Investigating the regularity of stylistic variation: from casual to careful speech

Stella Bortoni-Ricardo, C. Correa, R. Cecilia, R. Rocha, & V. Freitas

Sun. 11-1:15 A

This paper focuses on the organizational principles underlying the process of shifting between careful and casual speech styles. We chose to examine this phenomenon in classroom conversation in Brazilian schools because we have found that this type of discourse is largely casual but marked by apparently erratic stylistic variation. This variation cannot be accounted for by the well known parameters that have been associated with style shifting, such as topic, setting and audience, because variation occurs even though the situational context remains unchanged. Our purpose was thus to devise alternative and more accurate techniques to investigate that regularity of stylistic variation. Previous study has shown that a powerful constraint on language standardness in the classroom is the system of beliefs that the teachers hold about literacy events as opposed to orality events. In the present study the focus is on the speech produced in strictly oral events. Reading data are used only for comparison sake.

We started by posing the following general question and two sub-questions: 1. What contextual features influence the process of self monitoring so that the speaker will pay attention to the way s/he is speaking in addition to what s/he is speaking? 2. What triggers style shifting? 3. Which discursive features co-occur with casual style and careful style? In order to answer these questions we carried out VARBRUL analyses of a 6-hour corpus of classroom conversation. The dependent variable was the utterance, or discourse unit, classified as casual, when it contains one or more nonstandard phonological or grammatical features of the language, and careful, which is the standard-influenced style. The influence of the following factors groups is examined. (a) Degree of contingency of the exchange. A high degree of contingency obtains when the utterance is a response to immediate situational demands, including the verbal and non-verbal actions of the interlocutors. It is usually a member of an adjacency pair and can be either initiative or reactive. (b) Degree of contextual embeddedness, assessed through the occurrence of discourse markers and deictics. (c) Parallel processing, i.e. the influence of the nature (casual or careful) of the three previous utterances. (d) The occurrence in the utterance of discontinuities in the flow of information (insertion of parenthetic phrases, repetitions due to hesitation, after-thoughts, anacolutha, etc.). 4. The speakers : six different teachers of both sexes, college graduates with different regional backgrounds.

A large range of inter-individual variation (from 98% to 65% of standard-influenced discourse units) was found. To obtain a more accurate description of this inter-individual variation in the casual style, an implicational scale of the nonstandard features that occur in this style is being hypothesized.

Our preliminary numerical results show that contingency, contextual embeddedness and parallel processing are important factors in predicting degree of standardness in class room interactional speech. Thus, the range of factors usually studied in style shifting research must be enlarged to include new variables.