Power within and behind discourse
Linguist: Norman Fairclough
Power within discourse - Power exerted by the choice of language, e.g. formal register, epistemic modal verbs like “will”
Power behind discourse - The producers of the text have an external power behind linguistic features
Accommodation Theory
Linguist: Howard Giles
Demonstrates how we change our language and the way we speak depending on who we are speaking to
Convergence - Making our language more like the people we are speaking with - diluting accents, using the other person’s local slang or simply speaking slower
Divergence - When we emphasise the differences in our language against the language of the person we are talking to; this might be exaggerating our accent - this is particularly relevant if your accent is one with particular prestige, like RP
Man-Made Language
Linguist: Dale Spender
In patriarchal societies men control language and it works in their favour - where men perceive themselves as the dominant gender, disobedient women who fail to conform to their inferior role are labelled as abnormal
Language and Prestige
Linguists: Trudgill and Cheshire
Trudgill studied men and women’s social class accents and found that women’s pronunciation was closer to RP
Cheshire studied the speech of adolescent girls and boys, and found that boys tended to use more non-standard grammatical forms than girls
Standard English and RP gives a person ‘overt prestige,’ or being associated with a respectable section of society
Non-Standard English gives a person ‘covert prestige,’ coming across as more rebellious and independent
The Dominance Model
Linguists: Zimmermann and West, Coates
This is the theory that in mixed-sex conversations men are more likely to dominate the conversation than women
- Zimmermann and West found that 96% of the interruptions made in the conversations were made by men
- Beattie criticised this study as he thought that their sample size was too small - only white, middle class people under 35 were used
- Coates looked at topic shifts between men and women - men will often reject a conversation introduced by women while women will accept the topics introduced by men, also suggesting that men discuss ‘male’ topics like business, sport, politics and economics
The Difference Model
Linguist: Deborah Tannen
- She presented the ideas that males and females are often represented as being different cultures, rather than one trying to be intentionally dominant over the other
- Through language, men structure their interactions with others mostly as a framework to achieve independence and strength
- Categorised her ideas into 6 contrasts, one being ‘conflict vs compromise’
The Bradford Study and ‘Teenspeak’
Linguist: Gary Ives
- Asked a group of 17 year olds at a Bradford school whether they could remember words they used to use in the playground that were no longer part of their vernacular
- They couldn’t remember any specific words but when they were asked about how they speak as teenagers, they were able to be much clearer - common words in their lexicon were linked by an informal register with taboo language and dialect being, in their opinion, the most prevalent register - themes most associated with ‘teenspeak’
- Also an understanding that slang was a part of the teenagers vernacular and the teenagers acknowledged that this wouldn’t be used or understood by the older generation
Social Groups and Discourse Communities
Linguist: John Swales
Defined a discourse community as being members who:
- share a set of common goals
- Communicate internally using and ‘owning’ one or more genres of education
- Use specialist lexis and discourse
- Possess a required level of knowledge and skill to be considered eligible to participate in the community
Restricted and Elaborated Code
Linguist: Basil Bernstein
- Everyone uses restricted code some of the time, it is usually preferable in informal situations where there is shared understanding of something
- Elaborated code is different from restricted code in that it is understood without additional prompts
- Bernstein argued that working-class students had access to their restricted code, but middle class students tended to use both restricted and elaborated codes because the middle classes were more geographically, socially and culturally mobile
- Evidence of elaborated code can be found through things such as more subordinate clauses, more logical connectives like if and unless, more originality compared to the cliches in restricted code and more explicit messages compared to pronouns
Relationship between social class and the use of language features
Linguist: Peter Trudgill
- Norwich study found that the pronunciation of ‘ing’ at the end of words changed between social class, with lower classes dropping the ‘g’ in their pronunciation
- Among all classes, the correct pronunciation of ‘ing’ increased according to the formality of the situation
- Also looked at the use of verbs without their ‘s’ endings and found that non-standard forms such as ‘he go’ were found much more frequently among working-class speakers
- He found that the speakers’ language was influenced by gender
New York City research
Linguist: Labov
- Looked at the use of the postvocalic ‘r’, the pronunciation of the ‘r’ sound in words such as ‘farm,’ ‘floor’ and ‘car’
- In New York, the postvocalic ‘r’ is considered socially prestigious, like pronouncing the ‘h’ at the start of a word in Britain
- He went to three NYC department stores of differing levels of prestige and asked sales people and customers the same question where the answer was the fourth floor so he could note how they pronounced it
- He found that in casual speech, upper middle class speakers used the postvocalic ‘r’ more than lower class speakers, which confirmed his expectations
- However, an interesting finding was that in more formal situations (for example reading word lists), the reverse was the case - this suggested that lower-middle class speakers were more conscious of their own speech and more anxious to make a good impression through the way that they spoke
