Sunday 9 January 2011

Mode

Looking at mode there are three forms, written, blended, and spoken.  There are many aspects of mode that need to be recalled for exams, so I am just blogging my notes ready for tomorrow.

SPOKEN MODE
Accommodation: the process, according to H. Giles of adaptation of language when speaking to another person.  This process can move speech either closer to the other participant(s) or further away from.

Face: when speaking we give off a persona, 'acting out' a role within the conversation.  A theory developed by Goffman and extended by Brown and Levinson states that there are two faces used in conversation:

Positive face: where the person has a need to be liked and accepted.
Negative face: where the speaker needs to be independent and not imposed upon.

The positive and negative faces can lead to a face-threatening act (FTA) which can either challenge someone's face directly, such as 'you don't know what you are talking about', or threatens their positive/negative face needs, or both.  This lead to the idea of positive and negative politeness, whereby in strategies are employed to off-set FTA and other variables such as social gaps.

Face work: allows people to work in co-operation to support the 'face needs' of the other participants in the conversation.  A positive face need  is the need to be liked and accepted as part of the social group.  A negative face need is the requirement to feel independent and be free to be an individual.

Positive politeness: is the strategy used to emphasise a social closeness.
Negative politeness: is the strategy used to recognise the independence or social status of the person to whom you are speaking.

Pragmatics plays a part here, as it is often the real meaning of a text or message, the concept behind 'reading between the lines.

Although Received Pronunciation is not as common as it once was, it is still possible to hear individuals using Standard English, and this particular dialect continues to carry with it a certain amount of prestige.  This is where divergence and convergence, both upwards and downwards comes into spoken mode.

Divergence: the process where an individuals speech pattern becomes particularly individualised, marking them as being further away from the other person(s) in the conversation.

Convergence:  a process of adapting speech patterns, so that they are more in line with the other participant(s) in the conversation.

Both of these can go upwards or downwards.  Upwards when applied here means to bring the speech pattern up towards Standard English.  Downwards means that the speech moves away from S.E.

There are many lexical features within speech too:

Idioms and collocations are more frequent in spoken language, an idiom, or cliche such as 'at the end of the day' and collocation (pairs or triplets) e.g. hook. line and sinker are popular expressions from the media and are used in everyday speech.

In spoken language fillers are often involuntarily , it is generally a part of an individual's idiolect that causes them to use 'like' or 'OK' to fill a pause or a hesitant moment. Discourse markers are used to indicate a change of topic, or even the return to a previous topic 'well', 'so', 'anyway, getting back to' are all examples of a discourse marker.  Hedges are also commonly used in spoken language and they are often used to soften something, this has lead to the idea that women use hedges more frequently than men, it is a part of Tannen's 'diversity' theory, phrase such as 'sort of', words such as 'maybe' and politeness strategy such as 'could you possibly' are all hedges.  The use of hedges is seen as important in speech as they prevent things from seemingly being too blunt.

WRITTEN MODE
Verbs have different variants, there are stative, dynamic and modal auxiliaries.  It is also important that the tense and aspect of a verb is recognised.  The tense allows us to see the verb's action in relation to time e.g. present, past.  An aspect relates to the verb's duration, as the verb can be in a perfective aspect suggesting that the action is complete or has been completed in the past tense, or is current or continuing in a progressive tense.  A dynamic  verb is used when describing a physical action or movement e.g. run, jump, fly.  A stative  verb is used to describe a state of being e.g. be, know, understand.  Modal auxiliary verbs, support or aide others and have the purpose to give permission, possibility, probability, necessity, ability, desire and obligation.  Modal auxiliary verbs are  words such as; can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would.

Ellipsis: the missing out of word(s) in a sentence.  This is relevant when analysing text or spoken language, is there a reason why this word(s) has been omitted?  Very common in newspaper headlines and articles.  As are tag questions, when a phrase is 'tagged' onto a statement that can turn it into a question e.g. it is a lovely day, isn't it?

Comparatives: adjectives combined with -er or used with 'more' to created a comparison e.g. she is bigger
Superlatives:  adjective combined with -est or most (definite article 'the' is usually added too) e.g. she is the biggest

Nominalisation: the process where an action or event that is normally expressed with a verb is turned into a noun, and is often used as the head of a noun phrase.  e.g. Mayor's outburst provokes outrage.  This process is often used by journalists as a form of compressed syntax.

The passive voice  The active voice retains the subject of the clause as the agent e.g. X slammed the door.

BLENDED MODE
This is texts such as SMS, e-mails and instant messages.  These have different communication forms, whilst instant messages are synchronous communication, as the participants are present, e-mails and sms are an asynchronous form as the participants do not all need to be present.

Right then, I have had enough now, if I don't know it there is little I can do now, just have to wait now, fingers are crossed with 18 hours to go, eeeeekkkk!

1 comment:

  1. Wonderful illustrated information. I thank you about that. No doubt it will be very useful for my future projects. Would like to see some other posts on the same subject! bakırköy ingilizce kursları

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