British Legal Lexis
law has a need for specialist terminology due to the fact that
- it requires precision
- the long history of law being for qualified people only
- the desire to exclude non-lawyers
eg. voir dire (say what you see)
prima facie (on the face of it)
sub peona (under penalty)
American Military Lexis
- the military forms a very closed network
- military service affects a great deal of its personnel’s lives
- they need to create a sense of group membership and loyalty between service personnel
jar head - connotations of stupid, inspired by the haircut
rain locker - shower
deep six - get rid of it, hide it
medical note lexis
- an example of jargon being used in an informal situation
NFR - normal for Rochdale
CTD - circling the drain
semantically restricted specialist lexis
- ordinary words with specialist meaning
eg. (OE= ordinary english, MD= medical definition)
flu OE - bad cold MD - acute highly contagious respiratory disease
paranoid OE - worried people dont like you or are against you MD - psychosis characterized by systemized delusions of persecution
acronyms and initialisms in education
GCSE - general certificate secondary education
EBD - educational behavioural difficulties
register
from the McDonald’s text
formal lexis:
‘inform a crew captain’
formal grammar:
‘you will be paid’ (by zombies)
euphemisms:
‘disciplinary actions’
Gile’s Accommodation theory
changing the way we speak to suit our audience
in some occupations, speakers may need to converge with their interlocutor, for example in medical professions
eg. microcardial infarction is a heart attack
or speakers may diverge to show intelligence and thus reassurance
service encounters
‘a transactional interaction in which one person provides good or services’
eg. McDonald’s
opening and offers of service - “Hello welcome to Mcdonald’s, what can i get for you?”
Negotiations of service - “would you like to make it a meal?”
Closing and leave talking - “Thank you, enjoy your meal.”
Discourse structures
- some forms of occupational language do not have specific scripts but do have repeating patterns where similar structures are used repeatedly
eg. a recipe
1) preheating temperature
2) list of ingredients
3) list of imperatives outlining cooking steps in chronological order
4) serving suggestion
Discourse Communities
- the reason we recognise discourse structures is because we’re part of the same discourse community as the writer
membership of a discourse community also means that you know the appropriate:
- topic
- lexical choice
- status
Goffman’s Frontstage and Backstage Language
frontstage - when speakers are performing their professional identity
backstage - when speakers are performing a different identity
- also claimed that conversations are asymmetrical, meaning there is a dominant and a deferential speaker
Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory
positive face - see yourself in a certain way and expect others to see you the same (feedback and appraisal)
negative face - right to determination (while workers may not enjoy a particular task, they will not see it as a negative face threat to be asked to do it)
Lakoff’s Maxims
- Lakoff identified maxims she claimed people followed in order to be polite
1) don’t impose
2) give options
3) make the listener feel good - followed in order to be face attentive
Face and Symmetrical Conversation
- another important aspect of the workplace is ‘solidarity’
- this is the desire to suggest support and equality with one’s colleagues, therefore they are careful to attend to each others’ face needs and emphasise shared experiences
Lakoff’s Deference Model
- typical of low status employees
- demonstration of low authority via the use of ‘superpoliteness’
eg. using emphasis rather than volume, imply discontent/disagreement, adding tag questions for support
Z+W Dominance Model
- when managers actively try to dominate their employees
- in asymmetrical speech, flouting Sack’s No Gap No Overlap rule is more common of high-status speakers
- low status speakers tend to respect the turn of higher status speakers
Eakens and Eakens’ study of faculty meetings
- stated that status and gender determined whether someone would get interrupted or not
-they discovered that there was a hierarchal preference as people of a higher status were not interrupted as much - however, the most interrupted person was a woman
Normal Fairclough
- workplace conversation has a dominant and recessive conversationalist
- and that if people give accounts, generally the person with the most power is more likely to be trusted and believed because they are held to have greater ‘member’s resources’ ie. greater background knowledge and information
Lev Vygotsky
- said that sophisticated or authoritative language ensures that one person (the worker) is seen as in charge and in control by the other person (the customer)
