Language and Occupation Flashcards
Nelson - Business Language theory
He found what he describes as ‘a semantic field of business’ involving limited number of semantic categories: terms to do with ‘business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time, modes of communication and lexis concerned with technology’.
Swales - Discourse Communities theory
He defined a discourse community as having members who: share a set of common goals. Communicates internally, using and ‘owning’ one or more genres of communication. Use specialist lexis and discourse. Possess a required level of knowledge and skill to be considered eligible to participate in the community.
Koester - Interpersonal relationships theory
The importance of phatic talk (conveying emotions rather than ideas) is in getting jobs done. Although some employers are not represented as discouraging talk that is not strictly work-related, Koester shows that being sociable and engaging in personal chat is an important aspect of effective working. As well as power, then, solidarity - the ability to connect with one’s workmates - is an important dimension in workplace communication.
Goffman - Face theory
Politeness theory - an individual has both positive and negative needs
Drew and Heritage - ‘institutional talk’ theory
Workplace or professional talk differs from ordinary conversation in a number of ways: goal orientation, turn-taking rules or restrictions, allowable contributions, professional lexis, structure, asymmetry.
They suggest that members of a discourse community share inferential frameworks with each other, consisting of implicit way of thinking, communicating and behaving.
Cameron - Call Centre Research
She concludes that such telephone interactions are subject to a worrying degree of managerial control, characterised by ‘codification’ and ‘surveillance’. Her research shows that many call centres give very detailed specifications, or even full scripts, for what the telephone agent should say, and that the telephone calls are monitored and recorded, and used as a basis for appraisal. This, she says, results in a standardisation of interactions and a reduction of the autonomy of the call centre employees. She concludes that call centres are ‘communication factories’, with employees working in conditions similar to a production line.
Brown and Levison - positive and negative face needs theory
Brown and Levison developed a theory of how the notion of face, which has to do with basic human needs and feelings of self-worth, influences how people interact. Negative and positive face.
Positive or negative face can be threatened in various interactive situations by what Brown and Levison call face-threatening acts.
Norman Fairclough - Unequal Encounters theory
Fairclough stated that many interactions between individuals are ‘unequal encounters’ and that language choice is created and constrained by certain social power situations or that power types of discourse of kinds was accepted as normal for that kind of encounter
