Formal language Flashcards
Phonological features
Sound symbolism Blend 43 (softer),Garnier Fructus (harsher)
Aliteration ‘deliberate and deadly’
Assonance ‘beacon for freedom’
Consonance ‘flying into buildings, fires burning.. filled us with disbelief’
Onomatepioeia ‘The hush and rustle of the leaves’
Rhyme and rhythm ‘the wind blows and the smoth stream flows’
Accent- broadgeneral cultivated
Morphological features
‘classical affixations’- impede, dexterity, disbelief, sadness, unyielding
Compounding ‘law enforcement’ ‘hard-fought’ –>impenetrable text .
Doublespeak= lang used by businesses/govt army etc–> deliberate confound the truth. Lexically dense NP
Acronym+intilisms e.g the total of your SAC scors contributed to ATAR
Lexical choices
Jargonistic choices ‘Mitochondria’
elevated choices ‘perspire etc’
Syntactic patterning
PAL
–> parelalsim
antithesis
listing
–> cohesion as they glue and thread ideas together
pareleleism
e.g ‘our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom’ possessive determiner and NP
Mirrored structure, semantic thread.
Builds momentum
Packages noun phrases in mirrored structures, making it more memorable and powerful
antitheis
Antithesis ‘terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America’
Can/cannot= antonomy
(always antonomy in antithesis).
Sit side by side in a away which makes stronger contrast
listing
Listing ‘Disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger’
=semantic thread of strong emotions.
Layering ideas for greater impact on reader/listener
passive voice
–>Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.
=emphasis on thousands of lives as it is the grammatical subject but keeps agent in clause deliberately
Often tries to obfuscate the blame or focus on the agent.
nominalisation
Nominalisation= verbs to nouns
lexical and syntactic density, making discourse more formal also takes subject out of it.
–>more abstract by nouns over verbs
–>They encourage us to participate in the writing competition, vs Participation in the writing competition is encouraged.
Information flow
Never just flow
= discourse feature but all about syntax
–>sentence organisation
–>fronting, ending focus, front focus and clefting
–>about highlighting or foregrounding something (strategically focusing on what is important, or what is redundant due to what the audience already knows)
neutral vs marked syntax
Neutral=SVO
marked–> anything unusual (not SVO)
cleating
Clefting= division/chopping something
it-clefts= DummyS+V+S+relative pronoun+clause
what clefts= what+SNcl+V+NP (complement)
It-clefts, e.g It was alice who kicked the winning goal
e.g it was the winning goal that alice kicked
–> Emphasis.
What clefts e.g what I really want are answers
What Alex desires is another long weekend.
=foregrounding and bringing focus
end focus
END FOCUS
=relates to principle of end weight
Places material with higher communicative value at the end
Moves gramtically complicated or heavily modfied structures to the end
e.g she depended for inspiration of the presence of her books
end weight+ end focus here.
Existential sentences (there/it are dummy subjects)
Reserve new info for the end of sentences = end weight or end focus
There are many endangered species in Australia.
‘there’ exists only for grammar
It will be morning soon.
Sound more factual, authoritative, objective and factual
front focus
FIPv
–>fronting
–>inversion
–>passive voice
fronting
Fronting=hightlights the beginning of a sentence.
Creates greater prominence for elements that would usually come later
If Places Subject NP at start of IC= fronting
Gets audiences attention
Can be achived through a number of unusual syntactic (marked syntax) features
