Listening to people reading 223relationship, their participation in a common culture, their common interest
in some area of human activity like a sport, an academic discipline, a trade
or profession, or anything else that can be found in those parts of their
respective biographies that overlap. In the extreme case, an informal conversation
between intimates, the possibilities are endless and the fact of already negotiated
ground all-pervasive.
The written material that a reader must assimilate to speech is likely
to have been created in different circumstances. For one thing, the person
who created the text probably had a far less detailed profile of the addressee.
Most written texts are aimed at composite readerships. Moreover, the
individuals who comprise that readership are less likely to be known
personally to the writer. (A personal letter is, of course, the obvious
exception on both counts and consequently makes its own particular demands
upon anyone who tries to read one aloud.) If we confine our attention,
for the moment, to the large body of broadly discursive prose, we can
probably say that considerations affecting the common ground are largely
those which derive from a shared knowledge of, and an interest in, the
subject matter.
The presumed recipient is, in other words, a group, defined by interest,
rather than an individual or individuals. The task of recreating an interactive
version of the text which devolves upon the reader would seem therefore to
be satisfactorily completed when this has been taken into account. Something
of what this involves will emerge in what follows.
SOME EXAMPLES OF READING
In all I have done so far in this chapter, I have been making predictions
about readers’ behaviour on the basis of a more-or-less commonsense
view of how particular circumstances are likely to affect their use of the
intonation system. At this point it is perhaps helpful to examine some
specimens of what readers have actually done, to try to relate them to
those predictions, and, particularly, to see what light the proposed scale of
engagement sheds upon the particular acts of reading aloud they are severally
engaged in.
To make comparisons easier, three people were asked to read out almost
identical texts. They were simulated reports of events at a football match.
Reader 1 was asked to read his text as a sports columnist filing a report by
phone on the assumption that a colleague was taking it down from his
dictation. The second, taking the part of the colleague, was to read back
what he had written for checking purposes. The third, acting as news-reader,
then read the report as it would be included in the radio news bulletin that
evening. Practised and confident readers were used so that, although their
performances were doubtless affected by the fact that the activities were
simulated, the resulting readings were sufficiently close to the real thing for
the comparisons to be useful.