Frozen Register
A frozen register refers to a style of language that remains fixed and unchanging over time. It is characterized by its resistance to modification or evolution, often preserving archaic or traditional forms of expression. This type of register is typically associated with formal or ceremonial contexts, such as religious rituals or legal proceedings.
4 Key excerpts on "Frozen Register"
eBook - ePub- Genie Gertz, Patrick Boudreault(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Production with a larger usage of signing space is utilized in the place of pronunciation and loudness of voice in spoken languages. Also, productive manual signs are based on a slower tempo, reflecting clarity, and facial expressions and body movement create visuality instead of tone of voice. Sign language vocabulary choices also alter or vary with regard to the scale of (in)formal SL use. When communicating on the intimate level, interesting changes are observed within the restricted or abstract usage of productive-lexical signs, as well as with an increase in nonmanual features like eye gaze, eye shifting, usage of the neck instead of the shoulder, and an increased mouth and tongue movement instead of manual signs. In order to organize these seemingly abundant phenomena of SL registers into teaching curricula, an approach, present in many SL curricula, applies Joos’s model and terminology. His five dimensions represent variations of grammatically equivalent forms as pragmatically specific styles. From most formal to least formal/most informal, these are termed frozen, formal, consultative, casual, and intimate styles or registers. Frozen Register is outlined as language usage in situations of prestige and power, for example, in the context of justice, political and institutional agreements, religious rites, and ceremonies with ritualized procedures. The formal register involves one-way, concatenative patterns of signing with characteristics of monologues (debate, lecture, television formats). Both registers seem associated mainly with professional purposes. The consultative register employs two-way, sequential patterns in which signers participate alternately with back-channel behavior, interruptions, and turn taking in place. It involves asymmetrical interaction in fixed roles and constellations of signing, such as classroom discourse, workshops, and institutional interactive settings, such as medical encounters and professional meetings...
eBook - ePub- John Flowerdew(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Halliday and Hasan (1985/1989: 38–39), accordingly, define register as ‘a configuration of meanings that are typically associated with a particular situational configuration of field, mode, and tenor’. To put it more simply, register is a set of linguistic choices associated with a particular situation. These situations are usually related to professional activity (the language of teachers, doctors, students, and so forth) or interests (bridge-playing, bird-watching, music-making, and so forth). Examples of registers would be church services, school lessons or sports commentaries (Halliday et al., 1964). As Halliday et al. (1964: 87) point out, a single sentence from any of these registers might enable us to identify it correctly. We can guess that ‘let us pray’ probably comes from a church service, that ‘open your books at page 1’ probably comes from a school lesson and that ‘three players are on yellow cards’ probably comes from a soccer commentary. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the boundaries between registers are difficult, if not impossible, to specify. Thus, register is an idealised concept which allows us to make predictions about what lexicogrammatical features are likely to occur in any given situation. One thing that can be said from the point of view of learners, whether they be first- or second-language (L1 or L2) learners, is that the mixing of items from different registers is a frequent problem. The PhD applicant who wrote to me for the first time using the term of address Hi Sir is just one example. Taking the contextual parameters one by one, under the heading of field — what is going on in the text and the area of language activity (Halliday et al., 1964: 90) — registers may be identified according to the event of which the language activity forms a part. In some situations, language accounts for the great part of the activity, for example, an essay or academic discussion...
eBook - ePub- Basil Hatim, Ian Mason(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Sit where you are. Don’t interrupt.’ Hesitancy or confidence are aspects of behaviour which find expression in actual patterns of language use. These tend to be both recurrent and functional and must therefore be heeded as such by readers or translators. The need to be aware of variation and of the underlying motivations becomes even more urgent in domains such as literary analysis or literary translation, where some of the most elliptic or opaque forms of utterance (and hence the easiest to overlook) come to occupy a crucial position in the literary work, serving as important clues in the portrayal of a certain scene or persona. THE STATIC AND THE DYNAMIC IN REGISTER SPECIFICATION Registers, then, have a pragmatic and a semiotic meaning potential. We can see this potential in terms of the marked vs. unmarked use of language referred to in Chapters 1 and 2. As we have shown in the analysis of a number of texts so far, a register feature, like any other instance of language use, may be seen as unmarked when expectations are upheld and when the text world is unproblematic and retrieved without difficulty (i.e. maximally stable): lawyers speak like lawyers, scientists like scientists, and so on. Markedness, on the other hand, arises when expectations are defied, and when lawyers’ language, for example, is borrowed and used to best effect by, say, an anguished housewife, resentful of the deplorably indifferent attitude of the police (see Sample 3.11 in Chapter 3) or indeed by a politician, relaying a particularly detached, cold-blooded attitude towards some humanitarian issue (see Sample 11.3 in Chapter 11). In these highly dynamic uses of language, communicative stability has been gradually removed, intentions are blurred and intertextuality is less than straightforward. Let us return to Pygmalion. In dealing with this play, translators would be confronted with similar dynamic uses of language...
eBook - ePubVarieties of Modern English
An Introduction
- Diane Davies(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Hymes’s model was intended for the study of rather ritualised speech situations in which speakers could be expected to follow the rules of interaction laid down by their speech communities. In a wedding ceremony, for example, individual participants follow set ways of speaking, as established in their culture and community, so we can analyse such situations fairly easily with Hymes’s model (they have a very clear ‘act sequence’ and equally describable ‘ends’ and ‘norms’, for instance). Ordinary conversation, by contrast, is far less rigid than this and allows speakers more freedom to influence the interaction in certain ways, depending on their individual feelings and intentions. Speakers interact in ways that cannot simply be put down to ‘norms’, and their actual words and intended meanings may not match up in the way that happens (or is supposed to happen anyway) in official or ceremonial contexts. The study of what speakers may mean and how they are understood (i.e. the study of pragmatics) goes beyond our present concern with situational context. However, the way we describe situational context clearly needs to take account of the fact that speakers do not simply ‘respond’ passively to the situations in which they find themselves, but can actively ‘shape’ those situations through their use of language. 8.3 Register Register is a useful concept in the study of language in context. Spolsky (1998:34) writes: A register is a variety of language most likely to be used in a specific situation and with particular roles and statuses involved. Examples might be a toast at a wedding, sports broadcast, or talking to a baby. A register is marked by choices of vocabulary and of other aspects of style. The term ‘register’ is connected to language variation according to use, rather than to variation according to the user, for which we have the term ‘dialect’...
