Occupational Variation

Question 1

Semantic field

Answer 1

Have highly specialised lexis, and heavily influenced by their occupation

Question 2

Micheal Nelson- business speak

Answer 2

He found there was indeed a ‘semantic field of business’ involving a limited numbers of semantic categories: terms to do with ‘business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, time, modes of communication, and lexis concerned with technology’.

Question 3

John swales - discourse communities

Answer 3

Defined a discourse community as having members who:
1. Share a set of common goals;
2. Communicate internally, using and ‘owning’ one or more genres of
communication;
3. Use specialist lexis and discourse;
4. Possess a required level of knowledge and skill to be considered eligible to
participate in the community.
Of course members of a discourse community don’t communicate identically all the time - creativity and individual differences keep things changing and evolving.

Question 4

Drew and heritage - occupational power

Answer 4

suggest that members of a discourse community share inferential frameworks.
These consist of implicit ways of thinking, communicating and behaving.
They also suggest that there are strong hierarchies of power within organisations,
with many asymmetrical relationships marked by language use.