ET119 Language in Society

Classical Rhetoric (Aristotle) - What are the models of persuasion?

Ethos, Logos, Pathos

Ethos

Appeals to credibility

• reputation and experience

• trustworthiness

• Goodwill

Logos

Appeals to rationality

• inductive reasoning (finding generic principles from specifics)

• deductive reasoning (using generic principles and applying specifically)

• argument by analogy

Pathos

Appeals to the emotions

• audience persuaded or motivated by appeals to fear, anger etc

• manifesting through evocative imagery, tone and allegory

The Intentional Fallacy

Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946

• analyse linguistic features and effects/contexts but NOT speaker intentions

Fallacious Reasoning

use of flawed logic to undermine soundness but making it seem convincing (false convictions)

What can fallacious reasoning look like?

• begging the question (false conviction)

• Ad hominem (character attacks)

• either-or arguments (false dilemma)

• Pandering (ad populem)

• Hasty Generalisations (stereotypes)

• False authority

Levels of audience

Bell 1984

• speaker

• addressee

• auditor

• over-hearder

• eavesdropper

• referee design (outside circle)

Bell 1991 - News Values “The Language of News Media”

• Negative - more newsworthy events are neg

• Recency - recent or ongoing

• Proximity - regionally close

• Consonance - news made to ideas that audience already have

• Unambiguity - Events clear and questions should have resolutions

• Unexpectedness - ‘breaking’ news is attention-worthy

• Superlativeness - Worst or best of something likely to be covered

• Relevance - relevant to audience’s life

• Personalisation - reported more personal than abstract to grab attention

• Eliteness - story about powerful people (celebs etc) sell better

• Attribution - can facts/story can be attributed to someone important?

• Facticity - Figures, dates, locations, stats important for hard news

Audience Roles

• Addressee - known and ratified by speaker

• Auditor - present, known and ratified, not directly addressed

• Overhearer - speaker knows presence, not ratified

• Eavesdropper - peripheral pp, presence not known nor ratified

Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles)

• Convergence - modify linguistic practices to become more alike

• Divergence - modify linguistic practices to become more dissimilar

The Propaganda Model - language and media

Herman and Chomsky 1988

• structure of news ad framing discourses

• size, ownership, profit

• advertising

• sourcing

• flak and enforcers

• anticommunism

Structure of news

chronology differs

• inverted pyramid

• Most important details and quotes to least important info at bottom

• details, quotations in order of significance

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence

• Attention

• Need

• Satisfaction

• Visualisation

• Action

Attention

• what will target audience notice?

• what will they pay attention to and stay engaged with?

• Which linguistic theories could help?

Need

• state need

• illustrate need

• elaborate

• point way

• MASLOW HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

Satisfaction

How does proposed solution meet identified needs of target audience?

Visualisation

• help target audience to imagine themselves in a position where their need is met

• highlight impact of enacting recommendations via short/long term impacts

Action

prompt audience to act can take several forms:

• challenge to improve

• appealing to emotions

• illustrate exact actions required

• summarise purpose and benefits of acting

Themes of language and gender

• sex and gender

• do men and women speak differently

• how do linguists approach gender

Simone de Beauvoir

one is not born a woman, one becomes one

• biological sex - biological attribute

• Gender - social attribute

Early gender research

• Lakoff - Linguistic deficit model

• Coates/Tannen - Cultural difference model

• Cameron/Ehrlich - Social Dominance model

Deficit Model

Lakoff 1973

features of women’s speech:

• hedging

• tag questions

• polite forms

• hypercorrectness

Difference Model

Tannen 1990

• cultural differences

• variation - result of women/men being members of different cultures or subcultures

Examples

• apologies

• criticism

• turn-taking

• overlap

• Competition vs cooperation

• rapport vs report

Masculine vs feminine linguistic features

Holmes 2006

Feminine

• facilitative

• concilatory

• minor public contributions

Masculine

• competitive

• aggressive interruptions

• confrontational

• dominating public talking time

Diff vs Dom Models

Diff = distinct female/male subcultures

Dom = language patterns are manifestations of a patriarchal social order

Kira Hall 1995

• phonesex workers using conventional/stereotypical voice for economic gain

• male callers had idea of how black women speak but was false, black women had to put on persona so men would believe them

• gendered linguistics as constructed not definite

Bucholtz and Hall 1995 on gender

• “Gendered speaking styles exist independently of the speakers”

• gender and language about power

Berger and Luckmann 1991 - Identity as process

• recent approaches conceptualise identity as constant process

• progressive and ever-changing

• language and discourse is the principle means of a forged identity

Being vs Doing a woman + theorists

• Being = biological

• Doing being = fit social constructs and ‘act’ up

• Butler 1990 > men and women “do” gender (nurture) = performativity

• Cameron 2007 > no existence of difference in gendered lang

The Ethnography of Communication - Communicative Competence

Dell Hymes 1978

• humans need to know not only how to speak grammatically appropriately, but also situationally (grammar vs context)

