Speech tempo in free communication: a sociolinguistic aspect

The research is based on the data obtained from two informants participating in the project “One Speaker’s Day”, namely on their personal (primarily sociological) characteristics and their social contacts during one day. The focus of the article is on speech tempo as an integral component of individual characteristics of a particular speaker and spontaneous speech in general. Temporal characteristics are an important part of speech analysis, therefore they are the object of special phonetic analysis here. Speech tempo means how fast a person speaks, how fast or slow words are pronounced and how distinct and understandable they are to the listener. It is known that verbal behavior of a speaker varies depending on the person they speak with and the circumstances of the conversation. The problem of what this change of “registers of communication” depends on requires a comprehensive study in terms of both linguistics and psychology or sociology. Therefore, it is interesting to study the material of Speech Corpus of the Russian language. The study is based on the hypothesis that a person’s speech rate varies depending on their social role in a particular communicative situation. A social role is commonly understood as a model of a person’s behavior that is expected of every member of society occupying a particular social position (L. P. Krysin). The article presents some specific results of the analysis of records obtained from two informants. Temporal characteristics of speech of one of them significantly vary depending on the person he speaks with, while characteristics of the other informant remain almost unchanged.