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PHONETICS AND ELOCUTION

LEE S. HULTZÉN

F we accept the New English Dictionary definition of elocution, "the art of public speaking so far as it regards delivery, pronunciation, tones, and gestures; manner or style of oral delivery," the science of phonetics may be said to fall completely within the field of elocution. The materials of phonetics are speech sounds, the sounds of more or less formal or public speaking as well as the sounds of informal conversation. The sounds of public speech, whether delivered extemporaneously or from memory, are the immediate materials of elocution. And since, as Sweet observes, "nothing can shake the fundamental principle that all elocution, however, far it may be removed from the language of ordinary life, must be based ultimately on it," any study of the sounds of any kind of speech is significant for elocution.

But this natural kinship of elocution and phonetics has not been apparent in the publishers' lists. Except for the philological investigations not designed for any special application, most of the present body of the science of phonetics has been supplied by those engaged in teaching foreign languages and, to a lesser extent, by physicists and engineers interested in problems of acoustics or of long distance communication. The greater number of books on English phonetics are specially adapted to the teaching of English to foreigners.

As a consequence of this well-nigh complete monopoly of the field of phonetics by those whose special interests lie elsewhere, almost nothing has been done to correlate phonetics and elocution, however obvious the close interrelation of the two subjects must be. Yet much of the phonetic investigation undertaken with some 'Henry Sweet, The Sounds of English, Oxford, 1910, p. 80.

'Of the more than 250 titles mentioned in the Liste des Principaux Ouvrages dans lesquels est employé L'Alphabet Phonétique Internationale, published by the International Phonetic Association in 1922, one only was listed under the classification "Elocution." This book, on voice training, has only one short chapter on phonetics and the use which it makes elsewhere of the international alphabet is quite incidental.

quite different end in view contains material of importance to the student of elocution, and from a consideration of this material and of the correlating principles may be determined many of the needs for further study. Account must also be taken of less recent observations by elocutionists and others-studies which, while never so labeled, must properly be classed as phonetic. Some of these were fully as "scientific" as much of the research of the last forty years.

Although elocution may be considered as including the whole of phonetics, there are two fairly distinct relationships to be kept in mind. That portion of phonetics which is concerned with the analysis of the individual sounds and their combination as occurring in all oral discourse has the same relation to elocution that conversation has to more formal discourse-it is properly an antecedent study or practice. This includes the study of the formation of sounds, questions of pronunciation, standards of pronunciation and deviations from the standard, the analysis and synthesis of the individual sounds, syllabic stress, assimilation, quantity, and such special problems as the theory of plosive consonants. A discussion of this general division of phonetics will not further the special purposes of this essay.

There are, however, certain other aspects of phonetic investigation which have an added significance in their relation to delivery. To be sure, all the phenomena to be observed in public discourse occur also in the casual utterance of language; the difference is largely one of degree. But the difference in degree is quite sufficient to make apparent a special problem in the adaptation of phonetics to the uses of the public speaker. This problem includes various matters not in themselves considered by the phoneticians as constituting a unified portion of the science; the three here to be mentiond are brought together only because of their bearing on elocution. They are: (1) the grouping of sounds in speech, (2) the selection of significant, and the subordination of auxiliary sounds, and (3) intonation.

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The grouping of sounds in units larger than the word is a characteristic of all spoken language. It is apparent in the most casual utterance, in extemporaneous discourse, and in the most studied interpretation of the masterpieces. Different phoneticians have made use of different principles in analyzing the grouping of sounds and have

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used various names for the groups, such as: breath-groups, stressgroups, intonation-groups, etc., but they are all agreed that the actual phonetic unit is a group of sounds representing one or several, usually several, words. When further distinction is not necessary, the term word-group, a literal translation of the much used German wortgruppe, will serve to indicate some kind of grouping without limiting us to any particular theory.

The first significant point is that in speaking we always divide our language into word-groups, not into words. The speaker does not consistently separate each word from the preceding and following words by any physical manifestation.2 Because we have been accustomed to hear such speech and have a fairly extensive knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of our language, we are able readily and easily to distinguish the separate words in conversation or speech; and we do this to the extent that such a distinction is necessary for our comprehension of the thought. If the speaker uses a language with which we are not acquainted, particularly one which does not rely mainly on sounds and constructions similar to those of our language, it is quite impossible to distinguish the words. The word may be a unit of meaning; it is not a phonetic unit. The only division actually made in language is that into word-groups.*

'Perhaps the most generally used term is breath-group. See Henry Sweet, op. cit., p. 49; Daniel Jones, The Pronunciation of English, Cambridge, 1919, pp. 58-9; Paul Passy, The Sounds of the French Language, Oxford, 1913, pp. 23-8; Walter Ripman, The Sounds of Spoken English and Specimens of English, New York, 1924, p. 128; et al. Ripman, in his Elements of Phonetics, adapted from Vietor's Kleine Phonetik, New York, 1918, p. 102, discusses both breath-groups and stress-groups as being divisions according to different principles and more or less independent of each other. Passy, op. cit., pp. 28-31, considers the stress-group a subdivision of the breath-group. Sievers, Grundzüge der Phonetik, Leipzig, 1893, pp. 232 ff., uses the word Takte, as do other German writers, implying a similarity to musical bars; his basis of division is stress, and he refers to the stress-groups of Sweet's Primer of Phonetics, Oxford, 1890. E. W. Scripture, The Elements of Experimental Phonetics, New York, 1902, ch. 10, speaks of phonetic units, or auditory ideas, basing the division on the density "of the speech-current in consciousness. H. Klinghardt, in Klinghardt und Klemm, Übungen im englischen Tonfall, Cöthen, 1920, pp. 24 ff., rejects both the stress- and breath-group theories and proposes the intonatorische sinntakt, a grouping according to the meaning, marked in speaking by the intonation. See also Klinghardt's pamphlet, Sprechmelodie und Sprechtakt, Marburg in Hessen, [1924].

