Characteristic features of the Newspaper style.

Newspaper articles belong to the written variety of the publicistic style.

A newspaper serves to inform and convince the reader. It is intended for different kinds of audience, people who differ in their background and levels of education and culture. The newspaper is usually read in places where it is hard to concentrate (in the underground, at breakfast or lunch, during a break). The reading is often broken off. All these factors impose certain rules on creating a newspaper article. The article should be understandable to everyone; it should not rely very much on background knowledge of the reader or on the context. It is supposed to arouse the reader’s interest at once and keep it throughout the article. The main information should be imparted in a short, and expressive way.

Newspaper article are characterized by the following general features.

1. Newspaper articles abound in proper names (names of people, geographical places, establishments), numerals and other classes words expressing plurality and dates.

2. Newspaper language comprises a great number of economic and political terms and abstract words though they usually convey quite concrete information.

3. Newspaper clichés and phraseology are often employed in newspaper in newspaper style. Such clichés help to avoid misunderstanding, being trite банальные and widely used: bring down the government, showdown, dismiss allegations, come to office, come into force, bring to prominence.

4. a lot of abbreviations contribute to expressiveness. Abbreviations can stand for geographical names and names of well-known political and public figures, writers, film stars: JFK (John Francis Kennedy), BB (Brigitte Bardot). shortenings are also peculiar to English newspapers: Lib (Liberal party), Lab (Labour party), Mont (Montana)

5. As the newspaper is very sensitive to everything new taking place in the life of people, neologisms first come into being on its pages: long-haired (lads with the Beatle haircut).

6. The language of newspaper style is rich in stylistic devices, both lexical and syntactical, but they are usually dead so that are easily understood by everyone. Allusions, irony and punning are especially peculiar to newspaper style. As to the vocabulary newspaper language is a combination of words of various stylistic groups: colloquial, slangy, archaisms and barbarisms.

7. Articles contain lots of quotations of direct speech which may be often presented without inverted commas.

8. The syntax of some news items may be very complicated. The content is sometimes conveyed in 1-2-3 sentences which are complex with infinitival, participial, gerundial and nominative-with-the-infinitive constructions. The rule of sequence of tenses is not always observed.

Intonation.

Intonation is a complex unity of non-segmental features of speech: 1. melody, pitch of the voice; 2. sentence stress; 3. temporal characteristics (duration, tempo, pausation); 4. rhythm; 5. tamber.
Intonation organizes a sentence, determines communicative types of sentences and clauses, divides sentences into intonation groups, gives prominence to words and phrases, expresses contrasts and attitudes.

The two main functions of intonation are: communicative and expressive.
There are two main approaches to the problem of intonation in Great Britain. One is known as a contour analysis and the other may be called grammatical.
The first is represented by a large group of phoneticians: H. Sweet, D. Jones, L. Armstrong, and others. According to this approach the smallest unit to which linguistic meaning can be attached is a sense-group. Their theory is based that intonation consists of basic functional "blocks".
Thе grammatical approach to the study of intonation was worked out by M. Halliday. The main unit of intonation is a clause. Intonation is a complex of three systemic variables: tonality, tonicity and tone, which are connected with grammatical categories. Tonality marks the beginning and the end of a tone-group. Tonicity marks the focal point of each tone-group. |Tones can be primary and secondary. They convey the attitude of the speaker. Halliday's theory is based on the syntactical function of intonation.
RHYTHM AND TEMPO. Rhythm is the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Unstressed syllables have a tendency to cling to the preceding stressed syllables — enclitics, or to the following stressed syllables — proclitics. In English, as a rule, only initial unstressed syllables cling to the following stressed syllable, non-initial unstressed syllables are usually enclitics.
Each sense-group of the sentence is pronounced at approximately the same period of time, unstressed syllables are pronounced more rapidly. Proclitics are pronounced faster than enclitics.

Rhythm is connected with sentence stress. Under the influence of rhythm words which are normally pronounced with two equally strong stresses may lose one of them, or may have their word stress realized differently, e. g. ,Picca'dilly — ,Piccadilly 'Circus — 'close to ,Picca'dilly

PAUSATION AND TAMBER. The number and the length of pauses affect the general tempo of speech. A slower tempo makes the utterance more prominent and more important.

Pauses made between two sentences are longer than pauses between sense-groups. Their length is relative to the tempo and rhythmicality norms of an individual. Pauses show relations between utterances and intonation groups, performing a constitutive function. Attitudinal function of pausation can be affected through voiced pauses, which are used to signal hesitation, doubt and suspense.

The theory of Phoneme.

Ph studies sounds as articulatory and acoustic units, phonology investigates sounds as units which serve communicative purposes. The unit of phonetics is a speech sound, the unit of phonology is a phoneme. As a unit of phonology, phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound, able to distinguish one word from another. Phonemes can be discovered by the method of minimal pairs. There are several theories of phoneme.

1.Бодуэн-де-Куртене defined the phoneme as a physical image of a sound. It is semantically differentiating unit.

2.The abstraction conception on the phoneme was originated by Фердинанд де Соссюр, the Danish linguist Hjemslev. The abst view regards the phoneme independent of the phonemic properties.

3.Трубецкой, Блумфилд, Jacobson viewed the phoneme as the minimal sound units by which meanings may be differentiated. They stated that the features of the phoneme involved in the differentiation of words are called distinctive.

4. The physical view on the phoneme was originated by Jhones. He defined the phoneme as a family of sounds, showing similarities. No member of the family can occur in the same phonetic context as any other member. This view was shared by Bloch and Treiger.

5.Щерба was the first to define the phoneme as a real, independent distinctive unit, which manifests itself in the form of allophones. Vasiliev developed his theory and wrote that a phoneme is a dialectical unity of 3 aspects: 1. material, real and objective, 2. abstractional, generalized, 3. functional. It serves to perform the following functions: constitutive, distinctive, recognitive. Vasiliev states that phoneme is material, real and objective, because it really exists in the material form of speech sounds, allophones. It is an objective reality, existing independently from our will or intention. It is an abstraction, because we make it from concrete realizations for classificatory purposes.

Stress in English.

Any word spoken in isolation has at least one prominent syllable which is called stress. Stress is defined differently by different authors. B. A. Bogoroditsky, for instance, defined stress as an increase of energy, accompanied by an increase of expiratory and articulatory activity. D. Jones defined stress as the degree of force, which is accompanied by a strong force of exhalation and gives an impression of loudness. H. Sweet also stated that stress is connected with the force of breath.
Generally Word stress can be defined as the singling out of one or more syllables in a word, which is accompanied by the change of the force of utterance, pitch of the voice, qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the sound, which is usually a vowel.

According to the most important feature different types of word stress are distinguished in different languages.

1) dynamic, or force stress is achieved mainly through the intensity of articulation

2) musical, or tonic is achieved mainly through the change of pitch, or musical tone. It is characteristic of the Japanese, Korean and other oriental languages.

3) quantitative is achieved through the changes in the quantity of the vowels, which are longer in the stressed syllables than in the unstressed ones

4) Qualitative type of stress is achieved through the changes in the quality of the vowel under stress.

English word stress is traditionally defined as dynamic, but in fact, the special prominence of the stressed syllables is manifested in the English language not only through the increase of intensity, but also through the changes in the vowel quantity, consonant and vowel quality and pitch of the voice.
All English vowels may occur in stressed syllables with the syllabic /1, m, n/ are never stressed.

Stress can be characterized as fixed and free. In English stress is shifting which helps to differentiate parts of speech(import – to import). Stress helps to constitute and recognize words and their forms.