The type of writers’ speech behaviour as the index of their hidden attitudes and expectations to the contemporary reading audience

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The type of writers' speech behaviour as the index of their hidden attitudes and expectations to the contemporary reading audience

This paper aims to reveal the way the speech behaviour of particular writers reflects their attitudes and expectations to the contemporary readers. This general aim implies a number of tasks: to distinguish between two ways of speech choice (intentional and automatic), concentrate on the phenomenon of individual speech behaviour of a person, describe the types of speech behaviour (positive and negative), illustrate the way speech behaviour of writers reveals their inner expectations and attitudes by giving the results of pragmalinguistic analysis of writers' speech.

A person can change his style of speech at will adjusting to the situation, the type of addressee of speech and other factors. For example, a courteous man tries to avoid rude words talking to ladies; the formal style is used when people talk to authorities; formal style yields to colloquial in a chat with a bosom friend etc. In this case the author of speech makes his choice deliberately (he does it because he wants to), intentionally (in order to have a particular result or effect), consciously (the speech choice is done after thinking it over carefully, in this case a speaking or writing person has a rather good idea of what his speech actions might result in).

The «sender» of speech message selects some speech units which he finds the most suitable in this situation. The deliberate choice concerns clichйs of politeness, slang, euphemisms etc. People who professionally work with texts (writers, journalists, advertisement-makers) thoroughly select linguistic units to provide the optimal influence of their textual «products» upon other people's minds. In most of such cases the author of speech message is able to explain this intentional choice; he realizes its reasons and purpose. The conscious choice is a variable category; it is determined by the situational environment.

Though the deliberate choice varies in different situations, it's quite evident that each speaker has his own habitual personal speech preferences. The deliberate choice is a traditional object of linguistic investigations, especially those which deal with the problem of speech influence and manipulation. In the focus of such investigations is the speech of public persons (politicians, showmen), publicity texts, advertisements, etc.

At the same time in the speech of a person it's possible to find out speech habits of different type. It is the unintentional automatic speech choice which forms the bulk of human speech.

It should be mentioned that the nature of this automatic choice is not completely discovered yet. As a rule, the automatic speech choice can't be explained by the speaker; it is made without thinking. People chose automatically grammatical and textual categories.

The personal «unconscious» speech preferences of the author represent his individual speech behaviour which is associated with his speech habits revealed in his speech automatically [3]. Speech behavior reflects some personal qualities of a speaker and his way of thinking. The linguistic analysis of someone's speech habits helps in a way to create the psychological portrait of a person, to identify some positive and negative traits of his character. Some of such «diagnoses» are conventional in many countries. For example, a speaker frequently using the personal pronoun I is considered egocentric; a person whose speech is rich in subjunctive constructions is perceived as indecisive, lacking in self-confidence.

The problem of determining personal qualities of people by their habitual unintentional speech choice draws attention of Russian linguists [2; 4]. The brunch of linguistics which deals with this issue is so called «hidden» or implicit pragmalinguistics [Там же]. It is called like that because it intends to penetrate the inward realm of subconsciousness and disclose the matters which are not realized completely even by the persons whose speech is the subject of analysis.

The staple matter of this paper is the speech and speech habits of a particular group of speech «senders» - writers, in particular.

Writers professionally work with language. Their speech addressed to the reading audience is characterized by bright and colorful imagery. The choice of elements to create this imagery is as a rule intentional. It is natural of any writer to think it over thoroughly which word or expression would affect the readers' imagination better. Writers carefully select words, grammar constructions and stylistic devices to depict events, situations and feelings as brightly and precisely as possible. The rough copies of writers reveal the author's hesitations: he searches for an appropriate word considering many variants. For example, Leo Tolstoy is known to have transformed the majority of syntactic constructions in his first version of «War and Peace» because the writer found them too bulky and unnatural [7].

The intentional choice of different elements is typical of each particular author. It is the index of the author's personal style which is easily recognized by experts of literature (for example, Dostoyevsky's style, Dickens' style, etc).

