Gramley, Stephan; P?tzold, Kurt-Michael. A Survey of Modern English

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The complementary relationship, solidarity, is not without its attraction either. There

are interpersonal relationships which are characterized by reciprocity, by a more or less

balanced mutuality. One instance of this is the use of slang:

The type of language referred to as slang is more than a level of formality. That is,

slang cannot be understood simply as informal, colloquial, careless, sloppy language

even though these notions are indelibly connected with the idea of slang in many

people’s minds. Slang is, rather, ﬁrst and foremost, group language. This restriction

– at least in its origins – is the key feature of slang. That is, slang has an extremely

important social function to fulﬁl with regard to the groups that create it: it helps to

establish solidarity and is associated with group identity. An elderly white American

woman who talks about dissing (‘to show disrespect toward someone’) may be using

(relatively) recent slang, but she is violating numerous restrictions on its use, chief

among which is that this is typical of young black males. While slang usage such

as this may drift upward into the language of the more powerful and outward into

that of out-group users, this is far from automatic; and by the time this happens, the

original group will probably have long since turned to a different expression.

The fact that slang is typically connected with the subcultures of youth is perhaps

what leads many people to see it as informal, colloquial, careless, or sloppy, for that

is how many people evaluate young people’s language, the language of the (as yet)

weak, the (as yet) outsiders.

(Gramley 2001: 207f.)

1.6 WORDS IN USE: THE REGISTER APPROACH

This ﬁnal section discusses a model that provides a systematic approach to the variation

we ﬁnd in English in terms of two large categories: the people who use the language and

the situations in which people ﬁnd themselves. The more permanent characteristics, those

of the language users, are called dialects, while the various situational factors that inﬂu-

ence language use are collectively referred to as diatypes or registers.

1.6.1 Dialect

Dialects come in various guises including temporal, regional, social and individual. We

have made it clear that this book is centred on StE and GenE as the major default dialects,

i.e. the ones most often meant when people talk about the English language. We are not

directly concerned here with Old or Middle English. But this is not to say that some

knowledge of the temporal dialects, or earlier stages of English, is not relevant to a full

and correct understanding of the present day language. Reading Shakespeare or trying to

understand items like let (in tennis), kith and kin and ye olde tea shoppe involves histor-

ical information of one kind or another which can be found in histories of the language

and etymological dictionaries.

Regional and social dialects Geographic variation is, as many of the previous

remarks have indicated, extremely prominent in English. This may include regions within

12 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: STANDARDS AND VARIATION

a single country or it may involve the national varieties of English. Furthermore, the

urban–rural divide continues to be a major source of variation.

Regional dialects Classical dialect studies in the United States and Canada (the

Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, LAUS) as well as in England (the

Survey of English Dialects, SED, and the Lowman Survey of the Midlands and South of

England) and Scotland (the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland) are the most important exam-

ples of regional studies of English. The SED (ﬁnished 1961) largely ignored age and

social differences, emphasis being on farming culture (in nine main sections). The object

was to determine 387 phonetic, 128 morphological, 77 syntactic, and 730 lexical points

using such methods as naming, completing, talking, converting (for example, present to

past tense) and reverse questions (‘What does corn mean?’) in direct interviews. The ques-

tions asked were exactly prescribed and formulated. Generally the most immobile, oldest

and most poorly educated men were interviewed. In North America the Linguistic Atlas,

which is a loose grouping of individual studies such as the LANE [Linguistic Atlas of

New England] (Kurath et al. 1939–43) or the LAMSAS [Middle and Southern Atlantic

States] (McDavid et al. 1980f), differs somewhat from the SED inasmuch as it takes the

age and education (three levels) of the informants into account. The results showed larger

differences according to education/class and smaller ones according to age. Even with

their wider spread many of the American studies are methodologically weak and do not

possess a high degree of validity and reliability.

