Familiar (Conversational) Style
The usage of familiar (conversational) style is typical of every day English. It occurs both within a family group and in informal relationships, in the speech of intimate friends or well-acquainted people. In such cases it is the emotional reaction to a situation that matters, that’s why the attitudinal function of intonation here comes to the fore. Nevertheless intellectual and volitional intonation patterns may also take place.
Familiar (conversational) style, unlike other styles, will allow the occurrence of the entire range of intonation patterns existing in English. This is due to the fact that there are no serious restrictions on the range of emotions and attitudes which might be displayed in a conversational situation.
Unexcited conversational situations are characterized by low pre-heads, falling or stepping heads and simple Low falling or rising tones. Monosyllabic response utterances display narrowed pitch patterns and widened pitch patterns are typical of more excited situations. Thus there are a number of intonation patterns with the high falling nuclear tone, which implies the effect of personal participation or involvement in the situation. It is very important for the participants in conversation to show an active interest in what is going on. Besides, there is a high frequency of compound tunes and heterogeneous heads. There is also the occasional completely unexpected placement of nuclear tones.
In spontaneous informal conversation there is a tendency for intonation to form a basic set of recurrent patterns. Their nature depends on such factors as the relationship of the speakers to each other, the chosen subject-matter, the fluency of an individual, his emotional state and so on. Intonation groups may be of any length, but they tend to keep short.
Informal conversation is characterized by the frequent use of silence for purposes of contrastive pause. Pauses are brief and there are cases when intonation groups and sentences are not separated by any kind of pause. This style of speech is also characterized by the absence of a stable pattern of tempo and rhythm. Generally, the speed of utterance is quite fast. It depends on the fluency of a speaker, on his familiarity with the topic and on his experience. One of the most essential distinctive features of informal spontaneous conversation is the use of hesitation phenomena:
a) hesitation pauses;
b) hesitation drawls, lengthening of sounds, syllables and words;
c) repetitions of syllables and words;
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d) false starts to words, followed by self-corrections;
e) restarting a construction or a sentence to conform more to what the speaker wants to say;
f) unfinished intonation groups often accompanied by reduced loudness of voice;
g) fillers-in such as well, and, you know, in fact, etc.;
h) random vocalizations and such phonetic oddities as clicks, trills, intakes of breath.
Hesitation phenomena accompanied with facial expressions and gestures are of primary importance in determining the acceptability of conversation. Moreover, phonetics of conversation also involves attention to such phenomena as sound symbolism (e.g. brrr, whoosh), artificial clearing of the throat or coughing for purposes of irony, various snorts and sniffs to communicate disgust and other attitudes.
Spontaneous conversation is characterized by randomness of subject-matter and a general lack of conscious planning. This results in errors involving hesitation features of all kinds, frequent switches in modality, incompleteness of many utterances.
The most noticeable aspect of informal conversation is its vocabulary. Words tend to be very simple in structure, specialized terms and phraseology are generally avoided. The lack of precision in word selection is not important, any lexical item may be replaced by words like what-do-you-call-it, you-know-what-I-mean, thingummy, which function as nouns.
It is necessary to mention that dialogues occurring in a telephone conversation also refer to spontaneous informal speech. In a telephone conversation the participants are not visible to each other and they can’t rely on extralinguistic context to resolve ambiguities in speech. Moreover, they have to spell out words because of the distortion of certain sounds. There is also a tendency to avoid long unfilled pauses as they can be interpreted as a breakdown of communication with the resulting ‘Hello?’ or ‘Are you there?’. Besides, it’s typical of the telephone conversation that the listener is expected to confirm his continued interest and his continued auditory presence.
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