Professional Documents
Culture Documents
features
(their
typical
lexical
and
grammatical
face-to-face conversation
Description
of
typical
(pervasive)
linguistic
features
requires
Elias: Cinnamon.
Judith: Oh.
Kate: Those are good.
Eric: They're good.
Elias: That's the joy of life.
Kate: Did you guys come through the plaza on your way?
Judith: No.
Kate:
empty.
Elias: We drove through it tonight.
Judith: Yeah we'll do that.
Eric: I don't like the color lights on the tree though.
Kate: Did they put fake ones up in there one year?
Elias: No they're just all around on all the buildings.
Kate: Oh yeah.
Elias: I think it would be kind of dumb to put them on the ground. [LSWE Corpus]
3.2.
Participants
A Addressor(s) (i.e. speaker or author)
1. Type:
-
Unidentified
Addressees
1. single (e.g. personal letters and e-mail messages are also often addressed
to an individual);
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conversation.
power differences can influence language choices even in a casual
conversation.
C.
D.
Channel
A.
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B.
Specific medium:
- Permanent: taped/transcribed/printed/handwritten/e-mail
- Transient speech: face-to-face / telephone / radio / TV
IV. Production circumstances: real time / planned / scripted / revised and edited
-
V. Setting
A. The time and place of communication shared by participants (the physical
context of the communication)
- In many spoken registers, the participants share the physical context
and so they can directly refer to it (e.g., with words like yesterday or
here).
-
B. Place of communication
-
institutional / unidentified
2. Social characteristics
B. Addressee
1. Single / plural /un-
enumerated
2. Self / other
C. On-lookers?
other
N/A
no direct interaction
B. Social roles
variable
C. Personal relationship
none
D. Shared knowledge
varies
B. Comprehension
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Setting
A. Time and place shared by
participants?
B. Place of communication
1. Private / public public
2. Specific setting
no specific setting
C. Time period
contemporary
Communicative purposes
A. General purposes
B. Specific purposes
C. Factuality
D. Expressing stance
Topic
A. General topic area
varies
C. Specific topic
varies
institutional / unidentified
2. Social characteristics
B. Addressee
1. Single / plural /unenumerated
2. Self / other
C. On-lookers?
no direct interaction
B. Social roles
C. Personal relationship
No personal relationship
D. Shared knowledge
Variable
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B. Comprehension
Setting
A. Time and place shared by
participants?
B. Place of communication
1. Private / public public
2. Specific setting
no specific setting
C. Time period
contemporary
Communicative purposes
A. General purposes
Informational
(sending
out
/conveying
factual
C. Factuality
factual
D. Expressing stance
Topic
A. General topic area
varies
C. Specific topic
varies
Task
1. Consider the following speech situations (all spoken and directly interactive).
Identify the most important differences in the communicative purposes, social
relationship between participants, and other aspects of the situational context:
-
talking with your advisor during office hours, planning your research
programme (for the dissertation thesis);
talking with your best friend about what you did last weekend.
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Reduced
forms
and
dispreferred
structures
(contractions,
Coordination
(independent
clause
coordination
or
phrasal
coordination);
10. Main clause types;
4
5
Biber, D. and Conrad, S. (2009): Register, Genre and Style, Cambridge University Press, p. 50.
Ibidem, pp.78-82.
36
11.
cognitive, concrete, group noun etc.; determiner / article use; nominal preand postmodifiers; gender reference; noun clauses);
12. Adverbials: phrases and clauses (major type; syntactic realization:
single adverb, prepositional phrase, finite clause, non-finite; syntactic
position: initial, medial, final);
13. Complement clauses (major type: -that-clause, to-clause, wh-clause,
ing-clause; syntactic role);
14. Word order choices (extraposition, particle placement, indirect object
placement, by-passive vs active; clefts and focus devices).
Table 5. Distribution of selected linguistic features in the academic prose
register (adapted from Biber and Conrad 2009:116-117)
1. Nominal features
Nouns
Very common
Nominalization
Extremely common
Attributives adjectives
Extremely common
Common
Personal pronouns
Rare
2. Verb characteristics
Present tense
Past tense
Rare
Modals
Uncommon
Can and may most common
Passives
Rare
and place
4. Linking adverbials
Very common
5. Other features
Sentence structure
Standard syntax
Questions
Rare
Type-token ration
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Nominal features
Verbal and
Syntactic
adverbial
features
characteristics
Formal, standard
Nouns
language
nominalizations
and
Complex
verb
Sentence
very
phrases
are
structure:
common
commonly used
standard
syntax
clichd,
Prepositional phrases as
Canonical
specialized,
technical terms
postmodifiers of noun
heads: extremely common
sentence
patterns
frequently
used),
aspect, voice
abbreviated forms
Nouns as premodifiers of
deontic
accompanied
(expressed
Noun
by
explanatory notes
necessity
statements:
by
extremely
shall)
is
common
widespread
in
Questions:
official documents
group
elements
38
rare