Matakuliah
Tahun
: G0362/Sociolingustics
: 2007
Gaya bahasa (Style), Konteks dan
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Pertemuan 10
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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Outline Materi
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•
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Audiens sebagai faktor yg mempengaruhi gaya bahasa
Akomodasi: Konvergensi dan Divergensi
Konteks dan kelas sosial
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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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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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Factors that influence style
• Addressee
• Age
• Social background
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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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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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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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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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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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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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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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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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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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