language and occupation NEW Flashcards
(13 cards)
Sentence mood
Imperatives - issues a command
Exclamatives - emotive language often beginning with ‘what’ or ‘how’
Interrogatives - asks a question
Declaratives - a statement - the most common forms of sentence
Grice’s Maxim
Maxim of quality - we have to tell the truth or something that is provable with adequate evidence
Maxim of manner - we must avoid ambiguity or obscurity
Maxim of quantity - we have to be as informative as required - we should not say more or less
Maxim of relation - our response has to be relevant to the topic of discussion
Politeness
Face theory was created by Erving Goffman in 1955 and describes the meaning of negative face and positive face. Positive face is a desire to feel appreciated, valued, and liked while negative face is a desire to feel independent and have freedom. Acts that disregard these ‘faces’ are called face threatening acts and in order to avoid this, there are a series of positive and negative politeness strategies to ensure that we are appealing to one’s positive and negative face. Robin Lakoff developed this by giving three ‘principles’ to always follow in conversation: don’t impose, give options and make the receiver feel good.
Coding
All retail and hospitality outlets have coded tannoy announcements with can only be understood by staff.
The use of codes to signify a specific situation are often used by emergency services. The british police will have a code to describe the ethnicity of a person. IC1 is the code for a white person while IC5 is the code for chinese, japanese or south-east asian ethnicity.
Acronyms
Almost every occupation has its own special lexicon
Teaching - MEG (minimum expected grade), SEND (special educational need and disability)
Police - APA (association of police authorities), BPA (black police association), CJU (criminal justice unit)
MOD (ministry of defence)
Drew and Heritage 1992 - Institutional interaction
Institutional talk is normally informed by goal orientations of a relatively restricted conventional form
May often involve special and particular constraints on what one or both participants will treat as allowable contributions to the business at hand
May be associated with inferential frameworks and procedures that are particular to specific institutional contexts.
Fairclough 1989 - language and power
Power in discourse expressed by more powerful person in institutional setting constraining contributions of the less powerful participants.
Interruptions - the powerful person can interrupt and question whereas the weaker person can only respond
Enforcing explicitness - a weaker person may use ambiguous or vague utterances
Controlling topic - in informal conversation, the way a topic develops is unpredictable.
Formulation - summarising a speaker’s statement to develop understanding but also to maintain control
Howard Giles 1973 - communication accommodation theory
Recognises how at times, speakers will try to make their language resemble and be more in line with that of their audience to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of communication/ However, some speakers may attempt to use language to distance and distinguish themselves from others. These are called convergence and divergence
Plain english campaign 1979
A campaign aiming to eradicate jargon in official reports so that everyone can have access to clear, concise information
Shan wareing 1999 - types of power
Political power - power held by people in authority
Personal power - where the power arises from someone’s occupation or position in society
Social group power - power comes from social factors
Instrumental power - authoritative power held by someone due to the position they hold
Influential power - a need to gain more power. Used if power is not held already and is therefore used to persuade or influence others
Pierre Bourdieu - language and symbolic power
Language is an instrument of power. Utterances arise due to a relationship between a linguistic market and a linguistic habitus. Market is a person’s audience and the habitus relates to how society has moulded how the person thinks or acts.
Norman Fairclough - Language and power
Individuals with a higher social and economic status will likely be able to use language more powerfully, there are other factors which reflect power structures within society.
He looked at critical discourse analysis which is the definition as to how power is being used to persuade or influence.
An unequal encounter between two speakers or between a reader and a text, occurs due to power structures in society.
There are dominated and dominant classes in capitalist society.
When we look at how power is manifested in the language itself, we call it power in discourse. Power behind discourse relates to sociological and ideological factors behind the power being asserted.
Another useful term is synthetic personalisation.
Koester - Phatic talk in the workplace
He found that phatic talk which is essentially small talk where interactional talk is designed to maintain and develop relationships with coworkers.
He concluded that phatic talk is as important as transactional talk in achieving workplace goals