Isoglosses and isogloss bundles The product of such classical dialect surveys is

a linguistic atlas which maps out the boundaries between geographical areas where

different variants are used, for example where in England words like farm are pro-

nounced with and without /r/. A line dividing places with form A from those with form

B is called an isogloss. Several isoglosses running close together are called isogloss

bundles. In this fashion dialect areas can be determined. But the divisions are seldom

clear; rather, there are transition areas in which both forms may occur. Furthermore,

sometimes an island of older usage is left behind while everything around it has changed;

this is a relic area.

Other types of dialect We will not be particularly concerned with regional dialec-

tology in this book, but will be looking at the results of population movement, (a) from

country to town and (b) from mother country abroad. Sometimes this has involved the

maintenance of previously regionally based dialects as new social dialects, for example,

when migrants of a particular regional origin make up signiﬁcant parts of the new urban

working class. This happened in the United States as southern workers entered the

northern automobile industry in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. Or there may be a

levelling of dialect differences (known as koinéization), something which appears to be

happening today with the emergence of Estuary English in the Thames Valley (see 10.4.1).

Geographical variation both within the various national types of English as well as the

variation between the national varieties is the chief focus of Part 3 of this book. Traditional

dialect, as discussed above, will play only a minor role (see 10.2.2). Social dialects will

also be treated in Part 3; however, the link between pronunciation and the social class of

speakers has also been mentioned in the discussion of RP above, and a number of class-

related examples in the area of vocabulary are recounted in 2.10.

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Idiolect Idiolect or a person’s individual dialect must be mentioned. This refers not

so much to a different sort of dialect as to a selection from all of the above dialects, which

together make up a large part of a person’s linguistic individuality. Although idiolect

can contain a few items that only this person or his or her family use, it usually consists

of the established vocabulary common to most speakers of the person’s speech com-

munity. It is no easy task to describe someone’s idiolect as it tends to change over time

and according to the circumstances he or she ﬁnds herself or himself in. Idiolect will, for

example, reﬂect a person’s gender in the choice of lexis (see 9.2.1) and it may well show

regional mixes of one kind or another. American writers, for example, may use British

items like tarted up or roof rack, or use native faucet beside British tap. Idiolects are

therefore not ﬁxed once and for all, but are dynamic, changing according to time, place,

occasion etc.

1.6.2 Register

Variation in language clearly depends on when and where someone lives and on what

his or her gender and social class identities are, but it is also a function of: ‘what you are

speaking about; who your addressees are; how well you know them; whether you are

addressing them orally or in writing’ (Quirk and Stein 1990: 41). This second set of factors

relates not so much to the individual user as to language use in certain situations. Use

varieties are called diatypes or registers and are treated under four aspects, all of which

turn up again speciﬁcally in Chapter 6.

Field Field is the ﬁrst aspect and is also called province. It reﬂects the fact that one

needs different words to talk about different subjects. There are many terms that char-

acterize particular subjects: folk etymology, lexeme and homograph are found only in

linguistics. Others take on special meanings, for example boot (verb), hardware and

window in computing. There are also combinations of lexical items that are typical of

certain ﬁelds, e.g. desirable residence, tastefully modernized or compact patio-style

garden, which are found in the advertisements of property agents in England.

We are all perfectly capable of carrying on a general conversation about people,

the weather, our holidays etc. These everyday uses of language, though essential to life

in society, are easy because they do not make great demands on our minds or linguistic

abilities. But when we move from the general ﬁeld of everyday conversation to that of

the Internet, genetic engineering or heart surgery, the number of people who understand

the language, or could themselves use it, is rather more limited.

General language is most obviously distinguished from technical language by its lexis,

though other factors are also important (see Chapter 6). While a command of various

technical vocabularies is a matter of education and experience, their actual use is condi-

tioned by various factors. Technical terms used by a surgeon in a hospital or a lawyer in

a court of law are of course a convenient and precise means of communication. However,

when experts use technical terms with members of the general public, things are rather

different. They may be insensitive, or incapable of or unwilling to adjust their language

– perhaps they want to put distance between themselves and their interlocutors in order

to impress, exclude, intimidate or overwhelm them into willing submission. In short, we

are talking here about language as social power. Solidarity with other people would show

in words that everybody can understand.