The personal stylistic manner of writing is in the focus of attention of stylistics and poetics.

«Hidden» pragmalinguistics, as it has been mentioned, deals with inward categories. One of these categories is expectation(s). Originally this category doesn't refer to the linguistic field; it is rather psychological. Pragmalinguistics suggested the method to identify by the author's speech what he expects(ed) from the contemporary readers [2].

Writers' typical professional expectations imply first of all readers' recognition. Recognition, in its turn, implies readers' positive attention, interest, understanding and sharing the author's ideas. The question is whether all writers expect recognition with the similar degree of confidence. We can suppose that it is not so.

The suggested hypothesis was that in speech of a particular author it's possible to find out the habitual unconscious choice of speech «signals»; the use of them by the author makes a particular contribution in his attaining readers' attention and interest. According to the intensity of habitual, automatic use of these «signals» we can distinguish two types of writers' speech behavior: positive (not active) and negative (active). Positive speech behavior is supposed to be formed in conditions which are favourable for the author. Such writers tend to enjoy readers' positive attention, even admiration. In this case there is no special need for the author to stimulate readers' attention and interest using additional means. The speech of such writers is not so rich in signals which help the author to gain the recognition and interest of the audience. Negative speech behavior, on the contrary, becomes the author's speech habit in unfavourable conditions when the author often suffers from criticism, abuse and even public persecution. It's quite natural for such writers to reveal more energetic speech influence to gain the readers' positive attention.

This individual habit of frequent or rare use of speech units with particular influential potential is the index of the writer's positive or negative hidden expectations for contemporary readers. Besides, these individual speech manifestations of the writer reveal the way he perceives the contemporary reading audience: as like-minded persons or as criticizing opponents. The question is what grammatical and textual categories result in stimulating readers' interest and optimizing their understanding?

The text linguistics provides us with information that readers' and listeners' attention and interest are stimulated by the use of cataphora [1; 6]. Besides, readers' attention and understanding are optimized by accentuation [5].

The signals of cataphora and accentuation are numerous and diverse. Here are some of them.

(1) The book showed that two names had been added after that of Baskerville [10, p. 46]. The signal of cataphora is the cardinal numeral two. It makes readers expect the further explanation concerning these names.

(2) And suddenly she lifted high her bow, and, leaping with raised oars over a wave, broke the spell cast upon her by the wind and tide [8, p. 35]. In this case the signal of cataphora is the word suddenly. This word causes the effect of «interrupted narration» which draws readers' attention to the following information.

(3) Some, very few and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives… [Ibidem, p. 39]. The cataphoric element is the word mysterious. The words of this kind (strange, startling, extraordinary, peculiar etc.) tend to disclose their meaning completely in the further context. Readers start to wonder what was mysterious and strange about someone's life.

(4) His face was still buried in the clothes when the door of the bedroom opened noiselessly and Mr. Harding entered with a velvet step [13, p. 14]. The verb with the meaning of appearance to enter stimulates the readers' interest. They are eager to get more information about the «newcomer».

(5) When the parents of the house of Sedley returned from their dinner-party, they found the young people so busy in talking, that they had not heard the arrival of the carriage… [12, p. 21]. The adverbial clause of time preceding the principle clause makes readers wander what happened after the parents' returning.

(6) One afternoon, a month later Dorian Gray was reclining in a luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of Lord Henry's house in Mayfair [14, c. 61]. The signal of cataphora is the adverbial modifier of time in the initial position. It provokes readers' interest: what exactly happened one afternoon?

Of course, this list of cataphoric elements is not exhaustive; but it is evident that all these signals produce similar effect: drawing readers' attention and stimulating their interest. A text which is rich in cataphoric elements is more absorbing for readers.

The signals of accentuation stimulate readers' attention by giving special prominence to one of the elements in an utterance. For example:

(7) But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled [11, p. 52]. In this example the adverbial intensifier considerably is in the focus of readers' attention.

(8) The fact is, the old lady believed Rebecca to be the meekest creature in the world [12, p. 13]. In this case the idea of accentuation is reflected by the adjective in the superlative degree.

(9) …they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter, and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meet, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable [10, p. 26]. In this example the signal of accentuation is eternally which renders a shade of exaggeration.

(10) Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes; among them Sissy Jupe [Ibidem, p. 12]. The adverb only gives a special prominence to the following element.

(11) These rooms appeared to be much more modern than the central part of the house… [Ibidem, p. 125]. The effect of accentuating is produced by the logical contrast of these rooms with the central part (contrast stress).

The accentuating signals are very numerous. In Russian, for example, the inverted word order is widely used to accentuate some parts of utterances. The communicative effect of all accentuating elements is that readers get additional impulses which optimize their attention and understanding.

We have analyzed the speech of some British outstanding classical authors. To get objective results we prepared for each author extracts of equal size (1000 little syntactic groups) [2] in the genre of novel. All those novels were written by the authors when they were about forty years old; by this mature age the speech habits of a person have been supposedly formed. Our aim was to found out how often the authors choose in literary speech the signals of cataphora and accentuation. The results of this statistic investigation are introduced in the following chart.

It turned out that the habit of frequent use of cataphora and accentuation (in comparison with other authors) can be observed in speech of J. Galsworthy, W.M. Thackeray and A. Trollope. Their speech behavior may be characterized as negative (or active). It means that these authors used to «mobilize» more energy to gain readers' attention and interest as if trying to convert opponents to supporters. We can conclude that their dominant inward expectations, probably never explicitly stated, were negative. The most appropriate words to characterize that state of uneasiness, doubt and fear are foreboding, misgiving, premonition. These notions are of great interest for «hidden» pragmalinguistics because they don't denote thoughts and intentions, but feelings and inward emotions which are sometimes inexplicable. Inner emotions are uncontrolled; they (as well as expectations) «awake» in people's minds spontaneously in typical situations which are associated with those from the previous experience.

It is quite logical to suppose that in the past writers whose speech is rich in signals of intensive speech influence (cataphora, accentuation) had encountered a lot of hardship. The biographic materials prove that it is exactly so. The previous experience of these authors is characterized by such negative factors as boycott, persecution, public censure, mockery, «killing» critical reviews, material troubles etc. All these unpleasant, painful occasions could cause psychological disorder and deep inner pessimism in the souls of these authors. Their attitudes to potential readers may be characterized as tense and guarded.

The rare choice of cataphora and accentuation was found in speech of J. Conrad, T. Hardy, and O. Wilde. They demonstrate positive speech behavior (not active). These authors, evidently, hadn't experienced much negation and lack of understanding on the part of contemporary readers, especially - at the starting point of their career when speech habits of writers are just beginning to be formed. So the habit of frequent use of cataphora and accentuation was not formed in their speech. We can conclude that their dominant inner expectations were positive. Their speech proves that the typical emotional states of those authors when they were busy in creating their literary works were hope and optimism. Hope is a confident feeling about something good what will happen in the future. They had always been popular and interesting for contemporary readers and approved by them.

As for A. Conan Doyle and Ch. Dickens their speech habits do not give us the evident opportunity to indicate their expectations and inner attitudes towards the contemporary readers. It can be explained by the fact that their speech behavior was formed under the influence of contradictory factors. In particular Ch. Dickens on the one hand was a lucky writer, extremely popular among Victorian readers since the very beginning of his career as a writer. On the other hand he couldn't forget the painful experience of his young years when his family went bankrupt and the future writer suffered a lot from poverty and humiliation.

To make a conclusion we should mention that the method of identifying inner expectations of persons by their speech habits which is illustrated in this paper can be applied to different categories of people. Personal speech habits can show whether a person's perception of other people is generally positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic etc. It is a potentially productive method to diagnose different kinds of psychological disorder (on condition of its being enriched by additional experimental data).

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