Phonetic style-forming means.

Until now it was considered that the phonetic style—forming means are the degree of assimilation, reduction and elision, all of which depend on the degree of carefulness of pronunciation. That means that nothing but changes in the sound structure and the syllabic structure of speech were taken into consideration. But the investigations mentioned above show that phonetic styles differ prosodically too.

It should be emphasized that assimilation, reduction and elision are natural phonetic phenomena, which occur in any pronunciation style. These phenomena are caused by an unconscious economy of effort, known as 'the law of least effort' ,which is universal for all languages. The position and the nature of the adjoining sounds determines the character of the modifications that sounds undergo.

Besides that, the speaker is to a definite extent governed by his audience in his choice of vocabulary units, grammatical structures, tempo of speech, distinctiveness of articulation, and so on. He has to make sure he is understood. That is why he speaks more carefully when addressing a large audience, or people whom he is not on familiar terms with. Whereas he is less particular about the distinctiveness of his pronunciation when talking to those who know him well enough to 'tune in' very easily to his individual manner of speaking. For example, ['lemisi:] for "let me see" for "don't know” for "something” in a free chat are 'acceptable' (though non—obligatory} assimilation and elision, but in other more official situations they are 'unacceptable' with those who speak the orthoepic norm. It appears that the use of one phoneme for another as often as not is a style—forming means. It may have a stylistic colouring and produce a striking effect.

Elision, reduction and assimilation may, therefore, signal stylistic differences. Take the sentence "We can trust him to do it well" said in two different ways. O'Connor states that they belong to different styles: the first being appropriate to colloquial conversation, the second to a political speech delivered to a large audience. On account of all that, the degree of assimilation, reduction and elision may serve to distinguish phonetic styles.

Besides these segmental features, there are prosodic features which enable people to distinguish between different phonetic styles.

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