Monotony as the enemy of effective speaking

The fact is that people's attention is extremely unstable. As one of the recent research-works in the field has shown “"it flashes on and off at unpredictable intervals. Rather than acting like a sponge to absorb every bit of information that comes our way, most of us act more like filters”" (Turk, 1985). We listen only to information that gets our attention, and the more striking and abrupt the way to achieve it is, the better we understand and remember the point in question. Monotony is considered to be the enemy of effective speaking; it is contrast between the elements which is required. The task of the speaker therefore is to avoid monotony by changing his voice and modulating his rhythm consciously restructuring and rebuilding it by means of the typically English syllabification.

[Otherwise stated, we believe that we can make people listen to what we have to tell them by relying on the basic and the most important unit of perception and articulation in the English language i.e. the syllable. It forms the groundwork of English rhythm “"the soul, the breath, the life of English rhythmicality”" because it easily adjusts itself both to the speaker and the hearer, as the situated agents involved in communicative activities of various kinds.

[To illustrate the point let us turn again to our target material and see how highly competent orators and rhetors actually do it for example:

“"Glasnost and the political reform have gone far further, far faster than any of us could ever have thought and it seems to me that they have transformed the whole atmosphere. I believe that perestroika will succeed, that is the economic reform following the political reform.

I think it is perhaps easier for governments to bring about political reform, than it is to bring about economic reform. The political can be done by the Government taking the requisite action, although it requires a great deal of boldness, and courage, and vision.The economic reform is something where the government provides the opportunity for the greater personal liberties and people have to respond in partnership with government. Economic reform (the fruits of economic reform), the greater prosperity can only come about with the active and willing cooperation and greater effort by the people. If you take freedom, then you must take responsibility with it, and it’'s the exercise of that responsibility, and that effort and initiative which brings about the economic reform.

Clearly the change is so great that it takes longer than the political reform. But I am convinced that it will come about, and the prospects for great prosperity for the people of the Soviet Union are greater than they have been at any time during the last seventy years. The old system would not have brought about prosperity for the people of the Soviet Union; the new thinking will.”"

[This speech is of particular interest because it is clearly well prepared, and the speaker knows how to convey her ideas in the best possible way. The speech falls neatly into three parts which are by no means equal either in length or rhythmical organisation. In fact the whole passage is based on constant alternation of tension and laxity, staccato and legato, stress-B timing and something which is more in the nature of syllable-B timing.

[Thus, in the first paragraph the length of the inter-stress interval is totally conditioned by the four phonetically identical syllables in “"far faster”" and “"far further”". What’'s happening can be generally described as ‘'intensification of syllables’' when four stressed syllables in a row ( all of them containing a very strong fricative ‘'f’' at the beginning) become specially accented or doubly weighted and are brought out in the flow of speech most conspicuously. They form a kind of rhythmical and rhetorical fulcra, both for the speaker and the hearer to concentrate on in the process of communication. As a result the rest of the utterance is phrased automatically in the same extremely clear-cut and vociferous fashion, when all the capacities of English syllabification are called for to match this peculiar rhythm pattern, to support and enhance it, and in the final analysis to help to convey the general purport of the utterance, i.e. the idea of the speedy and unpredictable changes which are taking place in this country at the moment.

[Particularly interesting in this respect is the syllable-by-syllable pronunciation of the words “"transformed”" and “"atmosphere”". They are not just divided but ‘'hacked’' into two equally strong syllables, and this rather specific, ‘'monobeatic’' pronunciation fits into the general rhythmical pattern very nicely, underlining the phonetic similarity of all the additionally weighted or accented words.

[As soon as we pass on to the second part of the text, we immediately realise that here the inter-stress interval is no longer what it used to be. It does not require a very close examination to see that some of the initially stressed or strong syllables are brought out to the utmost, whereas others are suppressed and phonetically degraded, being engulfed, as it were, by their much more powerful phonetic environment. As a result the inter-stress interval considerably increases, our attention being drawn only to the keywords or the most essential points within the whole utterance - “"people”" and “"government”," “"political”" and “"economic”," “"the old”" and the “"new”" etc. Using Professor Bolinger’'s terminology it is “"contrastive accent”" which comes here to the fore (Bolinger, 1961). By extending the inter-stress interval the speaker manages “"to disambiguate her message syntactically”," so to speak, and to present the underlying idea with utmost clarity and conviction (Lehiste, 1977).

[As far as the third part is concerned here the speaker arrives at what can be described as 'the balanced variety' of dactylic and trochaic syllabic sequences. The latter, which is most welcome in intellective communication in general, in this case suits the speaker’'s special intention, helping her to convey the idea of economic success and prosperity which she believes will sooner or later come true in this country.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 912