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Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech CommunicationBarcelona, Catalonia, Spain |
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Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech CommunicationBarcelona, Catalonia, Spain |
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When E. Sapir wrote his book Language (1921), he put on it a subtitle: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Obviously he took the term "speech" in a fairly common use in American English, meaning the whole set of language phenomena. By that time or shortly after this term was made more specific in part as a result of F. de Saussure linguistic theories and in part as a result of the advancements in phonetic science. Indeed, at least since the late F. de Saussure and his langue/parole dichotomy - uneasily translated into English as language/speech by Gardner - linguists have always distinguished between these two facets of "language" and have accepted the interpretation of them advanced by the Swiss linguist within the framework of his systematic notion of language phenomena.
Let us pick up some ingredients from this interpretation, all of them of interest to our present discussion. The first one and the most relevant one is the opposition between the systematic or patterned, and the unsystematic or unpatterned. This opposition is supposed to underlie the language/speech dichotomy, in such a way that facts in "language" according to Saussure, arc patterned, i.e. they may be described through rules, whereas facts in "speech" are unpatterned, unpredictable, apparently ungoverned by rules.
The second opposition is that between the social and the individual. "Language" is the result of social behaviour, whereas "speech" is the sum total of all individual acts of speech. As far as linguistics is, according to Saussure, part of semiotics, and semiotics is part of social psychology, and as far as "language" - not "speech" - is the proper object of Saussurean linguistics, "language" is understood as a semiotic and socio-psychological reality. By contrast, "speech" is understood as the result of non semiotic individual behaviour, as a phonetico-physiological or physico-acoustical event or set of events.
Summarizing, language in the Saussurean sense is seen as something subject to regular pattern, the result of social activity, and socio-psychological in its nature, whereas speech is assumed to be something unpatterned, the result of individual behaviour, and phonetico-physiological or physico-acoustical in its nature. Moreover, two new assumptions were made: 1) language is something homogeneous; 2) language functions are to be studied in a general way, as universal propperties of it. The chomskyan view of linguistics did not basically modified these assumptions, except for the fact that cognitive psychology substituted for social psychology, homogeneity was interpreted psychologically in terms of instantaneous language learning uniformity and biologically in terms on genotype invariability, and lastly language function was of no concern at all.
This picture was generally accepted and remained unchallenged at least until the mid-sixties - notwithstanding the marginal study of phenomena such as the so-called "phonetic symbolism" or even the developement of acoustic phonetics. In fact, it was not until the emergence of sociolinguistics that either these assumptions or their consequences were severely critized by the founders of the new discipline.
To begin with the latter, from a methodological standing, W. Labov (1970) critized F. de Saussure and his followers for they tried to study "language" -i.e. "la langue", the social aspect of "le langage" - through the observation of one individual's linguistic output, while tried to study "speech" - i.e. "la parole", the individual aspect of "le langage" - through the observation of the whole community's linguistic output - or, it would be better to say that they programmatically conceived of this study in such a way. That is the basis for what W. Labov termed "the Saussurean paradox".
On the other hand, D. Hymes (1962) critized the reductionist Saussurean view of speech as a merely physiological or physico-acoustical fact, for, even if speech could be conceived in such a way, speaking, he argued, is also a social fact, a social activity among other social activities, and as such, it is a form of patterned human behaviour, so rule-governed as any other form of meaningful behaviour. These rules are language-specific, culture-specific even community-spedfic -which means that every culture and every community assign a different place to speaking and to the several meaningful ways of speaking relevant within it, and it is the labour of the analyst to discover them. As a consequence, an ethnographic approach to the study of language is proposed, an approach that must study language, language luncSons and the ways of speaking from speech community to speech-community, without taking either ones nor the others for granted in a universaBstic bias, as Jakobson's, functional approach had did (I960). A new kind of linguistic relativism - the relativity of function, as opposed to the relativity of form once uncovered by Sapir (1922) - emerges from Hymes conception.
By the same sort, language ceases to be considered as an all-embracing monolithic structure, and a new concept of the "verbal repertoire" -understood as the total set of language resources at the disposal of a speech^omtriunity and shared to different degrees by any of its members- is fostered by Gumperz (1971), who gathers the ethnography of speaking and extends towards an ethnography of communication.
In this way, sociolinguistics, whose foundations are to be found in the linguistic study of bilingualism developed in the work of such researchers as a U. Weinreich (1953), E. Haugen and W.F. Mackey at the half of the century, turned out to have language diversityas its main topic of research. Now, language diversity was to be found not only in multiling;ual communities but also in the core of so-called monolingual cornmunities, as far^Htliese present their own diversity, i.e. what has been termed f1iiffierent variation" by Labov (1969). This conclusion obviously was a challenge to the umtarian-homogeneous notion of language, sustained by the mainstream thought of linguistics throughout the century.
Finally -may be also innecessarily to add-, all trends in sociolinguistics share the idea that language use, and so speaking too, is a patterned activity that may be described through rules or norms, albeit of a different type than those usually employed in Uri^istic I will distinguish sociolinguistic rales -describing the existence of socio-symbolic alternative variants of a sociolinguistic variable, ex. g. French personal pronoun forms for 2nd person sg. tulvous ("you"), or English proper names and hypochoristic James/Jim , from communicative norms, describing the social and interpersonal conditions to be held for one or the other of these forms to be used appropriately, although in a sense both types of rules were collapsed into one with Labpy's not on of a "variable rule". Further, communicative norms include also those governing verbal interaction,or those stating when it is appropriate to speak or remain silent in a given context.
Bibliographic reference. Argente, Joan A. (1991): "From speech to speaking styles", In PPoSpSt-1991, paper 001.