The title of the present paper is hardly meant to suggest it rigidly claims painstakingly academic globality of generalization. Yet it would have been equally unreasonable not to allow myself a few lines of introduction as it is from the general trend of thought known as linguistic school of thinking that an individual research springs, feeding on the results of the preceding work done, testing and questing the validity of ideas elaborated and results reached in this or that field of philological disquisition.

The problem of reading in general and philological reading in particular has long been the subject of special interest and study for the scholars of the Department of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Philology of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Quite a few trends of Phonetic research in this or that way had to deal with many aspects of this highly complicated task. There is every reason to believe the difficulty here consists in the fact that this problem is actually part of the far more general question, that of the relationship between oral and written speech, and, as part of it, of transposing the text from its written into its oral form.

Very much has been done along these lines in the works of those scholars who studied the subject in the direction which is called 'philological phonetics'. In these works it has been specially explained that the written text as such contains a great number of actual indications as to how it should be read aloud, as to what should its most characteristic phonetic and prosodic features be. Quite a few discoveries have been made in the field of reading by the timbrologists who are now very closely concerned with the task of reading works of verbal art.(1)

Thus the ultimate purpose of 'philological reading' is to learn how the text is written, how it is arranged from all points of view: phonetic, lexical, syntactic, phraseological, morphological, etc., and in this way to arrive at the understanding of something more complicated, and, thus, much more important - to grasp the intellectual-rhetorical or aesthetic design of the author, the aesthetic-artistic purport of the text.

It has also been pointed out that, generally speaking, in the case of artistic prose philological reading cannot be a success unless we approach the task of reading as the task of penetrating as deeply as possible into what is described as the global vertical context of the speech event.(2) This is something that is the sum total of the cultural, historical etc. factors that form the general background knowledge of the text or, in terms of our metalanguage, 'the general background knowledge of the author' that finds expression in the text of the book and that can be understood only if the reader shares this 'background knowledge' or, at least, works hard to approach it.

Here it would be appropriate to mention, however in passing, that whatever variety (scientific or artistic prose) the text may actually belong to, it can give the reader a very clear indication as to what should it 'sound', its rhythm, its prosody, etc. be. The original precept which forms the basis of all research in this enormous field of reading is that when the writer creates his text he actually 'hears' it in his 'inner speech' and it is the result of what he hears that he reflects on paper. That is why the reader should be so particularly careful so as not to miss any single item, any single peculiarity of what he sees on paper and which might have some significance to restore in his mind's ear the actual picture of 'sound', so to speak, that should be reproduced in the text and which actually constitutes the text of verbal art as such. This is the 'indispensable foundation' of philological reading.

The material, and I am gradually coming closer to that part, consists of samples of artistic reading - that is by an actor - aimed at creating "voices of characters" to which the auditory method of prosodic analysis is properly applicable though, as we always remember, this method should, naturally, not be disjointed from those of acoustic phonetics on the one hand and linguopoetics on the other.

It follows that when creating what can be referred to as "the characters' voices" the actor is confronted, first and foremost, with the difficulty of "typifying"(3) them, as each character is expected to speak in an "individual" voice to become easily identifiable by the listeners practically within the first breath-group. Thus the all-important concept of what was called "a minimal sound characteristics" came to the fore, the implication being that it is constituted by both segmental and suprasegmental features of phonation.

With your permission I would like to turn at this point to commenting a selection of well-chosen examples from the recording of the story "The Red Headed League" by A. Conan Doyle done by Basil Rasbone. As we see it, the latter, being a wonderful master of artistic reading, used the rich arsenal of prosodic means most skillfully in his pursuit of constructing vivid and colourful portraits of the main personages - Holmes, Watson and Wilson.

As the analysis has shown, the speech portraits of the three main characters are contrasted on the prosodic level according to the parameters of
- pitch;
- range;
- tempo;
- loudness;
- timbre.

                          HOLMES                   WATSON                    WILSON
PITCH                middle                         low                               low
RANGE              widened                      middle                          narrow
TEMPO              fast                              middle                          fast
LOUDNESS       middle                        middle                          high
TIMBRE             slight nasality             strong breathiness            hoarseness

Thus, Holmes speaks rather fast, not very loudly and in a middle-pitched voice, making full use of widened range characteristics and slightly 'through the nose'.

