Neutral Register

4 Key excerpts on "Neutral Register"

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  eBook - ePub

  Standard English

  The Widening Debate

  • Tony Bex, Richard J. Watts(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  between them.

  This theoretical independence of the notion of Standard English from style does not mean that there are not problems in individual cases of distinguishing the two, as Hudson and Holmes (1995) have pointed out. For example, I tend to regard the use of this as an indefinite in narratives as in

  There was this man, and he'd got this gun, …etc.

  as a feature of colloquial style, but other linguists might regard it as a non-standard grammatical feature.

  Standard English is not a register

  We use the term register in the sense of a variety of language determined by topic, subject matter or activity, such as the register of mathematics, the register of medicine, or the register of pigeon fancying. In English, this is almost exclusively a matter of lexis, although some registers, notably the register of law, are known to have special syntactic characteristics. It is also clear that the education system is widely regarded as having as one of its tasks the transmission of particular registers to pupils—those academic, technical or scientific registers which they are not likely to have had contact with outside the education system—and of course it is a necessary part of the study of, say, physical geography to acquire the register—the technical terms—associated with physical geography.

  It is, however, an interesting question as to how far technical registers have a technical function—that of, for example, providing well-defined unambiguous terms for dealing with particular topics—and how far they have the more particularly sociolinguistic function of symbolising a speaker or writer's membership of a particular group, and of, as it were, keeping outsiders out. Linguists will defend the use of ‘lexical item’ rather than ‘word’ by saying that the former has a more rigorous definition than the latter, but it is also undoubtedly true that employing the term ‘lexical item’ does signal one's membership of the group of academic linguists. And it is not entirely clear to me, as a medical outsider, that using ‘clavicle’ rather than ‘collar-bone’ has any function at all other than symbolising one's status as a doctor rather than a patient.

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  An Introduction to Social Psychology

  Global Perspectives

  • James Alcock, Stan Sadava(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Even within a particular combination of regional and social dialects, a given individual’s speech varies from situation to situation in terms of speech register (Romaine, 2000). Speech registers are varieties of a language that are used in particular situations. They reflect one’s emotional state, and we can quickly judge whether a person is angry or happy or unfriendly just by listening to a tape recording of the voice. Choice of speech register also reflects the relationship between the individuals who are conversing, as well as factors such as the speaker’s perceived relative status, and the speaker’s judgement about the listener’s own typical speech register. Do you speak any differently to your mechanic than you would to your physician or professor? Our choice of register can tell people a great deal about how we view them. Speech registers also vary with the context: Think of a professor intoning a lecture with authority and eloquence. If you were to overhear that same person speaking in the same manner to a companion over dinner in a restaurant, he or she would likely strike you as pretentious and overbearing – all because the speech register is inappropriate in that setting. We adjust our speech to the situation, and as we go through our daily lives, we change registers frequently as we encounter a variety of situations. Because the use of certain speech registers reflects a speaker’s power relative to the listener, the choice of speech register can have debilitating effects. In some situations, this is because it reminds listeners of their relative lack of power and independence. For example, one speech register that we all are familiar with is what linguists refer to as baby talk or BT. This refers not to the way that babies speak but to the way that adults talk to two- to five-year-olds. It is recognizable by its high pitch and exaggerated intonations (Caporael, Lukaszewski & Culbertson, 1983), and it is a feature of all languages (Ferguson, 1977, 2011)

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  The Translator As Communicator

  • Basil Hatim, Ian Mason(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Pygmalion which we have consulted adopts a solution of the type of version 3 above: a combination of classical and vernacular to render the formal and informal parts of the text. But, as we shall demonstrate in the following critique, none of the three types of approach seems adequately to address the real issues. The problem is that a scale of categories (of formality in this case) which works for English is naively imposed on languages in which it may not necessarily be applicable. In the context of Arabic, to borrow the scale of formality from English and use it uncritically would inevitably entail the erroneous assumption that categories such as classical/vernacular always correlate with standard/non-standard English, on the one hand, and with formal/ informal speech, on the other. What is suspect in this kind of approach to language variation is not only the unconstrained positing of correlations, but also, and perhaps more significantly, the perpetuation of the notion that varieties such as RP and cockney or classical and vernacular Arabic are mere catalogues of static features, to be called up mechanistically with little or no regard for what is actually going on in communication.

