Phonological Rhetorical Devices

Rhetorical language code is focused not only on the words and sentences but also on the forceful sound devices.

Communicative phonetics and phonostylistics underline the rhetorical value of phonological features of speech realization (voice setting, speech melody, tempo, pausation, pitch ranges and levels).

Fundamental phonological principles of effective arts and forms of communication lie in the basis of rhetoricalphonetics. Discourse, which affects an audience, which informs, moves, delights, and teaches, has a rhetorical aim: it exercises rhetorical phonetic language resources to perfection.

Findings in the experimental phonetic studies of speech communication highlight the communicative and pragmatic relevance of the following rhetorical performance strategiesin English modes of discourse:

- effective information processing in imparting the message with the help of prosodic characteristics: proper discourse delimitation into in­formational units (tone-units) and pausation;

- prosodic emphasis (strong sentence stresses) given to the words that are sense-carriers and rhythmic distribution of strong stresses (peaks of prominence in rhythmic units) at more or less equal intervals of time;

- prosodic contrasts (tone, loudness, tempo) in marking the high-key (new) and low-key (background) information in discourse;

- a higher pitch of the voice, slower tempo, greater loudness for the expression of the new information;

- contextual modelling of tone-units (simple and compound) with contrastive and unmarked (at the very end of a tone-unit) nuclear stressed syllables;

- relevant density of emphatic contrastive stresses (not too many in suc­cession) focusing on words as sense-carriers within tone-units;

- prosodic patterns as speech style markers, and phonetic deviance from the ordinary norms to achieve special phonostylistic and rhetorial ef­fects; the application of more emphatic and emotional scales in tone-units: sliding, scandent, ascending for the expression of the high-key information and low-level scale for the expression of the low-key in­formation;

- voice timbre modifications to express emotional attitudes and prag­matic intentions.

Rhetorical phonetics serves to express communicatively relevant mean­ings and emotional attitudes.

"The Gettysburg Address" by President Lincoln is an illustration of the effective usage of rhetorical phonetic devices for the transmission of the speaker's message to people in a political speech.

The speaker's intended meaning and emotional attitude are highlighted by the thoughtful phonetic rhetoric: prosodic contrasts in marking the new information; strong sentence-stress and nuclear stress given to the key-words as markers of the most important information; contrastive nuclear stresses not on the last content words in tone-units; rhythmicality in the distribution of strong sentence stresses. Simple and compound tone-units are contextually and stylistically relevant in the prosodic rhetorical model of the political speech.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1646