occupation

Question 1

British Legal Lexis

Answer 1

law has a need for specialist terminology due to the fact that
- it requires precision
- the long history of law being for qualified people only
- the desire to exclude non-lawyers
eg. voir dire (say what you see)
prima facie (on the face of it)
sub peona (under penalty)

Question 2

American Military Lexis

Answer 2

• the military forms a very closed network
• military service affects a great deal of its personnel’s lives
• they need to create a sense of group membership and loyalty between service personnel

jar head - connotations of stupid, inspired by the haircut
rain locker - shower
deep six - get rid of it, hide it

Question 3

medical note lexis

Answer 3

• an example of jargon being used in an informal situation

NFR - normal for Rochdale
CTD - circling the drain

Question 4

semantically restricted specialist lexis

Answer 4

• ordinary words with specialist meaning
  eg. (OE= ordinary english, MD= medical definition)
  flu OE - bad cold MD - acute highly contagious respiratory disease
  paranoid OE - worried people dont like you or are against you MD - psychosis characterized by systemized delusions of persecution

Question 5

acronyms and initialisms in education

Answer 5

GCSE - general certificate secondary education
EBD - educational behavioural difficulties

Question 6

register

Answer 6

from the McDonald’s text
formal lexis:
‘inform a crew captain’
formal grammar:
‘you will be paid’ (by zombies)
euphemisms:
‘disciplinary actions’

Question 7

Gile’s Accommodation theory

Answer 7

changing the way we speak to suit our audience

in some occupations, speakers may need to converge with their interlocutor, for example in medical professions
eg. microcardial infarction is a heart attack

or speakers may diverge to show intelligence and thus reassurance

Question 8

service encounters

Answer 8

‘a transactional interaction in which one person provides good or services’

eg. McDonald’s
opening and offers of service - “Hello welcome to Mcdonald’s, what can i get for you?”
Negotiations of service - “would you like to make it a meal?”
Closing and leave talking - “Thank you, enjoy your meal.”

Question 9

Discourse structures

Answer 9

• some forms of occupational language do not have specific scripts but do have repeating patterns where similar structures are used repeatedly
  eg. a recipe
  1) preheating temperature
  2) list of ingredients
  3) list of imperatives outlining cooking steps in chronological order
  4) serving suggestion

Question 10

Discourse Communities

Answer 10

• the reason we recognise discourse structures is because we’re part of the same discourse community as the writer

membership of a discourse community also means that you know the appropriate:
- topic
- lexical choice
- status

Question 11

Goffman’s Frontstage and Backstage Language

Answer 11

frontstage - when speakers are performing their professional identity
backstage - when speakers are performing a different identity

• also claimed that conversations are asymmetrical, meaning there is a dominant and a deferential speaker

Question 12

Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory

Answer 12

positive face - see yourself in a certain way and expect others to see you the same (feedback and appraisal)

negative face - right to determination (while workers may not enjoy a particular task, they will not see it as a negative face threat to be asked to do it)

Question 13

Lakoff’s Maxims

Answer 13

• Lakoff identified maxims she claimed people followed in order to be polite
  1) don’t impose
  2) give options
  3) make the listener feel good
• followed in order to be face attentive

Question 14

Face and Symmetrical Conversation

Answer 14

• another important aspect of the workplace is ‘solidarity’
• this is the desire to suggest support and equality with one’s colleagues, therefore they are careful to attend to each others’ face needs and emphasise shared experiences

Question 15

Lakoff’s Deference Model

Answer 15

• typical of low status employees
• demonstration of low authority via the use of ‘superpoliteness’
  eg. using emphasis rather than volume, imply discontent/disagreement, adding tag questions for support

Question 16

Z+W Dominance Model

Answer 16

• when managers actively try to dominate their employees
• in asymmetrical speech, flouting Sack’s No Gap No Overlap rule is more common of high-status speakers
• low status speakers tend to respect the turn of higher status speakers

Question 17

Eakens and Eakens’ study of faculty meetings

Answer 17

• stated that status and gender determined whether someone would get interrupted or not
  -they discovered that there was a hierarchal preference as people of a higher status were not interrupted as much
• however, the most interrupted person was a woman

Question 18

Normal Fairclough

Answer 18

• workplace conversation has a dominant and recessive conversationalist
• and that if people give accounts, generally the person with the most power is more likely to be trusted and believed because they are held to have greater ‘member’s resources’ ie. greater background knowledge and information

Question 19

Lev Vygotsky

Answer 19

• said that sophisticated or authoritative language ensures that one person (the worker) is seen as in charge and in control by the other person (the customer)