Doctor Watson's voice is slower in tempo, not particularly loud and much lower in pitch, not characterised by prominent range modifications and marked by strong breathiness.

In so far as Wilson, the third character, the actor chose to make him speak both fast and loudly, although on a distinctively low pitch note and within a narrow range, this voice produced the impression of being recognizably hoarse.

Now, the question may well be asked: are all these prosodic features of equal importance for the listeners' identification of each of the characters?

It turned out that not all the features are equally useful for fulfilling this function. As could be easily observed, though the difference in tempo is typical of the contrast between Holmes and Watson, this characteristics is not stable enough be it Holmes or Watson. As a result it can hardly become a reliable feature for their identification. The same is equally true if we take the range characteristics of their voices.

And this provoked us to think of what we called "minimal sound characteristics". For the voice of Doctor Watson it is the complex of two prosodic features:
- specific "breathing"
and
- lowered pitch range.

It turned out these prosodic features become particularly evident when Watson's replica follows Holmes' - the transition points acquire, thus, a considerable functional importance.

For example, in the following dialogue of the characters low range characteristics are accentuated by thick print, whereas italics stands for breathiness.

Dr. Watson: …and closed the door behind me.
Holmes: You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear Watson.
Dr. Watson: I was afraid that you were engaged.
Holmes: So I am. Very much so.
Dr. Watson: Then I can wait in the next room.

Holmes' speech, on the whole, as has been previously noted, is characterized by mild nasality and most of the time his melodic curves are found in the middle section of the actor's range. It happens so that "minimal sound characteristics" of this character can be defined as "zero": distinct articulation of sounds, average loudness, mild nasality (as characteristic of most manifestations of the speech of English literary norm speakers). It can be also added that Holmes's voice range is rather wide but he keeps to the middle register. Thus, the conclusion might be that any clear identification of Holmes's voice as his 'individual voice' is possible only when contrasted Watson's speech as deviating from the norm. It would probably stand to reason to mention that Holmes' voice correlates with distinctly logical pauses, well-formatted sentences and the general clear logic of phrase. On the whole the image created is that of a man of culture and taste.

As far as Doctor Watson is concerned, this type of voice correlates with what David Crystal is known to have referred to as the so-called military type of voice: military environment has its own voice type.

When we come to the third character - Wilson - his lower class style comes to the fore: a whole range of segmental characteristics ([h] dropping, indiscriminant use of [ei] / [ai]) gives his speech substandard colouring of a distinct cockney variety. The actor manages to point out the character's physiological pauses (as, for example, in the sentence "If my hair would / only change colour", where the pause after "would" goes contrary to the normal syntagmatic division), his habit of shouting (the use of the high register), his monotony (a preference given to a sequence of level tones on one and the same pitch) - all these features produce the effect of a speaker of low culture. His "minimal sound characteristics" consists, therefore, in increased loudness (or high pitch) + monotony, which helps to distinguish Wilson's voice from those of Holmes and Watson (italics over thick print stands for the use of high register):

Holmes: You will first make note, doctor, of the paper and the date.
Dr. Watson: It is … eh … Morning Chronicle of April the twenty seventh eighteen ninety. Just two months ago.
Holmes: Very good. Now Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Wilson: Well, it's just as I've / been tellin' you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

It seems the following two questions are bound to arise as we start thinking of the further possible directions of research in the field of speech portrayals on the prosodic level: to what an extent are the analysed characteristics unique or, in other words, is it at all possible to find more examples of this kind in fiction, and, if this proves to be possible, what is the difference between typical and original prosodic portrayals.

As could be well expected, the answer to the first question is likely to be in the affirmative.

Thus, when discussing the problem of typifying voices of literary characters, as an additional means of expressive reading, we must stress once more, that we concentrate mainly on those features (both segmental and suprasegmental) which presumably reflect a social or professional status of the character. It was presupposed that these categories would certainly be more important than such features as temperament (choleric, melancholic etc.), physique (fat, lean, tall, short etc.), state of health (healthy, ill) etc.

But the material analysed shows most convincingly that there is no Chinese wall between social and biological features and it would be absolutely pointless to draw a distinct line between them if our final aim is to create "true to life voices", which would really impress the audience. Thus, a "low" voice of a character can be a marker at one and the same time of his corpulence, his temperament and his class superiority.

