Style, context and register

Patterned variations within individual speakers from a single location; differences in degree of formality

FORMALITY (level of attention/care taken in relation to the social situation)

› Continuum- formal----informal

E.g. Japanese (finely graded set of levels); Swiss German vs. High German; Vernacular Arabic vs. Modern Standard

Level of formality

KEEP YOUR AUDIENCE IN MIND WHEN SPEAKING AND WRITING

Stylistic differences

3 different requests for information:1. From a friend

Where were you last night? I rang to see if you wanted to come to the pictures2. In court from a lawyer

Could you tell the court where you were on the night of Friday, the seventeenth of March?3. From a teacher to his pupils in school on the day after Halloween

I know some of you went ‘trick-or-treating’ last night and so I thought we might talk a bit today about how you got on. Did you go out last night Jimmy?

‘eliciting the same information, but the context dramatically influences the form of the query’

(Wife to husband)w: Hello, how are you today?

H: I'm fine. Would you mind passing me the bread?W: Certainly. Would you like some butter with your bread?H: Yes, please. Thank you very much.

(Man Speaking to Stranger) A: You! Tell me the time!

B: Three.

(Wife to Husband) W: Hi honey, how was your day?

H: Great. We got a lot done. And yours?W: Fine, a bit stressful. Pass me that magazine, please.H: Here you go.

(Man Speaking to Stranger) A: Pardon me. Do you think you could give me the time?

B: Certainly, it's three o’clock.A: Thank you.B: Not at all.

Accommodation theory / Audience design

Speech convergence- when talking, the speech of the speaker converges towards the speech of the person he/she is talking to > speech accommodation > polite speech strategyUpward convergence: convergence towards the speech of someone with more power and status, or someone deserving respect in the contextDownward convergence: convergence towards the speech of someone with less power and status

E.g. people simplify their vocabulary and grammar when talking to children or foreigners > converge downwards towards a lesser linguistic proficiency of their addressee. -in multilingual countries (Singapore, India or Zaire) with many varieties – people accommodate to others by selecting the most appropriate language code-Think of other examples of upward/ downward convergence!

Example: A number of people who were learning Welsh were asked to help with a survey. In their separate booths in the language laboratory, they were asked a number of questions by an RP-sounding English speaker. At one point this speaker arrogantly challenged the learners’ reasons for trying to acquire Welsh which he called a ‘dying language which had a dismal future’. In responding to this statement the learners generally broadened their Welsh accents. Some introduced Welsh words into their answers, while others used an aggressive tone. One woman didn’t reply for a while, and then she was heard conjugating Welsh verbs very gently into the microphone.

Speech divergence – deliberately using a language not used by the addressee> in this specific case-because of disagreement with the addressee’s sentiments speakers did not desire to accommodate to his speeche.g. sometimes for political reasons-Albanian/ Roma language used instead of Macedonian

Accent divergence – e.g. people coming from smaller towns to Skopje stick to their dialect/ people aspiring to a higher social status will diverge upwards from the speech of those from the same social class

Speech divergence does not always reflect a speaker’s negative attitudes towards the addressees – it can be used to benefit the diverger e.g. Brigitte Bardot and Maurice Chevalier exploited their French accents in speaking English to add to their appeal

Context, style and class

• Example: Yesterday in the Wellington District Court …the All Black captain Jock Hobbs appeared as duty solicitor. Presiding was his father, Judge M.F. Hobbs. Etiquette required Mr. Hobbs to address his father as Mr. Hobbs… [Mr. Hobbs]could not remember the last time he had to call his father Sir… Said the father to son, when the son announced his appearance on all matters as duty solicitor: ‘I appreciate the difficulties you are laboring under, Mr. Hobbs.’

• Choice of appropriate form is influenced not by personal relationship between the participants but …? (consider also family relationships between teacher/ professor – pupil/ student)

The interaction of social class and style

Example: Elizabeth’s daughter Lily took a phone message for her. It read ‘arriving Tuesday at 10’. ‘Who was it?’ she asked but Lily didn’t know. ‘it was a man and he sounded like a teacher’ was all the information Lily could provide. Elizabeth reviewed the possibilities without any inspiration, and began to worry a little about how to cater for this unexpected guest. In the event the caller phoned again on Tuesday morning. It was the glazier who had promised to ring before arriving to put in a new window. He didn’t sound at all like a teacher in his conversation with Elizabeth. She concluded that it was his careful style while dictating his message to Lily which had misled her daughter.

Shifting style to adopt the linguistic features of a different group

Labov, 1966: distribution of postvocalic /r/ over 5 speech styles for four social groups. Example of the reading passage he used in his study of the New York City speech: I remember where he was run over, not far from our corner. He darted out about four feet before a car and he got hit hard. We didn’t have the heart to play ball or cards all morning. We didn’t know we cared so much for him till he was hurt.

Hypercorrection: overuse of postvocalic /r/ by lower middle class (video: Phoebe)

Specialized varieties

Domain: ways of classifying social situations. Assigning a suitable variety based on: => PLACE –> ROLE-RELATIONSHIP- >TOPICEg. home -> family members-> family activities ; work -> boss, employees -> work-related topics(a particular variety of language is appropriate to the domain)

‘In our gerontological sociolinguistic context, we would argue that when in intergenerational encounters, contextual features trigger an elderly (or even ‘aged’) identity in people, they will assume communicative strategies they believe to be associated with older speakers’.

A jargon: a group od specialists often develop to talk about their specialty (occupational style). Others use the term register more narrowly to describe:‘the language of group of people with common interests or jobs, or the language used in situations

associated with such groups’.=> The distinction is not always clear

Why do people need jargon?

Purpose: 1) label new needed concepts2) establish bonds between members3) enforce boundaries for outsiders

Australian aboriginal secret societies Thieves and underworld jargon Jewish horse traders (Hebrew terms for numbers and parts of a horse)

SOME EXAMPLES OF JARGON

Features which distinguish sports announcer talk as a separate register

Example: Cooley – steaming in now, - bowls to Waugh again, - stroking it out into the covers, - just thinking about a single, - Tucker taking a few ah shuttering steps down the wicket from the bowler’s end but Waugh sending him back

-language quite distinguishable from language used in other contexts

Features that distinguish this register:1.Syntactic reduction: e.g. (from baseball commentaries)- [It] bounced to second base (omission of subject noun or pronoun)2.Syntactic inversion: e.g. In comes Ghouri (reversal or inversion of the normal word order)3.Heavy noun modification: e.g. First-base umpire Larry Barnett/ This much sought-after and very expensive fast bowler (people rather than action are the focus of interest – subject nouns which are the focus of interest are heavily modified)

Slang and solidarity

• SOLIDARITY- common group membership. Important social force with a major impact on language. Associated with accommodation.

• SLANG- special kind of ‘intimate’ or in-group speech. A kind of jargon marked by its rejection of formal rules (power), freshness, secrecy, solidarity (group membership), taboo expressions.

• Australian aboriginal languages (every word means its opposite)• Pig Latin (children’s secret language, a meaningless vowel is inserted after every syllable)• Pachuco (developed by Spanish-American young people, idioms translated literally from

English to Spanish)• Cockney rhyming slang (video)