Occupation

Question 1

M. Halliday - anti language

Answer 1

• a way of communicating within language that excludes outsiders
• anti language uses the same grammar and words as the main speech community, but in a different way so that they can only be understood by insiders
• this is often used by criminals and people on the fringes of society e.g, polari users as they do not want to be understood by everybody

Question 2

John Swales - Discourse community (2011)

Answer 2

• a discourse group is a group of people who share the similar basic values.
• Swales describes this as “groups that have goals or purposes and use communication to achieve these goals”

Question 3

Drew and Heritage - institutional talk

Answer 3

• heritage : “institutional talk can occur anywhere and by the same token ordinary conversations. An emerge in almost any institutional context” - we aren’t defined by our occupation
• within everyday conversation, turn-taking rules and restrictions apply; for example we wait for someone to stop speaking before we take our turn to speak. Shows the persons general politeness and good manners
• goal participation- participants in a workplace who have conversations based on a goal.

Question 4

Drew and Heritage - inferential frameworks

Answer 4

• knowledge is built up over time and used in order to understand meanings that are implicit
• they suggested that members of a discourse community will share the same inferential frameworks (inferences) to make it easier to communicate swiftly
• in workspaces conversations, there is always somebody with more authority or knowledge who will have more control and power in conversation
• photic talk is needed and jargon so an operation can move smoothly

Question 5

Almut Koester - Phatic talk and banter

Answer 5

• Koester studied how employees interact within the workplace
• “banter is needed in the workplace “ as it calms the atmosphere and makes customers feel welcomed
• phatic talk (small talk) is important as workers need to establish relationships and have interactions that are not just about work related topics
• Koester believes that being sociable in the workplace is essential for effective working as employees are able to support one another
• can be used outside the workplace
• this suggests that features if occupational discourse are also features of wider societal discourses .
• therefore it is not a personas occupation that influences their language but rather their context as language features differ and sometimes remain the same within various contexts

Question 6

Howard Giles : accommodation theory

Answer 6

• interested in why we change the way we speak to accommodate other people
• two ways in which accommodation can occur in cigersation is through convergence and divergence
• convergence : the speaker adapts their language to resemble the language of who they’re talking to - (assimilation)
• divergence : the speaker adapts their speech in order to sound less like the person they are talking to

Question 7

Paul Grice - conversational maxims

Answer 7

• Gricean maxims are a way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them
• maxims:
• be truthful (say enough and tell the truth)
• be relevant (stay on topic)
• be clear (don’t be ambiguous)
• say enough (not too little
• flouting maxims : human interaction can be complex and counterproductive - when someone doesn’t stick to the maxim because everyday talk isn’t scripted yes there might be subjected everyday jargons but other than that, you can’t always be truthful or relevant

Question 8

Brown and Levison - politeness theory

Answer 8

• negative politeness strategies ( strategies that are performed to avoid offence through deference) and positive politeness strategies (strategies that are performed to avoid offence by emphasising friendliness)
• negative face: the wish to be unimpeaded by others in one’s actions
• positive face : the wish or desire to gain approval of others
• speech acts - becomes an act if following are seen: social distancing, use of apologies, formal language, deference etc
• Q3 - you would expect convos to be transactional but someone could threatened the positive face so it ends up being difficult and they aren’t scripted

Question 9

Martins Joos - spoken language styles

Answer 9

• Frozen style ( language of police, priests and teachers )
• formal style ( language of the wealthy/ middle class)
• consultative style (used by professionals in law, medicine, government and education)
• casual style (used between friends and family members- sentences incomplete/phatic expressions used)
• intimate style (used between lovers and twins. When others used it, it is usually construed as sexual harassment)
• joos found that using the wrong registrar of language can be socially offensive

Question 10

The daily Mirror article in 2011 Doctors excluding patients at their expense

Answer 10

Language includes idioms such as FLK which stands for “funny looking kid” GLM which stands for “great looking Mum” and slashes which stands for “surgeons”
- this naivety of outsiders/patients is used against them to exclude them however it still could be used to lighten up a difficult job

Question 11

Kim and Elder

Answer 11

-majority of miscommunications between the US and Korean air traffic control is due to native idioms and abbreviations Other countries did not understand.
- exclusion can happen within occupational groups and language will exclude outsiders even if not intended

Question 12

Occupation is not the sole influence on language - region

Answer 12

• Factors like region appear to also have a profound influence on the way people speak. For example, the Geordie dialect from Newcastle consists of phonological features like glottal reinforcements for consonants /k/ and /t/, lexical features like use of the verb ‘gan’ for ‘go’, and grammatical features like the non-standard use of the second person past tense verb ‘was’. These features show that the region which a person comes from appears to influence their language. Furthermore, dialectal impacts on language even appear to override occupational influences as it is unlikely that a person’s dialect will be as dependent on the changing context as occupational language is.

Question 13

Intro

Answer 13

• occupation being such a large part of life, especially in western culture, impacts many areas of life.
• it is argued that one of these areas is our use of language, however the fact that it ‘completely’ affects our language is up for debate, how impactful it really is maybe is questionable due to many factors that influence occupation and what makes up someone’s language

Question 14

Occupational register

Answer 14

• words or phrases that are used solely in a particular job or, on occasions, have originated in a particular occupation before becoming more widely spread
• aka ‘Jargon’

Question 15

Plain English Campaign

Answer 15

• campaigns against jargon and misleading public information
• they go against business jargon and semantic divorce