The Style and Timbre of English Speech and Literature

Marklen E. Konurbaev

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137519481
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The book introduces the reader into the world of mental perception of literary contents. Based on the research in modern semantics, functional stylistics and cognitive phonetics, it explores the way linguistic elements of a literary work cause readers to form a single perception shape identified as a cultural, literary or social stereotype.

1

Prolegomena to Stylistic Timbrology: Automation vs Foregrounding

All functional stylistics rests on the analysis of speech elements’ behaviour in a text: some of these elements are neutral and form the background for perception, while others have a great semantic and emotional expressive potential that is variously realized in a context of speech. There are ordinary and familiar contexts whose stylistic background is more or less universally perceived, but there are also others that imply a vast reading experience and erudition on the part of the reader. It is here that the author’s message is most intricate and requires of a reader a huge intellectual effort and experience for its proper understanding. The identification of the text’s foreground and background is not just a matter of reading experience or intuition. Much depends on the linguistic, logical and conceptual structure of the text, which determines the way we ‘hear’ it in our minds while silently reading.

Definition of timbre strings and the mechanism of mental hearing

The realm of language is vast, and styles of speech are its internal borders that divide this linguistic universe into multiple areas of usage. The container for language is human speech and, miraculously, the human brain makes it possible ‘to store and hear’ speech in the mind even when nobody actually utters anything. Our memory holds samples of speech, visual representations of situations, emotional impressions, sounds and voices. When we read a page, our memory allows these samples to echo each other variously, together with the new incoming voices of the text adding prominence to some elements and obscuring the others. And when we finish reading, miraculously again, we keep in our memory the ebbs and flows of intonations, rhythms and timbres as a general sensation of the living human speech that can be brought to life only and exclusively by the voices of the people who lived in the past and still live among us.

Designed as a powerful tool of interpersonal communication, language can act as an instrument used to reveal or conceal the intention of the speaker or writer behind various forms of expression accepted and recognized within a certain social community. The communicated sense lies beyond the words used by the author and is actually brought to life by establishing mental associative connections between the elements of speech. We propose to call these connections timbre strings, since the meaning of the written or uttered statement, its overall tone and voice hinge on such strings and fill speech with a particular aspect of reference to reality.

A timbre string is a mental association drawn in the course of reading between the words of the text. Once the correlation is established, the reader draws the mental map of relative prominence of words and their relationship to each other in representing the subject of the text. Some parts of the text may be very familiar to the reader and he or she will leave the words constituting such automated parts relatively mute. Other parts, meanwhile, are new or defamiliarized and the reader will slow down to make additional effort to perceive them in the context of reading.

The slowing down activates the articulatory motor cortex of the brain, which evokes micro movements in the speech apparatus caused by the appearance of the marked elements in speech (Zhinkin, 1958). These micro movements of the tongue and the muscles of the pharynx and larynx trigger the neural activity in the auditory cortex. As a result of this complex interaction the effect of hearing is produced in the mind of the reader – something that we call the inner or silent speech. Every marked element in a speech event bears such a mark of relative prominence and adds to the overall auditory picture of the text that is represented in our brain as a map of accents or timbre.

The nuts and pegs delimiting the area of timbre strings and increasing or decreasing their tension are the instruments of the text. Text can be defined as a speech event that is based on the assumption of relative completeness in representing a particular idea or a set of images by means of words and utterances organized in contrastive patterns and hierarchies in reference to the intended purport. The author’s purport is the mental focus of the text, its ever ‘vanishing point’ in the reader’s mind – the target that is always unattainable however hard the author may try to achieve definitiveness, completeness and clarity.

Text, its meaning and style, cannot be analysed without the instrument designed to estimate its semantic and expressive completeness, which in its turn is associated with individual perception of its reader. The elements of the text will stand out in the course of reading with various degrees of prominence in the reader’s mind depending on his or her background knowledge and individual intuitive and emotional perception. This will motivate the reader to estimate their relative significance and connect the most likely ones with each other to form recognizable semantic shapes in his or her mind. Once a mental shape or a cluster of such mental shapes is formed, the reader feels the intellectual satisfaction that is associated with understanding.

Words in a text tend to cluster in the reader’s mind into combinations, sentences and associative pairs in such a manner that their denotational meaning is partially dissolved in the new connotative meaning that arises in the context of the factor of closeness to other lexical units variously used by the author. The closeness of the elements in the text breeds new senses (Frege, 1966). And the reader strives to establish these connections either visually or mentally for the purpose of generating a cluster of new senses in speech serving the entirety of the author’s purport. The number of associative connections can be as great as the number of the elements the reader’s memory can hold simultaneously at the moment of reading and can be even more when the reader’s knowledge and erudition serve as a powerful contextual supplement to the author’s text. The author’s goal consists of making sure that the reader will draw as many connective lines and references between the words as the limits of the text allow.

In building the intended purport a number of meaningful connections are made strong and obvious by the author, some become weaker but are still quite discernible, and yet others are imbued with unclear cultural and semantic associations and obscure or dubious implications. The intended sense hangs on the strings of perception that pierce all communication through and cumulatively form a web of various ‘density’. These strings are not merely metaphorical and could be associated with neural connections and axonal guides forming in our brains in the course of reading or hearing. Some of them could be located in the relatively limited ‘lacunas’ of the brain being determined by the currently activated function of hearing, viewing or articulation, while other connections could be widely spread across the functional areas of the brain requiring recognition, remembering, planning and designing.

A ‘string’ in our theory – is an element of perception, an associative connection that a person establishes between the elements of communication while trying to grasp the meaning of speech addressed to him or her with which he or she then forms ‘a canvas’ recognized as a cognitive domain or a category or a developed notion within the framework of one’s own world-view (see Chapter 4).

Categorization of timbre strings and the notion of impact zones

The strings can be roughly divided into structural, epistemic and attitudinal. Structural strings are divided into two classes: linguistic that include grammatical and lexical-phraseological relations in the text and are rather straightforward and easily observable, and logical that highlight the key elements of statements and arguments. Epistemic strings evoke the ‘knowledge base’ in the memory of the reader/listener and usually extend beyond the borders of the text reaching various cultural objects and phenomena without which the text cannot exist as an intended act of communication. These strings bring to life various cultural and epistemic associations at the crossroad of the intratextual and intertextual associations. Attitudinal strings conjure up various emotional-expressive-evaluative overtones based on the potential of words to render these shades (see Chapter 7).

The junctures or the crossroads of strings in the text form the so-called ‘impact zones’ where the effect of one string is enhanced by the strings of a different quality and shade. The strongest ‘impact zones’ protrude in the mind of the reader as implicit auditory ledges forming the landscape of the message against other elements of the text that are relatively weak. This interplay of strings forms the areas of contrast that eventually shape our holistic vision of the text. Reading a text is akin to acquainting oneself with a topological map where some parts mark hills and other elevated areas, or foreground, while other parts fall relatively low and remain in the background (see Chapter 4).

Every reader strives to complete the text in his or her mind by building an exhaustive map of the connections between its elements. The resolution of the completeness is a challenge for every reader that can be mounted only on the basis of the correct identification of the impact zones where the bunches of timbre strings converge collectively forming a recognizable gestalt or image (cf. Wertheimer, 1959).

The interrelation between the elements in the text is largely an intuitive process where associations could be based on culture, erudition, the vision of the semantic affinity of words or the desire to complete a nearly finished semantic structure or image, even though a word or a phrase will not have any special expressive characteristics but will be suitable to complete the image potentially drawn by the author at the semantic level.

Structural strings

Structural strings are the easiest to ascertain and materialize in the inner and outer speech of the reader since they reveal themselves at the level of syntax (colligation) and idiom (collocation) (Akhmanova et al., 1969b; Alexandrova and Ter-Minasova, 1987). The reader identifies certain combinations of words as utterances capable of expressing meaning based on predication and separates them from word-combinations that only name or qualify objects of the world without actually establishing the relationship between such objects and the reality in which they might be placed. At this level of understanding the reader would be generally satisfied with either the way all parts of the utterance are united around the verb that is the centre of predication or any mentally considered relationship between a speech fragment and reality that will make the utterance presumably complete.

Word-combinations in the reader’s mind will be kept apart from the loose combinations of unrelated or remotely related words containing no attribution or unstable compound words that are also expressing attribution, but the strength of the bond between the words is much higher in this case than in a regular attributive word-combination (cf. Dolgova, 1980). The dynamic shape of the mental perception contour of a speech event in the reader’s mind is driven by his or her desire to link the syntactically prominent elements of speech in such a manner that the disposition of the basic elements of the utterance becomes clear and complete and no syntactic ambiguity in this disposition is evoked. Arguably, the closely related elements are perceived mentally faster than the loose ones (cf. Boothroyd, 2002; Ziemkiewicz and Kosara, 2010). Various syntactic breaks are marked in the mind as interruptions of various force, disengaging the constituent elements of the cognitive whole. Meanwhile the relationship of the syntactically connected but spatially distanced elements are mentally brought together and are realized by means of intonation and the basic contours: the rising one for the incomplete relations and the falling ones for those that may form a recognizable syntactic shape (see Chapter 5). The structural strings have no direct relation to the expression of the meaning of utterances but are in charge almost exclusively of the topology (smoothness) and the architectonics (composition) of the utterance. However, no perception of meaning and timbre would be possible without this analysis; however fast and intuitive it might be.

Let’s consider, for example, a rather complex fragment from The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities by Eric Hayot (2014) in which the author is pondering upon the essence of ‘footnotes and parenthetical structures’ in the text:

To be sure all these modes of disrupting the alleged wholeness of the text can be recuperated, as a system, into a new and more complex vision of the whole. But I would rather have that newer and more complex version, in which the possibility of extension and the necessity of exclusion have been essentially included and marked according to the medium of their appearance – as disruptions right on the page – than I would a work that dressed its self-disruption in the same cloth as its self-assurance.

An uninitiated reader may be somewhat discomfited by the multiplicity of implied references, syntactic interruptions and ellipsis in this passage. In order to grasp the ideas implied in the utterance he or she will inevitably have to make sure that the main types of syntactic relations, mood and modality of verbs as well as the narrative types of the sentences are clear to him or her. Without this preliminary structural analysis, which should last barely half a minute in the reader’s mind, there can be no question of grasping the whole. The lack of clarity in seeing syntactic relations and idiom is a serious impediment to switching to the epistemic analysis and grasping the author’s idea as a whole.

The syntactic structure of the first sentence that is read out of context, is rather ambiguous due to, presumably, the lack of comma after the phrase ‘to be sure’ in the beginning. Surely, this can be considered as an elliptical construction with the implication of purpose – ‘*in order to be sure’. This makes the reader seek for the verb ‘are’ plus the qualifier after the plural complex noun ‘all these modes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Prolegomena to Stylistic Timbrology: Automation vs Foregrounding
• 2 Neutrality in Language vs Neutrality in Speech
• 3 Classification of Contexts by Types of Stylistic Background
• 4 A Glimpse of the Brain: The Mechanism of Mental Audition
• 5 Inner and Outer Speech: A Parametric Match
• 6 Individual Author’s Style: The Way to Hear Timbre
• 7 The Style and Timbre of Everyday Speech
• 8 The Style and Timbre of Official Documents
• 9 The Timbre of Journalism
• 10 The Voices in Fiction
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index