The notion of speech style. Phonetic style-forming means in English

PHONETIC STYLES are different ways of pronunciation caused by extralinguistic factors and characterized by definite features. EXTRALINGUISTIC FACTORS: 1) the aim of speech; 2) the extent of creative activity of speech; 3) the form of speech; 4) social and psychological factors. STYLES: belles-letters, publicistic, newspaper, the style of official documents, oratorical, conversational, etc.

Each phonetic style is characterized by a specific combination of certain segmental and prosodic features. THE DEGREE OF ASSIMILATION, REDUCTION AND ELISION may serve to distinguish phonetic styles. Besides these segmental features, there are prosodic features which enable people to distinguish between different styles.

- Each speaker has a norm of LOUDNESS which he may depart from in different circumstances.

- His speech is generally characterized by a more or less regular usage of certain TONES. But there are circumstances when he introduces into his speech tonal variations, variations of pitch levels and ranges (either to awaken enthusiasm and interest in his audience, or to acquire an authoritative tone or, vice versa, to sound informal).

- Each speaker has a norm of speech TEMPO as well. He may also depart from it in different circumstances. For example, when reading aloud the tempo is more or less even, when chatting freely the variations in the tempo appear to be considerable.

- PAUSES also help to distinguish phonetic styles. In the written English read aloud the pauses are closely related to the grammatical structures, but in conversations they appear in between words in close grammatical connection.