What are Grice’s maxims?
Manner, Relevance, Quality and Quantity
What are Leech’s maxims? [T.A.M.A.S.G]
Tact [reduce negativity], Approbation [minimise criticism], Modesty, Agreement, Sympathy, Generosity
What are the 4 areas of Brown & Levinson’s theory?
Positive politeness, Negative politeness, Off-record, Face threatening acts
What are the 2 sides of Giles’ Accommodation Theory?
Convergence [making the eay you speak similar to them] and Divergence [Making it different]
What are the 5 levels in Joos’ Formality register? [F.I.C.C.F]
Frozen, Intimate, Casual, Consultative, Formal
What is Lakoff & Goffman’s theory about?
Framing: how a text type ‘frames’ something
What is the difference between Influential and Instrumental power? [Fairclough]
Influential: trying to convince you to do something.
Instrumental: a command, you must do something.
What is Synthetic Personalisation? [Fairclough]
When the text type tries to make it seem like they know you. [Using second person pronoun ‘you’]
What are the 3 sections of power according to Wareing?
Political, Social and Personal
What is O’Barr and Atkin’s theory?
Situational power: the power of a person changes per each unique situation.
What is Stubbe and Holmes’ theory?
Occupational power: your power relies on your occupation/job/rank e.g politican
What is Spender’s theory? (1970s)
- Dominance
- Men make female language silent in both written and spoken interactions
What is Lakoff’s theory? (G) (1970s)
- Deficit
- Female language is weaker than male language
- Women use empty adjectives; hedges, tag questions, weak expletives
- Men use imperatives, stronger expletives and interrupt more.
- Phatic vs transactional
What is Tannen’s theory? (1970s)
- Difference
- Men and women’s language is equal in power but used differently
- Females are supportive, cooperative, understanding, and propositional rather than demanding
- Men are competitive, give advice, and give orders and info.
What is Howard Giles’ theory?
- Attitudes to dialects (1970s)
- R.P speaker was rated highest for quality of argument but it was other accents that created a shift in opinion
- Standard accent = authoritative, other accents = persuasive
What was William Labov’s theory?
- Martha’s Vineyard (
- Original inhabitants diverged their accents from the upper class tourists and converged it to that of the fishermen
- Fishermen held in higher esteem by original inhabitants than visitors
- Sociolect became dialect of the people living there
- Generational split (younger than older)
What was William Labov’s second theory?
- New York department stores
- Tested in 3 different fashion stores
- The more expensive the store the higher the chance the employees would use R.P or standard English, especially if asked to repeat a sentence
What was Trudgill’s theory?
- Norwich (1974) investigating emphasis on a ‘T’ and dropping the ‘g’
- Men are more likely to use NSE than women, and believed they used it more often than they did
- Women more likely to use SE and believed they used it more often than they did
What was Milroy’s theory?
- Belfast (1980)
- People in closed social networks used NSE more frequently
- NSE less common with women because they were in less dense social networks
- In areas of high unemployment, women used more NSE due to denser networks
Skutnabb + Kangas
- Linguicism
