2. Gaya bahasa (Style), Konteks dan Register Pertemuan 10
Matakuliah : G0362/Sociolingustics
Tahun : 2007
Gaya bahasa (Style), Konteks dan Register Pertemuan 10

3. Learning Outcomes Pada akhir pertemuan ini, diharapkan mahasiswa
akan mampu :
Mahasiswa dapat memberikan contoh tentang akomodasi dalam penggunaan bahasa mereka sehari-hari
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4. Outline Materi Audiens sebagai faktor yg mempengaruhi gaya bahasa
Akomodasi: Konvergensi dan Divergensi
Konteks dan kelas sosial
Register
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5. What is Style?
These three sentences show differences in style of speech
From a friend:
“Where were you last night? I rang to see if you wanted to come to the pictures?”
In a court:
“Could you tell the court where were you on the night of Friday the seventeenth of March?”
From a teacher to students:
“I know some of you went ‘trick-or-treating’ last night. Did you go out last night Jimmy?”
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6. Definition of Style According to Holmes:
Style is language variation which reflects changes in situational factors such as addressee, settings, task or topic.
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7. Factors that influence style
Addressee
Age
Social background
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8. Addressee Who you talk to influences your choice of language:
A friend  casual style, informal;
An older person  more formal, polite
Younger  informal, casual
A stranger  polite, more standard form
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9. Age of Addressee
People usually talk differently to children than to adults
Adults ‘baby-talk’ to children
Native-speakers simplify their language to non-native speakers
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10. Social Background
People adjust their style of speech according to the background of the interlocutor.
How two doctors talk to each other about a patient’s condition?
How would they explain the same thing to the patient or the patient’s family?
How would you talk to the President?
How would you talk to your maid?
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11. Accommodation Theory
Speech accommodation happens when a speaker changes their style of speech to make others understand, such as using less technical terms.
Speech convergence is when the speaker’s style of speech becomes more similar to the style of the interlocutors (e.g. baby talk).
Speech divergence is when the speaker purposely talk differently from the interlocutors to assert his/her identity difference or to simply avoid talking to them.
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12. Context, Style and Class
Formal Context and Social Roles
Speech changes according to context (i.e. settings), style and class:
In a formal business meeting, a son has to address his father by his title and name.
A radio/TV announcer changes his/her style of speaking to accommodate the listeners/ viewers.
In some cultures, such as Javanese, your social class (caste) and the class of your interlocutor determine your speech style.
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13. Different Styles within an interview
When strangers meet, they would use most careful style of speech.
In Labov’s social dialect survey in NYC, Labov elicited a wider range of styles in his interviews.
He asked his informants to read aloud a passage and a list of minimal pairs (for careful speech style), then asked them to answer questions (formal style), and later asked them to tell a story (more relaxed or vernacular style).
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14. The interaction of social class and style
In Norwich (data reported by Trudgill, 1974) the more formal the style someone was using, the more ‘-ing’ they used (rather than ‘-in’)
The data also revealed that the higher the social class the more standard form they used (i.e. more ’-ing’)
Some people shift style (either to be more formal or more vernacular) in order to be more accepted by their interlocutors.
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15. Hypercorrection
Is when someone uses a form that is beyond the standard. And hence they use a wrong form instead.
example:
‘between you and I’
‘he asked for you and I’
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16. Non-western societies
Japanese has a special set of grammatical contrasts for expressing politeness and respects for others.
They assess their status on the basis of family background, gender, age, and the formality of context.
Similarly, Javanese has different levels of its language to mark the different relations between the speakers and the listeners.
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17. Register
Register is the typical style associated to a certain group of speakers.
For example,
doctors talk about ‘symptoms’, ‘post-natal syndrome’, etc.
Legal documents have certain ways of paragraphing, sectioning, phrasing, etc.
Sport announcers
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18. Sport Announcer Talk Syntactic reduction
‘[It] bounced to second base..’
‘Federer [is] looking rather … surprised..’
Syntactic Inversion
‘In comes Jackson’
‘slowly returning the ball…is Matt’
Heavy Noun modification
‘Yao, this gigantic young man from China, who…
Routines and formulas
Horse-racing commentators have different routines for the start, or locating horse names.
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19. Conclusions
People speech reflects not only their identity such as their ethnicity, age, gender, and social background, but also reflects the context in which they are using the language.
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