Occupation Flashcards
Jargon/Restricted Lexis
Language unique to a workplace
American Military Lexis
‘Rain locker’ to mean ‘shower’
There is a very closed network in the military so there is a need to establish solidarity with restricted lexis.
British Legal Lexis
‘Sub poena’ meaning ‘under penalty’
There is a need for precision, formality, excluding non-lawyers and law is a very old profession.
Semantically Restricted Specialist Lexis
Words that exist in normal English but have a different meaning in certain occupations such as paranoid, flu, anxiety.
Howard Giles - Accommodation Theory
People may need to converge in the workplace to form closer relationships. Alternatively, professionals may diverge from non-professionals to show expertise such as a doctor using specialist medical lexis - ‘myocardial infarction; = ‘heart attack’
Goffman - Frontstage and Backstage language
Frontstage - Performing professional identity, more formal
Backstage - Performing other identities, more casual
Drew & Heritage
Workplace conversations are goal-oriented and there are restrictions on what are ‘allowable contributions’
Goffman - Asymmetrical Conversations
Workplace conversations are not equal, power differences on display. High-status speakers will control the topic and limit topic drift in formal workplace conversations.
Brown and Levinson
Positive Face - How we view ourselves
Negative Face - right to self-determination (doing what we want)
Face and Asymmetrical Conversations
Workplace feedback is depersonalised to avoid damaging positive face. A superior giving a command is not a negative face threat, there is a contractual obligation to do the task.
Eakens and Eakens
Status and gender in the workplace determines who is interrupted. Higher status speakers are interrupted less. Women are interrupted most.
Norman Fairclough
Workplace has dominant and recessive conversationalists. The person with the most power is more likely to be believed because they have greater ‘Member’s Resources’
Lev Vygotsky
The worker using sophisticated and authoritative language means that the customer sees that the worker is in control.
Turn-Taking and Power
High-status speakers interrupt and overlap low-status speakers often (Link to Zimmerman & West)
Lower-status speakers follow Sacks’s No Gap No Overlap rules more closely.
