Listening to people reading 211perhaps impossible—event of a speaker proceeding with no regard at all
for a notional communicative state of play between themself and a real or
potential hearer, we should be justified in speaking of total disengagement.
The central possibility that I set out to explore is that we can set up a
working classification of acts of reading aloud by recognizing various
degrees of engagement. I shall be trying to show that, by making comparison
with the speaker’s performance in interactive events:
1 we can postulate and justify a scale of degrees of engagement;
2 the placing of any bit of reading on that scale provides us with a useful
working classification of performances;
3 and although there is considerable overlapping of the specific intonation
treatments associated with the various types, each actually involves the
reader in using the intonation system in a distinctive way.
The first part of the paper is concerned with what is involved in setting up
such a typology. After that I illustrate its use by comparing three specimens
of reading. Finally, I apply the procedure to a brief examination of the
relationship between the metrical organization of verse and the way it is
read.
ENGAGEMENT: 1
I will begin at one pole of what is probably best thought of as a continuum.
Let us postulate a condition which we will call minimal engagement—Stage
1 along a notional scale, the other end of which is full engagement. It is a
condition in which speakers have no concern with the communicative possibilities
of what they read, over and above that which arises unavoidably from the
apprehension that it is a sample of a language that they and those who hear
them, know. Perhaps the clearest example is the act of word-citation. To
read aloud a word randomly chosen from a dictionary is to make no assumptions
about how it will fit into any discourse or impinge upon any hearer in
anything more than a minimal way. And it happens, conveniently, that the
institutionally fixed citation forms of certain words provide us with a clue
to the intonation treatment of minimally engaged reading. Words which are
assigned a secondary stress followed by a primary stress, e.g.^2 un 1 happy,
and are customarily read out as two-prominence tone units,
// UN HAPpy //are usually recognizable as citations, because when these words are used in
engaged discourse there is a very strong tendency for no more than one of
the potential prominences to be realized. Thus the citation form contrasts
with the various treatments that the same word might receive when it is
used in interaction: