Preview

Styles of Pronunciation

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
765 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Styles of Pronunciation
STYLES OF PRONUNCIATION

The pronunciation of one and the same person may be different on different occasions. For instance, when the speaker is delivering a lecture, speaking over the radio, giving a dictation exercise, or when he is talking to official people he wants to be clearly understood that’s why he should sound explicit and his pronunciation may be characterized as correct or even super-correct. In informal situations where the speakers are more relaxed less attention is given to the speech and it will sound more natural and simplified, for example when the speaker is chatting with his intimate friends.
These different ways of pronouncing words when people adopt their language to particular situations are called styles of pronunciation. These variations depend on the aim and the contents of the utterance, the circumstances of communication, the character of the audience, the relationship between the speaker and the listener, the degree of formality of their speech, the type of activity, etc.
Stylistic variations are those variations in the pronunciation of speech sounds, words and sentences, which are peculiar to different styles of pronunciation.
There have been several attempts to classify styles of pronunciation. Thus, Professor D. Jones has suggested the following styles of pronunciation:
- the rapid familiar style
- the slower colloquial style
- the natural style used in addressing a fair-sized audience
- the acquired style of the stage
- the acquired styles used in singing
But, as we see there is no indication to the characteristic features of each style in this classification, nor there is any principle given that might help to distinguish one style from another.
Some authors confuse styles of pronunciation with literary styles. For example Professor R.I. Avanessov mentions the following styles: - common colloquial
- poetic

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    It could be argued that the use of language changes according to the context. Usually when I am with my peers I speak fast and not really clearly. When I am with my family it try to speak clearly so I don’t have to repeat myself or so that I don’t get called an imbecile. I am bilingual which means that I speak two languages with ease. I speak Polish as well as English and I have a polish accent with Received Pronunciation. When I talk to my family in English we completely ignore the pronunciation and we ‘freestyle’ [Pronunciation (prə'nʌnsi'ʌtiən)].…

    • 401 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Pronunciation differences are inherent when talking with any two people. People in their native tongue, dialect, speech pattern, etc., could pronounce the same word differently: for example data could be “d-at-uh or day-tuh”. Both are the correct but depending on where you are or who you are talking to, you could hear either (or “Ither”). The converse of pronunciation is…

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Spoken Language Essay

    • 1229 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The purpose of communication affects my tone ; in informal situations, much of communication is phatic (which is for social purposes only, not for acquiring information) , for example I often greet a friend by saying ‘how are you?’, although I know that my friend is fine . If I genuinely wanted to know how they were, I would ask the question with a very different and concerned tone saying “how are you” placing stress on the ‘are’, compared to the phatic gesture “how are you”. In the context of being amongst a large group, one’s pitch can change drastically. At…

    • 1229 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    There are as many different styles and variations of spoken language as there are people on Earth as language is an abundant…

    • 1008 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Style is the use of literary devices, tone, and mood in a particular way that makes author’s writing recognizable. In another word, the style of writing is the style of author who writes it. The author’s style can be recognized by the following components:…

    • 1366 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Attention to speech

    • 1109 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The first of the four Approaches I will discuss is Attention to Speech. Taglimonte (2006: p.8) suggests that it is “the style from which every other style must be calibrated”. William Labov devised a sociolinguistic interview designed to produce a range of types of speech. His main interest was to obtain and identify data that represented people’s casual speech, rather than speech that was altered due to the presence of an observer. Most of the interview was conversational and produced two types of speech, these were identified as careful speech “the interviewee was somewhat guarded” Schilling- Eates (2004: p.384) and casual speech “the interviewee spoke in a more natural way” Schilling- Eates (2004: p.384). The interview contained several tasks to elicit speech that was very self-conscious, as well as to produce signs of phonological variants relevant to the study, a reading passage, a word-list and a list of minimal pairs. Labov’s interview demonstrated that style changes are triggered primarily by the amount of attention people pay to their speech while they converse. However Attention to speech approach has been criticized, for example Bell (1984) notes that it is difficult to quantify attention to speech, and “experiments designed to investigate the effects of differing degrees of attention to speech on variation in usage levels vs. vernacular variants have resulted in mixed results” Bell (1984 p: 58). In addition Coupland (2003: p.34) also suggest that it is not possible to define naturalness in speaking.…