Sweet, The Sounds of English, p. 49; Passy, op. cit., p. 25; Ripman, The Sounds of Spoken English, p. 128.

'Passy, op. cit., pp. 25-8; Sweet, Primer of Phonetics, p. 42.

Sweet, Primer of Phonetics, p. 42; et al. Passy, op. cit., p. 28, says that, although the division of sentences into words may correspond to a phonetic phenomenon, "it is impossible to define phonetically the unit of meaning

One such group usually corresponds to several words. Sometimes a group contains only one word; or, on the other hand, a whole sentence, or even more than a sentence, may be contained in one group.1 The point of division between successive groups is marked in speaking by a pause of longer or shorter duration, or in some other way.2

An example given by Sweet is sufficient to show that there is no division between words in a group. "In such a sentence as put on your hat, we hear clearly the recoil or final breath-glide which follows the final t of hat, but the t of put runs on to the following vowel without any recoil, exactly as in the single word putting." It is also clear, as has been often noticed, that New York can no more be separated phonetically into two parts than can Boston or Philadelphia.

That a careful separation of words in connected speech, if indeed possible, is unnatural, no matter what the style of the discourse, is so well recognized as scarcely to deserve mention. The corollary, that the fault which is commonly known as "running the words together" is actually due to the omission or careless enunciation of sounds at the ends or beginnings of words, is as readily apparent. The way in which words are grouped, the factors which determine the length of the group, are, however, significant for the study of elocution as well as for phonetics.

Pauses occur at frequent intervals in speaking. They are made (1) for the purpose of taking breath, (2) for the purpose of making the meaning of the words clearer. The physiological limitation of the length of breath-groups, imposed upon the speaker by his effective lung capacity, need never interfere with his grouping the words “for the purpose of making the meaning clearer," and so need not be furknown as a word." Jespersen, Lehrbuch der Phonetik, Leipzig, 1904, p. 202, says, “The word is indeed not a phonetic concept." 'Passy, op. cit., p. 24: it frequently happens that two or three simple sentences are united in a single breath-group. On the contrary, in formal speech, in teaching, etc., a single elementary sentence may be divided into several groups." According to the theory, "one stress one group,” it is, of course, impossible to include several sentences in one stress-group. 'Breath-groups are separated by pauses, stress-groups not necessarily so. Klinghardt, Übungen im englischen Tonfall, pp. 29 ff., says that we frequently distinguish groups of words, not stress-groups, when listening to a speaker who never pauses until he runs out of breath, the grouping being indicated by the intonation.

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Sweet, Primer of Phonetics, p. 42.

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'Jones, op. cit., p. 58. Pauses, of course, refers to breath-groups. This statement is sufficiently accurate whether or not we are committed to the theory of breath-groups.

ther considered. "Pauses for breath should always be made at points where pauses are necessary or permissible from the point of view of meaning." 1 Practically, then, the length and content of the word-groups must be determined solely by the purpose of making the meaning clearer; the purpose of grouping is to enable the hearer to apprehend the meaning more easily. Passy says we stop, or pause, "because we speak to be understood, and we should not be understood if we did not stop." 2

The speaker may not, then, group his words haphazardly, may not stop at any chance place to take a breath. The word-groups must correspond with the division of the sense content. The words in any bit of connected discourse contain a succession of ideas, each of which must make an impression upon the auditor. Sometimes there are many words for the expression of a single idea or of a portion of the idea which is sufficiently definite to make an impression; sometimes there is only one word. But in every case each group should contain those words which belong to such a portion of the thought as the mind of the hearer is to grasp at one time. Such a grouping will make understanding easy. In writing, the proper divisions between groups may be, and often are, indicated by punctuation. This is by no means always true; frequently there should be more groups than marks of punctuation, almost as frequently fewer. Moreover the same written words may often be arranged into quite different groups by different speakers under different circumstances. But any one group should always correspond with the expression of a single idea. or such a portion of the idea as the mind of the hearer may seize upon.

It was because groupings according to stress very frequently do not correspond with groupings according to the meaning and because breath-groups do not necessarily so correspond (although Passy says that they should), that Klinghardt considered both these theories unsatisfactory and called the word-group a sinntakt, a sense-group, which, he says, is marked in speaking by the intonation. Similarly, 1 Jones, op. cit., p. 59.

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Passy, op. cit., p. 23.

Jones, op. cit., p. 59; Passy, op. cit., p. 24: "A breath-group corresponds with the expression of a single idea, or, in other words, with a simple sentence." Passy immediately modifies this statement, V. supra, p. 236 n. Probably sentences which, not being altogether simple in idea even though grammatically so, are divided into two or more groups are the rule rather than the exception.

Klinghardt und Klemm, op. cit., pp. 24 ff.