14 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: STANDARDS AND VARIATION

Personal tenor Also simply tenor or status or style, this refers to the formality of

any given piece of language, for which dictionaries have labels such as formal, familiar,

informal, colloquial or slang (see above for a discussion of slang). Most lexical items are

not labelled because they are stylistically neutral. There is often little agreement on

whether an item is colloquial or slang, or on how many levels ought to be set up. One

quite well known model is the ﬁve term one proposed by Joos (1962), which Strevens

(1964: 29) illustrates in this way:

Style Example

Frozen style: Visitors should make their way at once to the upper ﬂoor by way of the

staircase.

Formal: Visitors should go up the stairs at once.

Consultative: Would you mind going upstairs, right away, please.

Casual: Time you all went upstairs, now.

Intimate: Up you go, chaps!

Notice that a change in tenor involves much more than a simple change in the stylistic

level of the lexemes (visitors vs chaps). There is, for example, a change in the length

and explicitness of the message: from make their way to go, and from to the upper ﬂoor

to up.

Formality choices often go hand in hand with medium differences, but they are ultim-

ately determined by the relationship between the people concerned. The closer the sender

(speaker or writer) feels to his or her addressee(s), the more informal the language which

the sender can use. Conversely, the more distant the personal relationship, the more formal

the personal tenor is likely to be. The frozen and formal versions above are likely to be

announcements over a ship’s PA system, where the speaker does not see his or her

addressees, while the other three versions can only be uttered when speaker and hearer

see each other. Personal tenor is thus often determined by physical closeness or distance.

It has to be stressed that speakers are free to stick to the generally accepted conventions

or to ﬂout them, for whatever reasons or purposes. Foreign learners should in any case

be careful of using very informal or potentially offensive lexemes with people they do

not know well.

Medium or mode The ﬁve stylistic variants quoted above illustrate once again that

there is no causal link between formality and medium, or mode (the ﬁve examples given

all belong to spoken language). Although medial differences go far beyond lexical choices,

the focus of the present discussion is on the lexis and syntax typical of the two media.

First, however, a few more general notes are in order.

Speech is primary: it is acquired early in our lives more or less informally, while

writing is learned much later and by far fewer people, usually in a formal educational

establishment. Writing usually does jobs concerned with the transfer of information (tech-

nically called transactional uses) and confers greater prestige in society. Speech is

typically used to create, maintain and enhance social bonds (interactional uses) and thus

meets basic human needs, while writing satisﬁes less immediate ones, as becomes clear

from the following list which starts with uses typical of the spoken language and ends

with those that are exclusive to writing:

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THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: STANDARDS AND VARIATION 15

conversation in a pub, seminar, telephone conversation, personal letter, job interview,

radio discussion, television advertisement, lecture, sermon, script of play, television

news, newspaper, business letter, this book

(Leech et al. 1982: 140)

Speech, or more precisely spontaneous conversation, differs from writing in three major

respects: there is a great amount of linguistic give-and-take (or interactiveness, to use a

term from computer science); it is mostly, though not only, concerned with the lives and

interests of the people who have the conversation, and it is produced as we go along (this

has been called on-line production). At the other end of the spectrum are carefully

thought out and edited written texts in which the author often does not mention her- or

himself and has no speciﬁc addressees: indeed, they are monologues.

The interactive nature of conversation is clearly seen in the frequent use of items like

hm, ugh, yeah, right and well, that have an emotional and interactional meaning, and are

marked off from other utterances by pauses or their own intonation contours. There is a

variety of labels for these, of which the most general and recent is inserts (see 7.5 for a

discussion of the three discourse markers now, you know and well). Other features are

tag questions and expressions like I think, in my opinion or as far as I am concerned.

This ties in with the personal, interactive nature of conversation and explains the rela-

tively greater use in written texts of items which have to do with impersonal, objective

information.

Features determined by the situation are referring words (deictics) like him or that one

over there and items of personal reference, such as ﬁrst and second person pronouns.

Participants in conversations share a geographical and temporal background as well as a

lot of personal knowledge of each other so that allusions to places, persons and past times

will be found that are unintelligible to outsiders. Writing has to be more explicit because

writers are isolated from readers and cannot rely on the situation or on paralinguistic

means to help make their message clear.