    • 1109 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Jenkins, Jennifer. 2002. A sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for English as an international language. Applied Linguistics Vol. 23 No. 1, 83-103.…

    • 2328 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    all adapt our spoken language in different situations. An example of this is called convergence, there are two types of convergence. Upward convergence which is when you use more Standard English and formal language and downward convergence, when you make yourself go down to a different persons level of speaking and use more non-standard English and informal language An example of upward convergence is a student speaking to a senior teacher. The student would use upward convergence to sound more formal. An example of downward convergence is an adult speaking to a teenager who doesn’t use as formal language techniques. Another example of this is subject specific language this is where someone uses language which is specific to a job or topic. An example of subject specific language is when a police officer says things like they are taking someone into custody. The subject…

    • 618 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Referring to pronunciation we can settle some basic parameters to see the difference between dialects. First we have the merger of [I] and [å] before nasal consonants, makes pin and pen homophones in the American dialect. Many words that used to be stressed on their second syllable are now stressed in their first syllable (like reconcile) but in America nowadays this process is even more rapid. Words like cigar, hotel and Detroit are now front-stressed. Then there is the deletion or reduction of weakly stressed syllables, a process that has been really important in English phonetics and that now is extending throughout the States. An example of that would be fence from defense or 'lectricity for electricity.…

    • 760 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One of the most difficult problems facing non-native speakers of English is pronunciation. It is usually the largest obstacle to overcome when trying to achieve fluency. Many non-native speakers have studied grammar for many years but are unable to speak like native speakers due to their inability to pronounce the sounds of words properly. This page is designed to provide techniques to help you pronounce the sounds of the English language.…

    • 625 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    the role of poem in society as most of work of the literature takes particular social…

    • 2490 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The differences between the English language as spoken in Britain. The USA, Australia and Canada are immediately noticeable in the field of phonetics. However these distinctions are confined to the articulatory-acoustic characteristics of some phonemes, to some differences in the use of others and to the differences in the rhythm and intonation of speech.…

    • 3067 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Introduction to Phonetics

    • 1296 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Speaking is such a normal part of our everyday life that we usually do not stop to think about what we are doing. It could be compared to walking: once you have learned how to do it, it becomes an automatic action that does not require conscious thought. If we had to think carefully about every single step it takes to produce speech, it would take us hours to form a single sentence. Luckily, there is no need for this, as long as we stick to our native language or dialect. However, if we would like to learn a new language or language variety, we could make good use of two linguistic branches: phonetics and phonology. Phonetics and phonology differ from each other in the way that phonetics in the study of the physical aspect of human speech sounds, while phonology is more about the abstract. In this essay, I will go more into the basics of phonetics.…

    • 1296 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    As non-native speakers of English, we often face some problems with English Language. However, I will not focus on all the problems. As a baby, we are able to learn speaking any language without any accents but when we use one particular language more and more ,our entire speech system, from lips and palate to vocal cords, becomes accustomed to the sounds needed to use the language and it becomes more difficult to produce "foreign" sounds.…

    • 1477 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In order to give some idea of what stylistics is, it seems wise in the first place to briefly define the field. H.G. Widdowson provides a scholarly and commonly accepted definition: “By stylistics, I mean the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation and I shall take the view that what distinguishes stylistics from literary criticism on the one hand and linguistics on the other is that it is essentially a means of linking the two”. He further explains his definition from the morphological make-up of the word stylistics, pointing out that the “styl” component relates stylistics to literary criticism, and…

    • 2341 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics