The Language of Everyday Life

An Introduction

Judy Delin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781446238103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is a lively, practical guide that provides a fascinating linguistic description of six familiar text and discourse types, showing how language works in everyday life to perform its particular purpose. Through original examples, students are introduced to a wide-ranging repertoire of analytical concepts and techniques, described in basic, clear terms, and drawn from a broad range of areas of linguistics and language study. The aim of the book is to enable students to discover for themselves what is interesting about different language situations, and to begin to interrogate the relationship between language, society, and ideology.

The Language of Everyday Life includes: topics for discussion; exercises, and; further readings; extensive glossary of technical terms; a practical guide to project work.

1	Introduction

The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the richness of the language that plays such a central role in everyday life. By examining a small number of selected text types, the book presents concepts and ways of going about looking at language that will, it is hoped, expose some of the intricacy of human linguistic behaviour and its role in shaping and reflecting society. If the resulting understanding thereby invokes a sense of wonder at what we do through and with language day by day, then so much the better.

The book is also intended to be empowering. This may be on a practical, ‘life skills’ level: it is useful to know, for example, how advertising messages influence us, or situations of unequal power affect us in a job interview. In addition, however, the book aims to provoke independent research on language in everyday life, where so much remains to be discovered. There is a fascinating diversity of social situations in which language plays a role. This leaves ample room for projects that, even if the researcher is new to this kind of work, can yield genuinely interesting and even novel findings about how humans interact and how we use language.

LANGUAGE AND EVERYDAY LIFE

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Myers takes the view that everyday talk is a distinct discourse type, and draws a distinction between this and ‘other’ text types such as advertising:

Everyday life is not institutional – not politics, or church services, or courts … talk in everyday life is man to man, or woman to woman, or woman to man or whatever … everyday talk is created out of a contrast with advertising talk. (1994: 108)

If we take his view, this book is mistitled. On Myers’ approach, the kinds of language we are looking at are not everyday, but are trying to either evoke the everyday (as in advertising, trying to use conversational devices in order to seem ‘ordinary’ and believable) or to avoid it (as in interviewing, where the ‘ordinary’ kinds of responses of interest and approbation towards what another is telling you have to be withheld). However, I have quite consciously adopted the title The Language of Everyday Life because the text types examined here are so common that they constitute an important part of our everyday experience, and the features of all of them overlap substantially with the features of everyday language. If everydayness is confined to face-to-face conversations between equals, it is surprising how much of our everyday life would have to be described as not everyday. However, it will be clear from much of the discussion in the book that face-to-face conversations between equals are a very useful touchstone for comparison of the text types that are examined. For example, the kinds of instructions a step aerobics instructor gives to her class are usefully contrasted with how people ask one another to do things when they are in an equal relationship. I have not devoted a chapter to face-to-face interaction between equals, although by the end of this book readers should find themselves well armed with terms and concepts with which to describe it. There are many good introductions to casual conversation: I recommend Eggins and Slade (1997) in particular.

CHOICE OF TEXTS

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The book is organized around types of texts that we all intuitively know to exist, and expect to have different properties. Sports commentary, for example, will predictably be different from the language used in an interview, and the language of advertising will be different from that of instructions. This much is obvious. Given this observation, however, it is not always easy to see what can be said to pin down what makes a text of a particular type identifiable as such a text, and what can be said about how it achieves its purpose. What this book does is provide a survey of the more significant characteristics of each text type, providing the reader with a set of terms and ideas, taken from an eclectic range of linguistic theories and approaches, that can be used as a toolkit to open up the text, and, it is hoped, many other texts after that.

This book does not attempt to describe exhaustively the differences, or even the characteristics, of the different text types, and does not pretend to present text examples that can be guaranteed to be representative of their types in any formal way. The suggestions presented are not based on large bodies of text, but on relatively short, closely analysed, selected examples. These are all from real texts, not constructed ones. The texts discussed in the book were chosen because they are interesting, and display many of the characteristics that might normally be found in texts of their type. There is, therefore, an attempt to present informally what might be thought of as normal texts. I have not deliberately gone for the weird. The important point is that the texts presented here could easily have been found by the reader, and the skills, ideas and approaches described herein could easily be adapted to those texts. To reinforce the point, the final chapter of the book is dedicated to describing how just such a project in text description could be designed and carried out by someone who had read the book, with a view to illuminating his or her own texts in a similar way.

Following Christie (1990: 238), the book seeks to introduce a skill: ‘the skill … in identifying those elements of the grammar which most usefully illuminate the particular text in hand’. We should be careful to interpret the term ‘grammar’ very inclusively: the whole system of choices that language presents. This is not a use of the term grammar as it is conventionally understood, referring to the way words are combined into the constituent parts of clauses, and clauses into sentences, but many other levels of description (here we use the term ‘syntax’ for referring to sentence structure). Levels of description used in the book include:

Production values	The way in which texts of certain types are constructed around expectations of what they will, and will not, contain.
Rhetorical structure	The constituent parts of texts, such as summaries, descriptions, narrative, warnings, step-by-step directions, etc.
Conversation structure	How a dialogue is constructed in ‘turns’ between speakers, and how these are formed, begun, and ended.
Syntax	The way certain syntactic constructions – different sentence types – are used.
Lexical choice	The way words are chosen, and used in relation to one another.
Semantics	The way meaning is conveyed by certain grammatical and lexical choices.
Pragmatics	The way meaning is retrieved through inference and through the use of shared knowledge and context.
Sound	The way audible elements such as intonation and stress contribute to meaning.

We also look at the ideological ‘work’ a text does as it is interpreted by its intended audience, and how this and all the levels listed above are orchestrated together to make a text work. This eclecticism of description illuminates not only the text, but the relationship it has with its producer, its consumer, and its situation.

TYPES OF TEXTS?

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What is it that makes us feel that there are different ‘types’ of text? I noted above that most of us have quite secure intuitions about what texts are of the ‘same kind’, and which are of different kinds. A useful and widely used system for describing different kinds of text is the notion of register. The idea of register is meant to capture ‘differences in the type of language selected as appropriate to different situational features’ (Halliday et al., 1964: 77, cited in Leckie-Tarry and Birch (1995: 6)). On this approach, language is seen as arising from its context of situation, and different situations will predictably give rise to different language features. As Leckie-Tarry and Birch (in Halliday et al., 1964: 7) argue, both linguistic and situational features need to be captured in a proper account of the register of a text. Typically, the description of register is divided into three categories (see, for example, Halliday and Hasan, 1976):

Field	Characteristics of the nature of the situation (institutional or non-institutional; its location; participants; purpose) and domain, subject matter, or content.
Tenor	Characteristics of the social relationships of the participants; formality or informality; social identity; age; sex; power relations.
Mode	Means of transmission: spoken or written; planned or unplanned; the possibility or impossibility of feedback; closeness of relationship to some activity; distance over time and space.

We can see the description of register in action through applying it to a piece of text used later in this book. In the following extract, two presenters are commentating a football match between England and Romania. The ‘main’ presenter is Brian, but every so often an ex-footballer, Kevin, makes his own comments. The extract begins at the end of a long contribution by Kevin about England’s performance in a previous match against Colombia, who tired in the last 20 minutes of the game:

Kevin	the Colombians did it in the last twenty minutes and we’re good enough to do it We’ve just just got to believe and we’ve got to push forward and we can cause them problems
Brian	Le Saux – from Campbell – but it was difficult to take and there were too many Romanians round him And it’s Popescu on the break Ilie

While the statement of field, tenor, and mode is not an exact science, the outline features of each category given above should give sufficient pointers for what to look for. Here is a suggested register description of the discourse. It is somewhat complicated by the fact that Kevin and Brian seem to be doing rather different things: Brian is doing play-by-play commentary to the television audience, while Kevin tends to address his more evaluative and conversational remarks to Brian.

Field	Institutional, football, evaluative, informative; TV station representative and ex-footballer to co-presenter, Kevin ‘overheard’ by home audience; Brian speaking directly to audience.
Tenor	Casual, unplanned, more knowledgeable than home audience but one presenter more powerful than the other.
Mode	Television, live broadcast, spoken to Brian/to camera, impossibility of feedback from audience but possible between presenters; Brian closely related to action of the game, Kevin less action-linked.

The next step is then to go on to look at what features of the language or its organization reflect, or make us perceive, these situational factors. For example, elements of the mode become clear in the turn taking behaviour of the two presenters and how they address one another (Kevin talks to Brian, Brian talks to the camera). Field is indicated by specific vocabulary such as players’ names, phrases like ‘difficult to take’ and ‘on the break’ and the distinctive syntactic constructions, including elements such as ‘from Campbell’ and ‘and it’s Popescu that we might not expect to find in everyday conversation. The evaluative nature of some contributions and an obvious bias towards the perspective of the English team come through in Kevin’s ‘we’re good enough to do it’ and ‘we can cause them problems’, and in Brian’s ‘too many Romanians’ (presumably not too many from the Romanians’ point of view) and the tendency to perspectivize the action from the England players’ point of view. Tenor is created partly through the ‘unplanned’ characteristics of the speech, leading to repetitions and utterances that look, on paper, ungrammatical or incomplete, and through certain informal vocabulary choices, such as ‘causing them problems’ as a metaphor for gaining an advantage in the game, and referring to winning as ‘doing it’ and progressing in the game as ‘pushing forward’. There are many more features to comment on, but these few should give an idea of how we can relate various aspects of linguistic choice and organization to the three register features.

A consideration of the register of a text can highlight some features of its relationship with situation, and therefore its language, which may otherwise be overlooked, often because they are obvious. Using a technique like this, moreover, can provide a means of stating more carefully the relationship between texts of very disparate types, and therefore finding ways of comparing language features that might otherwise be confusing and difficult to approach.

Somewhat overlapping the notion of register is the notion of genre. Some theorists have seen genre to be a subdivision of register, and others as a super-category. Because of its difficulty of definition, the term is not used in this book, although Swales’ definition of genre as a ‘socially recognized communicative event’ (1990: 13) may suggest, as Leckie-Tarry and Birch (1995: 10) point out, that a genre may be a complete communicative event, such as a church service or a coffee-break, while the notion of register can be used to describe segments or sections of such events. Register might change, therefore, as a text or discourse progresses, while genre would remain constant. For a very useful and readable discussion of the interrelationship between the two notions, see Leckie-Tarry and Birch (1995, Chapter 1).

Readers will also be aware throughout the book of the influence of researchers who see the use of language as an ideological activity. That is, language use and understanding require certain sets of assumptions to be in place in both speaker (or writer) and hearer (or reader). As Fairclough (1989: 2) argues very clearly, even when we feel these assumptions to be simply ‘common sense’, they actually reflect, enshrine, and even create differential relationships of power in society. To give a concrete example, when an advertiser suggests in an advert that such and such a shampoo gives a healthy shine to the hair, the advertisement is appealing to a ‘common sense’ assumption that shiny hair is desirable. If a reader or viewer does not have that assumption already, the advertisement may cause them to construct it for themselves and store it away for future use. Now, it may be difficult to imagine a situation in which shiny hair is not desirable, but this may be seen as testimony to how hard it is to examine one’s own common sense and see it as a potentially ideological construct. To make this easier, recall that it is not currently constructed as desirable to have shiny skin: indeed, cosmetics are sold that are intended to banish just this effect. These values are entirely cultural. What the advertisement does is construct a wish or common-sense need for shiny hair (or matt skin), and present the product as the answer to the need. This creates a consumption role for the onlooker, and a powerful role for the shampoo or cosmetic company as a provider and adviser. It is often the case that advertising communication will fit into a whole slew of similar communications (magazine features, TV programmes, films) in which similar values are adopted, and so individual advertisements will not stand out as abnormal in terms of the assumptions they require and communicate. In the following chapters, many uses of language will be examined that make a particular contribution to the conveying of assumptions, or that appear to require certain assumptions to be in place on the part of the hearer or reader in order to make sense of the message. Although language is not the only medium through which this work is done, language plays an important ideological role in many communicative contexts.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS

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Texts in the book...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Language of Written News Reporting
• 3 The Language of Sports Commentary
• 4 The Language of Instructions
• 5 The Language of Interviews
• 6 The Language of Magazine Features
• 7 The Language of Advertising
• 8 Researching the Language of Everyday Life
• 9 Glossary
• 10 Bibliography
• Index