The spontaneity of conversation has the greatest number of linguistic consequences,

in phonetics and syntax as well as lexis. Conversational pronunciations are characterized

not least by contractions (can’t, won’t), reductions (weak forms, see 4.5.2), elisions and

assimilation processes of many different kinds, which can present great difﬁculties to

foreign learners.

The basic unit for syntactic descriptions is the sentence. In spoken English, however,

there are many stretches of language where the concept of sentence makes no sense.

Various alternative terms are in use for the units of spoken language, among them infor-

mation unit, utterance chunk or idea unit. Spoken language units are short, having a

mean length of approximately two seconds, which is about six words; they belong to a

small set of syntactic structures and are much more predictable than written ones. Deletion

of sentence elements such as the subject or the predicate is common. Speakers rely on

well known structures that were learned early in life, such as paratactic constructions,

while planned discourse uses those acquired at a later stage. Speech is untidy, full of

mixed constructions (syntactic blends), false starts, repetitions (of words as well as

constructions), digressions, loose ends, inconsistencies and changes of construction, none

of which are permitted in formal written texts. There are, for instance, noun phrases in

conversation whose function is to establish a topic ﬁrst and then say something about it.

This breaking down of the message into two distinct parts makes things easier for both

16 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: STANDARDS AND VARIATION

speakers and hearers, as in: ‘My wife, she only came later to the party.’ This is called

left dislocation in syntax and preface in discourse analysis. In the next example, a

horrible murder has taken place and Larry King asks his guest (another talk show host

on one of whose programmes the murder victim had appeared):

King: Did you remember the show? You do so many.

Springer: Yes, I honestly didn’t. And I don’t mean to sound insensitive about it. But

the reality is, we do 200 shows a year. I have been doing it 10 years – not –

ﬁnished 9 years already. That is 1800 shows. We have 10 guests a show. That

is nearly 20,000 people. I didn’t – you know, until obviously everyone has

been showing me the tapes. At the time, when I heard about it, no I didn’t

remember it . . .

Springer has something similar to a preface, only here it is a temporal adverbial

phrase (at the time) that is moved to the beginning of his utterance in order to make an

emphatic contrast with the preceding clause until obviously everyone has been showing

me the tapes. Notice that Springer ﬁrst answers yes, which may be triggered by King’s

you do so many, but this sounds odd, as is shown later by normal no I didn’t remember

it. There is repetition of the lexical verb do and the constructions that is and I didn’t.

There is also an obvious break in his contribution after I have been doing it 10 years,

where Springer hesitates and then changes his construction. Finally, the utterance ﬁnished

9 years already, where there is no subject and auxiliary, is an example of the deletion

of function words in conversation and of how questionable it is to speak of ‘sentences’

in spoken language.

Noun phrases tend to be simple, as in Springer’s answer, but are often modiﬁed in

an afterthought by a following phrase. Clause-ﬁnal, retrospective though (It was nice,

though) in speech corresponds to written although at the beginning of a clause.

Information density is lower in conversation, i.e. speakers use fewer lexical items than

grammatical items. In all these respects writing is different: it uses highly structured

syntactic forms that are less predictable; it knows anticipatory structures like on the one

hand; it does not avoid subordinate constructions with causal or temporal sentence connec-

tors like because, since, therefore. Recent research based on an extensive collection of

data (what is called a corpus) has modiﬁed the received wisdom that speech and coord-

ination go together as do writing and subordination: ‘In fact, with the exception of but,

the frequency of all coordinators is relatively low in conversation, while subordinators

are more frequent in conversation than in news and academic prose’ (Biber et al. 1999:

82f.). Nevertheless, writing demands greater attention from readers because it packs more

information into its sentences, i.e. there is a higher percentage of lexical items. This fact

is of course related to the main purpose of much writing: lexical items convey informa-

tion. The differences are also well brought out by the distribution of inserts: while there

are none in written texts, we ﬁnd a good number of them in conversation, which ties in

with conversation’s interactional nature. Among other features particular to writing we

ﬁnd the passive rather than the active and relatively many declaratives but few impera-

tives, interrogatives and exclamations. Finally, processing a written text takes place at

the leisure of the reader, who can skip pages, go back and forth or go over the same

passage again as desired or needed. This is one of the factors that make literature and its

appreciation possible.

