Style and Register

Chapter 3 treated each speaker as belonging to a group. But the same speaker talks differently to a friend, a judge and a child. This chapter is about that second kind of variation: not between people but within one person, depending on the situation and on who is listening.

Register

A register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or communicative situation. Registers form a spectrum with no clear boundaries, and scholars disagree on terms like register, field and tenor. The term was introduced by T. B. W. Reid in 1956 and popularised in the 1960s. Diatype is a similar term for variation by social purpose, and the line between dialect and diatype is not always clear.

Field, mode and tenor

These three determine a text's linguistic features. For Halliday and Hasan, register is one of two defining concepts of a text, alongside cohesion. A text is coherent when it fits its context and stays consistent in register.

Register or style?

Language teaching often uses register as shorthand for formal versus informal style, though the source calls this definition aging. Linguists increasingly use style for formality levels and reserve register for specialist language tied to an activity, such as academic jargon. Situational registers listed include legalese, motherese, the language of a biology lab, a news report and the bedroom.

Five Styles of Spoken English

Martin Joos described five styles in spoken English:

Formal English may use walking rather than walkin', father rather than dad, child rather than kid, and avoids words like hella, ain't and y'all. The walking / walkin' pair is the ING variable you met in Chapter 1.

Style-Shifting

Style-shifting is when a single speaker changes style in response to context. It is voluntary, and it contrasts with variation between speakers. Wikipedia describes three explanations.

1. Attention to speech (Labov, 1972)

Labov proposed that styles lie on one dimension, "measured by the amount of attention paid to speech". Casual speech receives the least self-monitoring. Criticisms: attention is hard to quantify, and the model implies one style per formality level (Hindle, 1979). The source's evidence is Labov's 1966 New York department-store study: lower-class speakers rarely pronounced postvocalic /r/ in casual speech, while middle-class speakers shifted toward the higher-status form when paying attention. (This fills the gap left in Chapter 3, which had no source for Labov's New York City work.)

2. Audience design (Bell, 1984)

Speakers adjust to their audience and also to nonpresent reference groups they converge with or diverge from. Speakers continually negotiate their relationships with people, present or not, who come up in discourse.

3. Style as identity

The page does not use the term "speaker design". Its closest equivalent is LePage and Tabouret-Keller's (1985) view that speakers use style to associate with or distance themselves from groups, and that all styles are equally fundamental rather than one underlying "casual" style. Later scholars (Bell, Johnstone, Schilling-Estes) studied initiative style-shifting, where speakers deliberately choose forms to present themselves in a certain way.

• Eckert, Belten High (Detroit suburbs): urban-oriented "burnouts" used newer urban-led vowel changes most. A subgroup of "burned-out" burnout girls led in negative concord, which is unusual because it is usually male-led.
• Eckert, Palo Alto High School: students used clothing styles to signal identity. "Preppy but unique" girls combined elements of two styles.
• Podesva et al. (2002): a gay lawyer avoided sounding "too gay" and used high release of word-final stops to index professionalism.
• Niederhoffer and Pennebaker (2002): speakers show linguistic style matching, which is sensitive to power differences.

Accommodation

Communication accommodation theory, associated with Howard Giles, studies when, how and why people adjust their communication to others. (The style-shifting page calls it Communication Accommodation Theory and does not attribute it to Giles; the dedicated page does.)

• Motives named: social approval; similarity-attraction (people who are more similar tend to attract each other); social exchange (weighing rewards and costs); causal attribution (listeners judge convergence by the intent they attribute to the speaker); intergroup distinctiveness (speech can "signal a salient group distinctiveness, so as to reinforce a social identity").
• Examples: a native French speaker using complex terms with a novice (divergence); Welsh speakers who strengthened their accents and used Welsh when their identity was threatened; Tunisian Arabic speakers in London who converged to Sharqi Arabic co-workers; and young people using "Elderspeak", an over-accommodating style toward older adults. In a 2001 study of doctors and patients, converging led to miscommunication.
• Shortcomings noted: convergence can occur in arguments, where approval is not the goal, and non-convergence can maintain distance in asymmetric relationships such as employer and employee. The dedicated page does not discuss "maintenance" as a concept.

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