Elocution

Abstract: Towards a standard of pronunciation It is generally agreed that Received Pronunciation as a distinct and widely recognised sociolect did not exist before the nineteenth century and was not named as such until Ellis used the phrase to describe a pronunciation used ‘all over the country, not widely differing in any particular locality’ (1869–1889: 23). However, as Raymond Hickey has reminded us in the introduction, the notion that one type of pronunciation was superior to others had been around at least since the sixteenth century, when most commentators broadly agreed with Puttenham (1589) that the ‘best’ pronunciation is ‘the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx myles’. What is lacking from these early accounts is any prescription or proscription of specific features: readers are told where and from whom the most prestigious pronunciation can be heard, but are not advised to adopt or avoid any particular sequence of phonemes. In the early seventeenth century Alexander Gil provides what Dobson acknowledges to be ‘the best account of seventeenth-century dialectal pronunciation’ (1957: 142), giving examples of Northern, Western and Eastern pronunciations, but recommending that only the ‘Common Dialect’ should be used, at least in prose. He uses terms such as ‘barbarous’ to refer to regional pronunciations, and reserves his strongest condemnation for a social group which he calls the ‘Mopsae’, who appear to be advanced speakers carrying forward changes ‘from below’ which have their geographical origin to the East of London.

Abstract: This article, the sixth in a series presenting the results of a computer-assisted analysis of a tape-recorded corpus of natural conversations by members of the educated middle-class of Paris, deals with liaison. The results, as compared to those of earlier studies on this subject, show a number of interesting differences, possibly due to recent linguistic evolution. The frequency of liaison is studied in the context of (1) the grammatical functions of the contiguous words involved in the phenomenon, (2) the phonetic characteristics of the liaison consonant and (3) a number of paralinguistic variables such as sex, age, occupation, syllabic rate, loudness, the attitude and posture of the speaker, and subject matter. These results are incorporated into a new table of practical rules for the linguist, teacher and student of French, that also specifies liaison differences between the conversational style of the dominant (Ile-de-France) dialect of French and the artistic affectation known as elocution.

Abstract: I could never think the study of wisdom confined only to the philosopher: or of piety to the divine: or of state to the politic. But that he which can feign a commonwealth (which is the poet) can govern it with counsels, strengthen it with laws, correct it with judgments, inform it with religion, and morals; is all these. We do not require in him mere elocution; or an excellent faculty in verse; but the exact knowledge of all virtues, and their contraries; with ability to render the one loved, the other hated, by his proper embattling them. Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries

Abstract: The critical debate up to Bysshe's "Art of English Poetry" (1702) Stress, accent, quantity and the composition of the pentameter The prescriptive criticism The elocution movement and the critical work of Thomas Sheridan The elocution movement and the destruction of form The theory of rhyme, and poetic genres Form and meaning in blank verse. Appendices: Dryden's connection with the preface to Joshua Poole's English Parnassus "Rhyme" and "rime" in Paradise Lost.