Variation within individual speech
'Stylistic variations' occur because no one speaker will speak in the same manner in all situations. The totality of his speech forms -his 'idiolect,2 -will consist. of a range of styles which he deems appropriate to the varying social situations in which he may find himself. This appropriateness is dependent on factors present in the situation, such as 'place of interaction, topic of discourse, the person or people with whom the speaker is interacting, and of course, the degree of attention he is paying to his own speech'.3
Such styles are reflected in the way the language is spoken, in the choice of vocabulary and sentence constructions. They include also the attitude of the speaker at the time; whether he is polite, serious, patronising, etc. O'Connor, for example, commenting on such differences of pronunciation says that they 'can be graded by almost imperceptible degrees from stylised declamation at one end of the scale to the meaningful grunts of the family conversation at the other. 4' For the purposes of his particular transcriptions of spoken English he distinguishes between four styles: declamatory, formal colloquial, colloquial and familiar.
In certain cases the choice between stylistic variants may be determined by the occupation of speaker or listener. A lawyer in practising would naturally use the vocabulary and phraseology common to his profession, and the style appropriate to the formality of the occasion. Such variation is conditioned and is often given the special name of 'register variation'.
- Bloch, B. 'A set of postulates for phonemic analysis' in Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Vol.24; 1948
- Milroy, L. 'Phonological correlates to community structure in Belfast' in Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, Vol .l; 1976; p.2 and Milroy, L. Language and Social Networks; Oxford: Basil Blackwell; 1980
- O'Connor, J.D. New Phonetic Readings from Modern English Literature; Berne: A. Francke; 1948; p.4
