EnglLang U3AOS2 Metalanguage

Formality

What is the role of standard english in creating formal and informal texts?

Standard English plays a key role in formal texts by supporting clarity, cohesion, and prestige. It is used to signal authority, reduce ambiguity, and suit high-stakes contexts such as legal, political, and professional communication.

What strategies ar eused for Semantic Patterning

• Figurative language

• irony

• metaphor

• oxymoron

• similie

• personification

• animation

• puns

• lexical ambiguity

• hyperbole

Lexical meaning

• Idiom

• Denotation/connotation

Phonological patterning (“CORRAA”)

• alliteration

• assonance

• consonance

• onomatopoeia

• rhythm

• rhyme

Morphological Patterning

• conversation of word class

• creative word formation

Cohesion Factors ("CHASERS D-FACT CC")

• Synonymy

• Antonymy

• Hyponymy

• Collocation

• Clefting

• Fornt Focus

• End Focus

• Anaphoric Referencing

• Cataphoric Referencing

• Dietics

• Repetition

• Substitution

• Conjunctions

• Adverbials

Dysphemism

A word or phrase that magnifies an unpleasant meaning, for humour, to cause offence, or to abuse. E.g. urinating → “taking a piss”.

Coherence Factors (FLICC)

• Inference

• Logical Ordering

• Formatting

• Consistency and conventions

Political correctness

A style of language that is designed to reduce or avoid potential offence or exclusion. Its purpose is to prevent bullying and offensive behaviour by using impartial language instead of words or expressions loaded with offensive undertones.

Jargon

A language variety that is particular to any trade, occupation, hobby, or group. It is highly specific to its context, meaning that those outside the field may not understand me. It helps communicate complex ideas more precisely and faster.

Double-speak

The use of euphemistic, ambiguous, and indirect language deliberately misleads, confuses, or obscures meaning. For example, “In need of modernisation” actually means “This house is old. It needs to be completely renovated or demolished.”

Taboo Language

Language that is deliberately offensive, controversial, or insensitive and shouldn’t be used in public contexts. This may include profanities, obscenities, expletives, slurs, and epithets.

Public Language

Used in the public domain, such as in the field of politics, media, law, and bureaucracy. Its register tends to be more formal and show greater levels of planning in spoken texts. NOTE: It’s NOT “the language one SHOULD use in the public”

Rhetoric

The type of language used when the intent is to be strongly persuasive, whether it be to persuade to share a POV, or to convince a reader that the fictional world presented to them is real. When analysing rhetoric features, its important to consider the message being delivered to the audience, aswell as the underlying inferences that are required.

• Subsystem Patterns

• Rhetorical appeals to emotion

• Repetition

• Euphemism

• Connotative language

Syntactic Patterning

• Antithesis (opposite ideas expressed in a parallel structure, add depth and complexity to writing)

• Listing

• Parallelism (contributes to a more polished and elegant style, which often aligns with more formal communication) 

Euphemism

A word or phrase that masks an unpleasent meaning, often by using mild, vague, or indeirect alternative. Allow speakers to avoid causing embarrassment or giving offence when referring to taboo topics.

Nominalisation

It occurs when a noun is created from a word from any other word class, particularly verbs. This shift in grammatical structure makes writing appear more academic, complex, and authoritative by focusing on the "what" rather than the "how.” Nominalisation can convey a sense of detachment and objectivity, which are characteristics often associated with formal writing.

E.g. ‘To participate"‘ → ‘Participation’ this makes the action an abstract concept and the topic of the sentence.

Lexical patterning

The repetition of lexemes throughout a text, with simple lexical patterning being the repetition of the same word, whilst complex lexical patterning is the repetition of the same word with different derivational/inflectional morphemes attached.

Honorifics

These can be titles prefixing a person's name, e.g.: Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms, Mx, Sir, Dame, Dr, Cllr, Lady, or Lord, or other titles or positions that can appear as a form of address without the person's name, as in Mr President, General, Captain, Father, Doctor, or Earl.

Stance- taking

When a speaker describes an object in a way that expresses their attitude or relation to the object.