If you allow me to digress however slightly, I would like to note that lexicographic work of the 90s has defined such a very involved and at the same time fascinating concept as "manner" (and there is every reason to believe it is in full accord with the research done in the field of "the manner of speaking") as
"the way in which you behave and talk on a particular occasion", in the plural form - "ways of behaving or speaking, particularly when they are considered good or polite" or, in another source, " the manner in which you do something is the way that you do it' (with a further comment amounting to "If you have good manners, you behave and speak very politely"), and, even more specifically,  a "mannerism" is defined as " a term used to describe any stylistic habit that becomes exaggerated or is carried to excess"(4).

In a way the conclusion may lead us to however tentatively stating the fact that "the manner of speaking" as a concept could be characterized in terms of
1) this or that emotionally coloured prosody of a given definite speech situation;
2) an equivalent of social, dialectal or other stylistic peculiarities;
3) an equivalent of some definite set of idiosyncratic peculiarities of a given speaker.(5)

Here we may adhere to the example of the "booming" voice of a certain Lady Westholm from the novel by A. Christy "Appointment with Death":

"It was going to be very expensive and she felt quite sure she wasn't going to enjoy it! Lady Westholm's booming voice, Miss Pierce's endless twittering, and anti-zionist lamentation of the dragoman, were already fraying her nerves to a frizzle".(6)

Examples in very much the same line can be profusely found in the novels of  "The Forsyte Saga" by J. Galsworthy. One can follow, for example, to what an extent the voice characteristics of Winifred is socially important:

"Your father", she said in her fashionably appointed voice, while her fingers plucked rather pitifully at sea-green brocade, "your father, my dear boy, has - is not at Newmarket; he's on his way to South America. He - he's left us".(7)

There is no doubt that what the author meant by "fashionably appointed voice" was normal for the distinguished manner of speaking of Victorian times - precision of articulation coming to the fore most obviously. Though we may also guess, even from the words of the author, that "the minimal sound characteristics" of Winifred Forsyte is a higher range than usual and a slightly expressed plaintive timbre, both prosodic features expressing not only her mood at that particular moment, but also her biological status and her temperament in general.

It follows that, taking into account what has been said, when choosing "minimal prosodic characteristics" we can hardly raise the problem of imitating  different dialects of English because what really matters here is not how much we know about those dialects but to what extent our audience is ready to appreciate the 'dialectal niceties'.

But one way or another something must be done in this direction because for certain novels diatopical dialect as a marker of one's speech appears to be unavoidable. Thus in the above mentioned novel by A. Christie one of the characters, for example, "a pleasant middle-aged American of a strictly conventional type" is characterized in the following way:

"He was carefully dressed, with a long clean-shaven face and he had a slow, pleasant, somewhat monotonous voice".(8)

As could be seen the author pays special attention to the slow tempo of the character's speech and a certain monotony of this prosodic pattern, implying that these very characteristics account for the pleasant impression his speech produced. We feel the author's assessment as positive, but is it everybody else's reaction? And are these the only prosodic features which the reader is supposed to associate a piece of American speech with? Personally, we feel very doubtful about it.

By way of conclusion let us reiterate the importance for whatever suggestion or point made within the framework or scholarly quest of truth to require daily and painstaking proof found in our class activities.

NOTES
1. See: Davydov, Mikhail (1984) Sound paradoxes in English and their functional specificity. Moscow; Konurbayev, Marklen (1993) Timbre organization of English speech. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Lomonosov Moscow State University. University Press: Moscow.
2. See: Gyubbenet, Irina (1991) The fundamentals of philological interpretation of a fictive text. Moscow.
3. See: Davydov, Mikhail & Kuleshov, Vladimir (1976) Sound characteristics and speech portrait of a literary character. 'Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta' Volume 9. Philology, No.3. Moscow.
4. Collins English Dictionary, London, 1993; BBC English Dictionary, Harper Collins Publishers, 1993; The Oxford Companion to English Literature, OUP, 1992.
5. See: Davydov, Mikhail & Yakovleva Yelena (1999) Prosodic Images in English Speech. Moscow.
6. Agatha Christie. Appointment with Death. London, Collins Fontana Books, 1968, p. 51.
7. John Galsworthy. The Forsyte Saga. In Chancery. Moscow, 1975, p. 66.
8. Agatha Christie. Op.cit., p.19.