Hymes’ ethnography of SPEAKING

S - setting (time, place etc)

P - participants (speaker, hearer etc)

E - ends (goal)

A - act sequence (order of acts to make up event)

K - key (tone)

I - instrumentalities (means of media of speech)

N - norms of interaction (appropriate speech)

G - genre (expectations and forms)

Concepts of verbal hygeine

• deficiency in linguistic discourse

• lexicon change in modern day lead to derogation of SE

• politically correctness and SE as an example

• Lakoff - big difference between spontaneous change and forceful/manipulated change for lang

• standardisation used to keep communication efficient, VH enforced

Race/Ethnicity - Degrees of Present

Fairclough 1995

• different aspects of event can be foregrounded, backgrounded or presupposed

• race - physical or biological trait, socially constructed

• ethnicity - shared cultural features, language, religion etc

English with an accent - Lippi Green

• Eurocentrism in children’s TV

• Standard American English portrayed as hero/protagonist

• non-standard forms seen as villainous, mark of ‘otherness’

• Entrenches accent bias

Themes of LIS

• Gender

• Race/Ethnicity

• Age

• Power

Themes - Age

Eckert 1992 - Adolescent Language

• unique linguistic features used by children

• How language reflects and constructs social identities

• found many statements ending in rising intonation

— serve as discourse identity markers

Themes - Race/Ethnicity

Labov 1972 - Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence

• verbal deprivation - lower socioeconomic backgrounds lack verbal stimuation

• cultural deficit theory - children from certain cultural backgrounds lack the necessary skills to succeed in educational settings/environments

Themes - Accent (race+ethnicity)

Lippi-Green 2012 - Teaching Children How to Discriminate

• portrayal of accents in Disney movies

— Three Little Pigs = Yiddish portrayal

• protagonists to have standard American English, antagonists to have NSF

Themes - Power/identity (gender)

Hall 1995 - Gender articulated: lang and the socially constructed self

• using lang and stereotypes to allow women to transform into ‘ideal fantasy’

• have control of who they portray

• based on expectations of women

— empty adj, hedging, intensifiers, submissive/‘small’ speech

Butler 1990 - Gender Trouble (Performativity)

• gender is not innate and is a social construct

• identity formed through various external behaviours and our environment

Angouri et al 2021 - More than builders in pink shirts

• women negotiate and express gender in different contexts (esp workplaces)

• community of practice

What is a linguistic penalty? - Celia Roberts & Campbell 2006

a disadvantage or discrimination faced by individuals

• usually minorities whose style doesn’t match conventional standard

• results in job and social service exclusions

What is a critical commentary?

• analysis of passage

• include key themes, functions and characteristics

• use line numbers instead of quotes (for poetry)

INTRO

• summarise arguments or content

• important thematic/structural aspects

OVERVIEW

• mode of passage

• structure

• narrative pov

• register and tone

ANALYSIS

• sentence structure

• tense usage

• word order

• figurative lang

• Narrative technique (1/2/3rd person)

• Punctuation/Vocab

CONC

• summarise findings and aspects found

• assess achievements and significance = in itself and in relation to work from which its taken from

What is Verbal Hygiene?

Cameron 1995/2012

• people criticise NSF

• argue against lang change

• deeply rooted prescriptive views

• attempt to ‘clean up’ lang

• Lang regulation is about POWER

Examples of verbal hygiene in day-to-day life?

• Editing

• grammar in schools (dropping marks)

• political correctness

• broadcasting news

verbal hygiene - Pinker 1994

Euphemism treadmill

• euphemisms absorb stigma of words that they replace and so require new ones

• cycle of linguistic renewal

— EG —

• idiot > r*tard > disabled > special needs > on the spectrum > neurodivergent

verbal hygiene - Foucault 1991

• Whoever shapes discourse controls how its thought about too

• people feel compelled to relegate lang

— EG —

• homosexuality was a disorder in APA until 1973 > community reclaimed words = fighting over definition of their category

» links to Cameron - lang regulation about power

What is Glottophobia?

Blanchet (M) 2016

• Form of prescriptivism

• systematic discrimination based on speech, accent or vocab

• treats non-standard forms as ‘dirty’ or inferior

Linguistic Imperialism - Phillipson (1992)

• global dominance og English is not natural phenomenon but deliberate and systematic projection

• cultural and economic hegemony

• maintained by structural inequalities between English and others

Linguistic Imperialism - Pennycook 1994

• spread of English as continuation of colonial/neo-colonial power

• English teaching evolved as tool for colonialism and indoctrination, entrenching hegemony

Diglossia - Ferguson 1959

• bilingualism where one lang has higher prestige (H) and other languages have low prestige (L)

Diglossia II - Fishman 1967

• arguing that diglossia not limited to just prestige

• one holds more formal use, other is informal use

• essentially formal vs informal