  TOWARDS A MORE WORKABLE SOLUTION

  As will become clearer in the course of the following discussion, simple solutions to complex problems such as dialectal fluctuation in Shaw’s Pygmalion invariably run the risk of glossing over a basic text linguistic principle governing language variation in general. This is the requirement that, whatever options are selected to uphold the register membership of a text, they should always be adequately motivated. Register is a configuration of features which reflect the ways in which a given language user puts his or her language to use in a purposeful manner. This intentionality acquires its communicative thrust when intertextuality comes into play and utterances become signs (socio-textual/ rhetorical or socio-cultural/semantic)— cf. Chapter 2 , where these notions are explained.

  We are all familiar with the way advertisers, for example, take meticulous care in their choice of what kind of speaker or professional activity is appropriate to given settings for selling certain products. It would indeed be bizarre if a speaker of southern British English were used to sell the traditional qualities of Yorkshire bitter or if a strongly-marked regional accent were used to sell pharmaceutical products. Advertising copy-writers make sure that this does not happen. What is involved here is precisely an advertiser’s attempt at being, perhaps intuitively, in tune with the way texts develop in natural settings. A given register thus takes us beyond the geographical provenance of, say, the beer drinker or the consumer of pharmaceutical products to questions of identity (i.e. self-image). Register consequently carries all kinds of intended meanings and thus functions as the repository of signs, whose range of semantic as well as rhetorical values is intuitively recognized by all textually competent speakers of a language.

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  Exploring the Spanish Language

  An Introduction to its Structures and Varieties

  • Christopher Pountain(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7

    Register

   

  In Chapter 6 we looked at diatopic and diastratic variation in modern Spanish. In this chapter and the next we will consider what is sometimes called diaphasic variation. First of all we look at register, i.e. variation according to the situation in which language is used, or the purpose for which it is used. As with diatopic and diastratic variation, it turns out that such external circumstances can often be correlated with internal, structural features of language. Native speakers can make judgements about what is appropriate and inappropriate linguistically in a particular situation, an ability which is sometimes called communicative competence (Hymes 1974: 75), just as surely as they can recognise the acceptability or unacceptability of grammatical forms. Unlike diatopic and diastratic linguistic variation, however, register has primarily been studied as a property of written texts, and while the geographical and social variation observable in speech is largely subconscious on the part of the speaker, written register is often a more consciously cultivated phenomenon. Furthermore, the characterisation and classification of situation and purpose cannot by its very nature be as rigorous as identification of such variables as sex, age, or even social class, and it is rarely possible to say that a particular text uniquely exemplifies one particular register. Certain situations of use in fact demand and exploit register-switching (e.g. quoted conversational forms in a newspaper report, allusory language, parody).

  We must distinguish between categorisation of the situation or purpose of a text and the identification of its characteristic linguistic features. Register is often characterised (following Halliday 1978: 31–5) according to the parameters of field, tenor and mode. Field relates to the subject-matter of the discourse, tenor to the relation between the participants (e.g. speaker and hearer, writer and reader) and mode to the medium employed (e.g. speech or writing). In a political speech, the field might be the national economy, the tenor would be a single speaker trying to persuade a mass audience of a particular point of view, and the mode would be spoken, but usually on the basis of a written script. From the linguistic point of view it is common to use general terms such as high or low register, high register being generally correlatable with an abstract or intellectual field, a formal or conventional tenor, and non-spontaneous written mode. In the last thirty years or so it has become more common for dictionaries to give some indications of register when a word is restricted in use from this point of view: OSD

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