Universidad Tecnológica De Pereira
Facultad De Bellas Artes y Humanidades
Licenciatura en Bilingüismo con énfasis en inglés
Sociolinguistica course
Reading report format
Name of student(s): Mariana Otálvaro O, Luisa Cañizales
Chapter: 10
Unknown words: add phonetic transcription + definition
Deferential------------Diferencial
Straightforward----------Directamente
Readily-----------Facilmente
Simpler---------Mas sencillo
Scarcely-----------Apenas
Overlap----------Solapado
Narrowly---------Estrechamente
Burden---------Carga
Ad hoc: ‘for this specific purpose’ - /ˌæd ˈhɑːk/
Sections and summary
Style in non-western societies
Part 2
-Japanese is one of a number of languages with a
special set of grammatical contrasts for expressing
politeness and respect for others.
-Before deciding which style of Japanese to use,
Japanese speakers assess their status in relation
to their addressees on the basis of such factors as
family background, gender and age.
-They then select from plain, polite and deferential
styles.
-The choice of appropriate style involves
consideration of a range of word forms and syntax.
-The appropriate form of the verb, for instance,
varies in different styles.
-The basic straightforward non-deferential
utterance represented by contrasts with the politer
style used where the polite verb ending -mashi is
added to the verb.
-Utterances can also be modified in a variety of
ways according to the attitude and relationship of
the speaker to the subject matter of the utterance.
-Relative status must be carefully assessed on
every occasion in order to select the correct
combination of grammatical forms, vocabulary
items and pronunciation- in other words, the
appropriate style for the context and the
addressee.
 -The standard variants mark reading style rather
than social group membership.
-In other communities, too, reading style contrasts
markedly with other styles.
-Faced with this array of levels and the social
consequences of a wrong choice- insult or
embarrassment, for instance one can readily
understand the popularity of Indonesian, the
national language.
-In a society where social division are not so clear
as they once were, Indonesia much simpler
stylistic alternatives.
-We have illustrated that linguistic features which
signal social group membership are often, but not
always, signals of contextual variation too.
-A high level of education and familiarity with using
language in more formal contexts frequently go
hand-in-hand and so it is scarcely surprising that
the features which characterize each tend to
overlap.
-However, particular pronunciations, syntactic
constructions or vocabulary items may simply
indicate a person’s social group without also
patterning for style.
Register -It could be described as an occupational style.
-Some linguists describe this kind of language
variation as “register” more narrowly to describe
the specific vocabulary associated with different
occupational groups.
-Styles are often analyzed along a scale of
formality, as in the examples from social dialect
research discussed above.

Sports announcer talk -When people describe a sporting event, the

language they use is quite clearly distinguishable
from language used in other contexts.
-The most obvious distinguishing feature is
generally the vocabulary.
-This involves features such as syntactic reduction
and the inversion of normal word order sentences.
-While describing the action they are observing,
sports announcers often omit the subject noun or
pronoun, and frequently omit the verb be.
-there is no loss of meaning as a result of this
syntactic reduction, since the omitted elements are
totally predictable in the context.
Syntatic inversion -Reversal or inversion of the normal word order is
another feature of sports announcer talk.
-This device allows the announcer to foreground or
 focus on the action and provides time to identify
the subject of the action- an important piece of
information for listeners.
Routines and formulas -An interesting feature of sports commentaries,
including race calling, is the use of routines to
reduce the memory burden on the speaker.
-The same feature has been identified in other
situations where the memory burden from
information which must be simultaneously
processed and communicated is potentially very
high.
-These registers are all characterized by the
extensive use of oral formulas.
-The formulas involve a small number of fixed
syntactic patterns and narrow range of lexical
items.
-Quite clearly this register, too, is characterized by
very restricted range of lexical and syntactic
variation.
-The specialized register of occupational groups
develop initially from the desire for quick, efficient
and precise communication between people who
share experience, knowledge and skills.