Lecture
THE SOUND ORGANIZATION OF SPEECH is the artistically expressive use, serving definite stylistic functions, in a prose or verse text of this or that element of the sound composition of language: consonant and vowel sounds, stressed and unstressed syllables, pauses, various kinds of intonation, homogeneous syntactic turns of phrase, repetitions of words, and so on.
The most frequent form of sound organization of speech is the repetition of homogeneous sound elements (sound repetitions), which create various kinds of symmetrical sound patterning in speech. Since the repetition of homogeneous sounds occurring in words linked by a given sound repetition sets those words off within the speech flow and draws attention to them, they are, to a certain extent, pronounced with added emphasis compared to other words, acquiring a definite intonational significance. Because of this, the sound organization of speech is always bound up with intonation and carries intonational meaning. Homogeneous sounds as such saturate all speech (owing to the repeatability, across an enormous number of words, of a very limited number of phonemes) and are stylistically neutral, imperceptible on the level of artistic expressiveness; but it is precisely in connection with intonation, which marks out words weighty in meaning or emotion, that they become an expressive device, forming an intonational-sound system of speech closely bound up with its lexical, syntactic, and emotional-semantic structure.
In this sense, the significance of the sound organization of speech can be revealed only within a given context, in connection with the overall expressive orientation of a character’s speech or of the author’s narration as a whole.
In some works, attempts are made to understand the sound organization of speech as an autonomous system in the aesthetic sense, one that, through a particular selection of sounds, creates this or that sound-image, or sound scale (sound-painting), as it were independently of the meaning of the words in which these sounds occur. Insofar as onomatopoeia, i.e., the imitation by means of speech sounds of this or that real-world phenomenon, is present in language to some (insignificant) degree (cf. "cuckoo"), it may likewise occur in the sound organization of speech, but to just as insignificant a degree, since the overwhelming majority of phenomena cannot be reproduced by the sound means of speech. Hence all manner of attempts to seek purely sound-based pictures in artistic speech are of little value. The sounding side of speech acquires powerful expressive significance precisely in indissoluble connection with everything else, in artistic unity with it.
In characterizing the various kinds of sound organization of speech, a distinction is drawn between repetitions of sounds by quality (assonance — repetition of vowels, and alliteration — repetition of consonants) and by position (anaphora, initial repetition — repetition of initial elements; epiphora, final repetition — of final elements; ring composition — at both beginning and end; anadiplosis (dovetailing) — at the end of one unit and the beginning of the next, whether words, phrases, verse lines, or hemistichs, and so on).
Alongside the role the sound organization of speech plays within the integral expressive system of an individual text, one must also bear in mind its typological significance in distinguishing verse from prose, where such constant forms of repetition as rhythm, rhyme, and stanza already determine the specific character of the type of speech itself (naturally, depending on the features of the given language) as verse speech, as distinct from prose, which does not possess such consistently expressed features of sound symmetry.
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