Occupational Language

Question 1

Drew & Heritage - Institutional Talk

Answer 1

• Institutional talk differs from ordinary conversation in various ways
• Goal orientation: participants in workplace conversations often focus on specific tasks/goals
• Turn taking rules or restrictions
• Professional lexis
• Allowable contributions: there may be restrictions on what kinds of contributions are considered ‘allowable’
• Structure
• Asymmetry: one speaker often has more power/special knowledge than the other

Question 2

Drew & Heritage - Inferential Frameworks and power relations

Answer 2

• Inferential frameworks - members of a discourse community share implicit ways of thinking, behaving and communicating
• There are strong hierarchies of power within organisations, with many asymmetrical power relations which are marked by language use

Question 3

Koester - Phatic talk

Answer 3

• Phatic talk - language with a social function
• Workers need to establish interpersonal relationships and have interactions that are not just about work-related procedures
• Being sociable and engaging in personal chat is an important aspect of effective working
• Solidarity - the ability to connect with one’s workmates

Question 4

Wilson - Business Language

Answer 4

• Investigated whether there was such thing as a ‘business lexis’
• Found that there was a ‘semantic field for business’ that involved a limited number of semantic categories including business-people, companies, institutions, money
• Also found certain language didn’t appear in business contexts e.g. weekends, family, society, personal activity

Question 5

Louhiala-Salminen - Business letters, faxes and emails

Answer 5

• Believes that business letters are more formal than emails or faxes because the conventions of business letters are more established and stable than electronic modes
• More variation in language used in faxes and emails because writers are less constrained to conform to certain standards
• Informality of fax and email could also be contributed to context-dependence - often less explicit than letters and assume reader already has some background knowledge about the situation

Question 6

Kim & Elder - Korean Pilots

Answer 6

• Communication difficulties were found between Korean pilots and American air-traffic wardens
• Not due to poor language skills, but because the Americans did not use the agreed phrases
• Americans abbreviated unhelpfully, or elaborated unnecessarily and sometimes used idiomatic expressions
• Shows the importance of jargon in the workplace

Question 7

Cameron - Call Centre Conventions

Answer 7

• Call centre conversations - highly formulaic
• Questions asked by agents and order asked in were determined by the software the company was dealing with
• Employees need to elicit information from the caller and input it to the computer in a specific order
• The customer in this transaction should feel as if they have been given good service and therefore the agent uses interpersonal/relational language to accommodate

Question 8

Fairclough - Power in and behind discourse

Answer 8

• Power in discourse - the ways in which power is conveyed through language
• Power behind discourse - the focus on social and ideological power
• Synthetic personalisation - the way in which advertising and other communication forms use personalised language to construct an artificial relationship

Question 9

Wareing - Types of power

Answer 9

1. Political - power held by those with the backing of the law (e.g. politicians)
2. Personal - power held by individuals as a result of their roles in organisations/occupations (e.g. teachers and employers)
3. Social group - power held as a result of being a dominant member of a social group through variables such as class, gender and age i.e. white middle class men

Question 10

Goffman - Face theory

Answer 10

• Face - a pesron’s self esteem and emotional needs
• Face-threatening act - a communicative act that threatens face
• Positive face - the need to feel wanted, liked and appreciated
• Negative face - the need to have freedom of thought and action and not feel imposed on

Question 11

Brown & Levinson - Politeness Strategies

Answer 11

• Bald On-record - the speaker does nothing to minimise damaging the listener’s ‘face’
• Positive politeness - shows that as the speaker, you know the effect you’re having on the listener’s face
• Negative politeness - this too recognises that as a speaker you impose a threat to the listener’s ‘face’, but it explicitly recognises that the listener doesn’t want to be bothered, demonstrating respect
• Off-record indirect - trying to avoid directly asking for something so instead, waiting for that thing to be offered to you; method removing some of the pressure that comes with imposing on someone’s face

Question 12

Lakoff - Politenes principle

Answer 12

3 maxims to not cause offence:
1. Don’t impose
2. Give options
3. Make the hearer feel good

Question 13

Searle - Illocutionary Speech Acts

Answer 13

• Locutionary acts are the speech acts that have taken place
• Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance, where saying equals doing, as in betting, warning, welcoming etc.
• Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the listener, who accepts the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned