CASE STUDIES

• example of mcdonalds occupational language

  crew captain
• 4 examples of workplace jargon

  Premium Rate Facing off Clocking in Packing down
• Why are legal terms so specialist?

  need for precision

  long history of law (from latin speaking times)

  prestige of law

  exclude non-lawyers
• 2 military terms

  Jarhead - Marine

  Deep Six - Destroy or dispose of something
• What does the military form?

  Closed Network - servicemen and women only associate with each other for long periods of time
• what does a closed network lead to?

  specialist vocabulary and shared knowledge
• 3 medical abbreviations/jargon

  CTD- Circling the drain

  UBI- unexplained beer injury

  CNS-QNS- central nervous system-quantity not sufficient
• 2 service industry initialisms

  VNP- very nice person

  QF- quite fussy
• 3 examples of school initialisms/acronyms

  GCSE- general certificate of secondary education

  NEET- not in education employment or training

  SEN- special education needs
• What is a service encounter?

  Hasan and Ventola transactional interaction in which one person provides goods or services
• How do you remember service encounters?

  OR - offers or requests of service

  T -Transactions of service

  S - Salutations
• What the discourse structure of teachers reports?

  tends to be personality then how they work then how to improve
• 2 examples of repeated discourse structure in occupational language

  prescriptions

  wills
• discourse community

  John Swales groups who have goals or purposes and use communication to achieve these goals
• what does membership of a discourse community help determine?

  topic

  lexical choice

  status

  politeness features
• What is front stage conversation ?

  Goffman

  perform professional identity

  may be when with customers or with colleagues when doing work
• What is a backstage conversation?

  Goffman

  different, more casual identity

  during social moments or when discussing personal matters
• What are inferential frameworks?

  Assumptions that the participants share about each other in the context of a conversation
• Inferential frameworks of workplace conversation examples

  Background information

  roles and status of people involved

  importance of completing the task

  discussable topics
• What is an asymmetrical conversation?

  Goffman

  superiors demonstrate dominant behaviour, inferiors demonstrating deferential behaviour
• What are the three main features of workplace conversation?

  types of speech - largely transactional

  Topic - formal conversations undergo less topic drift, high status speakers control choice of topics, high status speakers use topic looks to ensure conversations are productive

  Turn Taking - rules are more carefully followed than in casual conversation
• What is Face Theory?

  Brown and Levinson

  When we interact with others we are careful to not offend or upset the people we are talking to. We also protect ourselves from being offended or upset
• What is positive face?

  desire to be approved of and for others to see us in a certain way
• what is negative face?

  the desire to feel unimpeded, we believe there are things we are allowed to to and things we can’t be made to do. Want others to have the same opinion
• What is a face threatening act (FTA)?

  any utterance that offends you or upsets you
• what is a positive face threatening act?

  suggesting someone doesnt view you in the same way you view yourself
• what is a negative face threatening act?

  someone suggesting they don’t have the same ideas about what they can and can’t make you do
• positive face in the workplace

  feedback and appraisal is part of many occupations, act in a more controlled way than in other situations
• negative face in workplace conversations

  workers may not enjoy a particular task, they wont find it a face threat to be asked to do it by someone in an appropriate role
• Cooperation Theory 4 Maxims

  Paul Grice - All conversations must follow this to be successful

  Quality - be truthful

  Quantity - right amount of information

  Relation - be relative

  Manner - be clear
• Lakoff’s Deference model

  10 features that show deference in speech. In asymmetrical workplace conversation we can expect to see:

  hedges

  tag questions

  superpolitness

  speaking in italics

  hyper correctness
• Dominance model

  Zimmerman and West

  features that a high status speaker may use in order to establish themselves as high status:

  interrupt and overlap low status speakers

  symmetrical speech- more overlaps than interruptions

  asymmetrical speech- more interruptions than overlaps
• Eakens and Eakens

  study of faculty meetings, status and gender determined whether someone would be interrupted, most interrupted was a woman