PRESENTATION BY FAKHRADDIN SABOURI

2. Style, register and context
• Style: the level of formality in the way of speaking; there are more formal and
less formal styles of every variety .
• Register: a way of speaking a language which is associated with a particular
occupational or activity group. Example: field of law and justice
There is a terminological distinction between register and style. Both are associated with
a specific speech situation but whereas register often refers to the specific vocabulary
chosen and expected in connection with a particular speech situation, style includes
grammatical variation.
In communication and composition, context refers to the words and sentences that
surround any part of a discourse and that helps to determine its meaning. Sometimes called
linguistic context. In a broader sense, context may refer to any aspects of an occasion in
which a speech-act takes place, including the social setting and the status of both the
speaker and the person who's addressed. Sometimes called social context.

3. Summary of this chapter
• 1. Addressee as an influence on style
1.1 Age of addressee
1.2 Social background of addressee
2. Accommodation theory
2.1 How do speakers accommodate?
2.2 speech divergence
2.3 stylization
2.4 Accommodation problems
3. Context, style and class
3.1 Formal contexts and social class
3.2 Different styles within an interview
3.3 Colloquial style or the vernacular
3.4 The interaction of social class and style
3.5 hypercorrection
4. Style in non-western societies
5. Register

4. Stylistic differences
• Three different requests for information:
• 1- From a friend:
• Where were you last night? I rang to see if you wanted to come to the movies.
• 2- In court from a lawyer:
• Could you tell the court where you were on the night of Friday the seventeenth of March?
• 3- From a teacher to his pupil in school on the day after Halloween:
• I know some of you went “trick-or-treating” last night and so I thought we might talk a bit
today about how you got on. Did you go out last night Jimmy?
• So the addressees and the context affect our choice of code or variety, whether language,
dialect or style. Features in which people’s speech indexes their group membership are
stylistic features.

5. Addressee as an influence on style
• Example:
• (a) Excuse me. Could I have a look at your photos too, Mrs. Hall?
(b) C’mon Tony, gizzalook, gizzalook.
• First utterance was addressed by a teenager boy to his friend’s mother and The second
utterance was addressed to his friend.
• So the better you know someone, the more casual and relaxed the speech style you
will use to them.
• What Factors affect the degree of social distance and solidarity? age, gender, social
roles, whether people work together or are part status and so on .
•

6. Age of addressee
• When addressing people of different age, the speaker generally talks differently.
• Some features in speaking and writing to children: Some features in speaking and writing to adults:
- Using short and grammatically simple structures using complex grammatical structure
- Using simple range of vocabulary low frequency words and complex expression
- Using We rather than You to refer to addressee
- Using the sing-song intonation which characterizes baby-talk standard intonation patterns
• But sometimes when speaking to non natives and patronizing situation with adults we
tend to use children feature of speaking and writing.
• Example: sing-sung by a nursing aid to an elderly woman in a private hospital.
• It’s time for our [i.e., your] lunch now isn’t it Mary. We [i.e., you] better wash our [i.e.,
your] hands

7. Social background of addressee
• contrasting styles of newsreaders on different New Zealand radio
stations.
• middle-of-the-road station (ZB) has the lower end of the social
spectrum
National Radio network (YA) has older, generally better-heeled
audience
• (YA) Last week the British Prime Minister Mr David Cameron
met the Australian Premier Ms Julia Gillard in London . . .
Their next meeting will not be for several months.
•
(ZB) Las’ week British Prime Minister David Cameron met
Australian Premier Julia
Gillard in London . . . Their nex’ meeding won’t be for sev’ral
months.
•
Audience design: the influence of the addressee
or audience on a speaker’s style.

8. Accommodation theory

9. Accommodation theory
• Based on the social role, status and background of the addressee, the speaker either
chooses to modify his/ her speech towards or away from the style of the addressee. This
style modification is known as the Accommodation Theory.
• Accommodation theory was developed by Howard Giles and others in the 1970s. It suggests
that we adjust our speech to ‘accommodate’ the person we are addressing. This may result in
convergence or divergence.
• Convergence: each person’s speech converges towards the speech of the person they
are talking in order to please each other or when they like each other. This process is
called speech accommodation.
.
EXAMPLE: Peter Trudgill interviewing people in Norwich, use of [t] in better and bet. Glottal
stop used up to 98% with lower class interviewees (100%). With higher class (25%), Trudgill’s
use dropped to 30%. He was accommodating to his interviewees. AS it shows that when
people talk to each other their speech often becomes more similar.
•
Downward convergent : When people simplify their vocabulary and grammar .
• Example: When a doctor addresses a patient and simplifies the vocabulary items he is using instead of using the
jargon of the medical field.
• upward convergent: People converge their speech UPWARDS towards the more sophisticated linguistic
proficiency of their addresses who are often of a higher status.
•

