Formal features Flashcards
Acronyms and Initialisms
morphological
form part of formal lang. often specific to specialist registers
Modern compounding
morphological
common feature of public lang. (doublespeak)
builds compound nouns – lexically dense noun phrases (e.g. ‘social-distancing measures’)
Jargon
lexical
create specialist semantic field
Nominalisation
lexical
no need for subject responsible for action of related verb as they are nouns
more authoritative, distant, abstract, more lexically dense (syntactically)
Syntactic patterning
syntax
builds cohesion
PAL
- Parallelism
- Antithesis
- Listing
Parallelism
efficiently packages ideas into mirrored structures
*describe which word classes/phrases are repeated
Listing
creates layering
Antithesis
efficiently package (opposite) ideas into mirrored structures
Passive voice
syntax
reverses standard SV(O) –> SV(A)
indirect, less personal
(agentless) - indirect, ambiguous, avoiding responsibly, hiding, less personal, increases social distance
Embedded clauses and phrases
syntax
extra info
Information flow
discourse and pragmatics
FEC
Front focus
End focus
Clefting
Front focus
- highlight beginning of sentence
- greater prominence for elements that usually come later
- places something other than subject noun phrase that would usually come later
- get audience’s attention
- achieved through less usual syntactic structures
FIP
Fronting
Inversion
Passive voice
End focus
- end weight principle
- heavy at end of sentence
End weight
Existential
End weight
move grammatically complicated or heavily modified structures (higher communicative value) to the end
Extistential
(There/It = dummy subject)
* used to reserve new information for end of sentence
* end weight/focus
* create empty subject using pronoun “there” –> purely grammatical
* present as fact/truthful/assertive