10. •Divergence
• Deliberately choosing a language not used by one’s addressee is the clearest
example of speech divergence. It is considered an uncooperative speech
behavior and tends to happen when a person wants to show his cultural
distinctiveness, social status, ethnic identity… etc. People who aspire to a higher
social status will diverge upwards from the speech of those from the same
social class.
Example : When the Arab nations issued an oil communiqué to the world not in
English, but in Arabic, they were making a clear political statement. They no
longer wished to be seen as accommodating to the Western English-speaking
powers.
• . If both participants in a conversation converge towards the other, this is called
mutual convergence.
• Speakers may also consciously diverge both from their own usual speech style
and that of their addressee(s) towards the style of a third party for special
effect. This has been labelled referee design – the third party is ‘referred to’
although they are not present. We could describe them as a reference group.
People initiate such stylistic shifts for a range of reasons. When you imitate your
teacher to amuse your friends, or when you adopt a prestige accent to impress
your boss, you are engaging in referee design.

11. •Stylization
• When someone goes beyond their usual or normal ways of speaking and
behaving and engages in a ‘high’ or ‘strong’ performance of some sort, the term
‘stylization’ is used, e.g. the speech of comedians and singers. When a New
Zealand singer uses a US accent, we can say she is styling her performance .
• Ben Rampton has described this particular type of stylization
as ‘crossing’ – young people temporarily cross over into another group’s speech
variety.
• A stylized performance may involve features of a particular regional accent, or
stigmatized vernacular grammatical features, or very formal grammar, or very
erudite vocabulary, or high pitch or a distinctive intonation pattern. pantomime
typically involves stylization.

12. Accommodation problems
1. Overdoing convergence might offend listeners. Listeners might react
differently to different types of convergence.
2. Reasons behind convergence or divergence are very important.
3. Deliberate divergence are regarded as uncooperative or antagonistic.
4. “Context” of the speech is one of the best way to avoid accommodation
problems.
5. Speech accommodation or style shifting which often occurs unconsciously in
casual contexts may not be appropriate in more formal context.

13. Context, style and class : Formal contexts and social roles
• Characteristics of the addressee are not the only influential factors on speech
style.
The choice of appropriate form is influenced not by the personal relationship
between the participants, but by the formality of the context and their relative
roles and statuses within the setting. People’s roles in some formal contexts
strongly influence the appropriate speech forms.
• Examples: A law court is a formal setting where the social roles of participants
override their personal relationship in determining the appropriate linguistic
forms or In classrooms where a child’s mother or father is the teacher, the same
pattern is usually found. Children call their parents Mrs. Grady or Mr. Davis
rather than Mum or Dad .

14. Different styles within an interview Inan interviewing setting, we can elicit more formal style than casual one, why?
• American sociolinguist, William Labov, carried out research in New York City in 1962. He looked at the
pronunciation of /r/ in the middle, and at the end of words for example car and heart. The New York accent is
a non-rhotic accent, unlike most American accents, meaning that the /r/ is not pronounced, just as in most
British varieties of English; hence /ca:/.The phonemic representation for a rhotic pronunciation of car is [car].
• He collected data through a variety of methods including, asking participants to read a word list , passage, and
an informal interview; this was to try and collect natural speech in the interview and the carefully considered
speech in the reading of lists and passages. Labov found a higher use of rhoticity in all social classes when
reading the word list as opposed to in an interview. Labov concluded from these findings that rhoticity appears
to be related to social status.
It comprises an informal part (consisting of free conversation) for eliciting vernacular or local use, and
a formal part (consisting of a reading passage, word lists and minimal pairs) to elicit various degrees of
formal or standard language use.
• the vernacular is a person’s most basic style – the style which, if it can be captured, provides the sociolinguist
with the most systematic and therefore most valuable data for analysis.
•
Trying to obtain an audio-recording of this style involves the observer’s paradox, i.e., observing
(and recording) the way a person speaks when they are not being observed. Simply we can say distracting
speaker from concentrating on their own speech,they consistently used more vernacular features in describing
situations where they had been in danger of death, or recounting the details of fights they had seen, than when
reading aloud or talking on more conventional topics.

15. Colloquial style or the vernacular
• Techniques or other ways to elicit vernacular style:
- Topic manipulation
- Recording small groups of people rather than individual
Features of colloquial or casual style:
- Pronunciation features:
[h]-dropping: e.g. ‘oh well, ‘e said, ‘I suppose you can ‘ave‘im
[in] (vs formal [iŋ]: e.g. We was up there cuttin’
Grammatical features:
was with plural subject we, e.g. We was up there cuttin’
Come (vs Came): Frazer come on to us.
• Two further examples, which can be found in the English of widely different regions
of the world, are the use of me (for standard my), e.g. then me mate arrives, and the
use of them (instead of those) as a determiner: there’s a cross-piece in them old-
fashioned doors. In Tyneside, vernacular me is used by working-class schoolchildren to
tease or express disapproval in stylised performances.

16. .
The interaction of social class and style:
From the way people from different
social groups speak with information
about the way people speak in different
contexts indicates that the features of
social class and contextual style interact.
Group 4 at the top of the graph is the
lowest social group and uses the highest
proportion of vernacular [in]
pronunciation. Going down the graph,
each social group uses fewer vernacular
[in] pronunciations than the one above
and more than the one below, and so
the lines are clearly distinguishable.
The more formal the style, the fewer
vernacular [in] pronunciations occurs.

17. stylistic variation
speaker variation
Inter-speaker variation
when the same linguistic features
distinguishes between speakers
socially (variation between the
speakers).
Intra-speaker variation
the difference in the way a
single speaker talks in two
or more different situations
(variation within a speaker).

18. Hypercorrection
•
it is the exaggeration of some lower class speakers in imitating
middle class standard speech. For example: the use of 'I' rather
than 'me‘ in constructions such as 'between you and I'.
The diagram illustrates variation in speech style and relationship between
Social groups and linguistic variation.
people’s pronunciation of post-vocalic [r] increases as they pay more
attention to their speech. the higher the social class you belong to, the
more post-vocalic [r] you pronounce, and the more formal the context, the
more often you pronounce post-vocalic [r] regardless of your social class
Interesting point the diagram illustrates is the tendency of group
2, the lower middle class (LMC), to pronounce [r] even more often
than group 1, the upper middle class (UMC) in the two most
formal styles.
LMC speakers out-perform UMC speakers when they are reading
isolated words. This is hypercorrect behavior – the LMC are
overdoing it. ‘more correct’ than the standard – ‘hypercorrect’
speech. Some have called it ‘super-standard’.

19. Style in non-Western societies
• In several languages there is a complexity of variations with regard to style.
• AS an example , when addressing a person, the choice between pronouns is
influenced by the relationship between the speaker and the addressee and the
social context in which they are speaking.
• Japan : Japanese speakers assess their status in relation to their addressees on
the basis of such factors as family background, gender and age as well as the
formality of the context.
Iran: context is a relevant factor and Iranian reading styles, in particular, contrast
dramatically with other styles of speech.
France (tu vs. vous)

20. Register
• Register: It is an occupational style with jargon that describes the
language of groups of people with common interests or jobs or the
language used in situations associated with such groups.
 Jargon: Specialized vocabulary specialists develop to talk about their
specialty.
 Some linguists use the term register to refer to the style of speech from
slang to elevated variety. Others restrict it to specialized vocabulary.
 The difference: Style is analyzed along a scale of formality. Register,
, is associated with the language of a particular group of people.
 Other examples of registers: Journalese, baby-talk, sports
commentators, language of airline pilots, criminals, doctors, engineers,
politicians, students …etc.

21. Sports announcer talk : Syntactic reduction , Syntactic inversion and Heavy noun modification
When describing sporting events, the language announcers use is quite clearly distinguishable from language used
in other contexts, especially in term of vocabulary. Terms like silly mid on, square leg, the covers and gully, for
instance, to describe positions, and off-break, googly and leg break to describe deliveries, are examples of
vocabulary peculiar to cricket.
•
grammar is equally distinctive: Play-by-play and colour commentary
• Play-by-play commentary: it focuses on actions by using telegraphic grammar, e.g. syntactic
reduction, inversion of normal word order in sentence due to lack of time.
• Colour commentary: In colour commentary, by contrast, where there is more time, nouns
tend to be heavily modified.
Syntactic reduction :omitting the subject noun or pronoun. MARK [is] in difficulty
• Syntactic inversion : focus on the action and provides time to identify the subject of the action.
EXAMPLE: Pete goes to right field and back for it goes Jackson.
• Heavy noun modification : the subject nouns which are the focus of interest are often heavily
modified both after the noun and before it.
• Example: David Winfield, the 25-million-dollar man, who is hitting zero, five, six in this World
Series . . .

22. Routines and formula
• An interesting feature of sports commentaries, including race calling (the
commentary accompanying a horse race), is the use of routines to reduce the
memory burden on the speaker. The same feature has been identified in other
situations where the memory burden from information which must be
simultaneously processed and communicated is potentially very high,
such as livestock auctions in New Zealand, tobacco auctions in the USA and
North American ice hockey commentaries. These registers are all characterized
by the extensive use of oral formulas.
• The formulas involve a small number of fixed syntactic patterns and a narrow
range of lexical items.
•

23. Routines and formula
• The specialized registers of occupational groups develop initially from the desire
for quick, efficient and precise communication between people who share
experience, knowledge and skills. Bricklayers, butchers, carpenters, dentists,
doctors and linguists all adopt specialized terminology to express shared
meanings concisely and precisely. Over time, the language of such groups
develops more and more characteristics – lexical, syntactic and even
phonological (as the race-caller example illustrated) – which distinguish their
communications from those of other groups. Eventually these specialized
registers may be very difficult for outsiders to penetrate.