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THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: STANDARDS AND VARIATION 17

Functional tenor While it is intuitively obvious that we use different means to

instruct, threaten or persuade others, it is less obvious how many functions language can

have and how to classify them. One approach distinguishes six functions, which are

derived from six essential features of human communication:

• The emotive (or expressive) function is related to the sender, who wants to express

emotions.

• The conative (or directive) function is addressee-related: it relates to attempts to inﬂu-

ence others in order to achieve some goal, typically realized by orders and requests.

• The meta-communicative, or meta-lingual, function is related to the code used. It is

involved in questions such as: ‘What is the meaning of let in tennis?’

• There is a particularly close link between the message and the poetic or aesthetic

function. This function can be deﬁned as the use of language for language’s sake,

i.e. for a special aesthetic effect.

• The informational or referential function derives from the context or subject matter

of communication and is concerned with information transfer.

• The ﬁnal use of language is the phatic function, in which language is used to keep

social relationships in good repair by ensuring that people keep talking with each

other, as in small talk (see the interactional uses mentioned above).

Notice the contrast between phatic and aesthetic language: with phatic communion what

is important is not the news value of what one says or the originality or creativity of the

language used, but that something is said at all, that silence is avoided so that speaker

and addressee feel at ease and can enjoy each other’s company.

It should be noted that just as lexemes have different meanings, so one and the same

phrase or expression can serve different functions: I’m dying for a cup of coffee can, in

the right circumstances, be read as a piece of information, as an expression of the speaker’s

emotion, or as a veiled order to the addressee to get the speaker something to drink (see

7.2.1. on speech acts).

Evaluation and conclusion Registers have been divided into those where linguis-

tic choice is limited (marked registers), e.g. greetings, forms of address and instructions,

and those where there are more options available, for example, the language of journal-

ism (unmarked registers). Much research has been concerned with looking at very

general registers, such as the languages of journalism or advertising, and setting up sub-

types within them. One approach to advertising differentiates between radio, TV and news-

paper advertisements and discusses, in addition to the genre of traditional commercial

consumer advertising, a new type which addresses more material needs in contrast to the

social and symbolic needs met by many products. This type of advertisement is meant to

sell goods and services presented as necessary whether they are or not – for example cars,

suits, transatlantic ﬂights and the latest colour TVs. These ‘no-frills’ advertisements are

simple and factual; they mention the product’s price and contain little hyperbolic language.

Thus the difference in the perception of the product comes through in a no-nonsense style.

Another aspect in register research is the question of whether the four categories are

always equally important. It has been said that the language of science is dominated by

considerations of ﬁeld, the language of diplomatic protocol by personal tenor, and the

language of advertising by functional tenor. More generally, it has been claimed that it

18 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: STANDARDS AND VARIATION

is genre or the type of text which determines choices in ﬁeld, mode and personal tenor

(see Biber 1988; Swales 1990). As a result, functional tenor as a category is not on a par

with the other three. A great deal of research is being conducted at present and it is too

early to say anything ﬁnal about either the number of categories or possible hierarchies.

Finally, one should also ask whether the register model captures enough of the

situational factors to be able to give an adequate description of language in use. Among

the more permanent (dialect) characteristics, gender is treated in a substantial body of

research (see Chapter 9). People’s ages, ethnic and social afﬁliations (subcultures such

as youth groups or Rastafarians) and sexual orientations have been given increasing

attention in recent years. Some neglected (diatypical) factors are the settings of a situa-

tion, i.e. the physical and temporal contexts (see Biber 1988: 28–33 for a detailed list of

situation components). If the register model is seen not so much as a closed system,

but rather as an open approach which needs reﬁning and extending, it will continue to be

a very useful tool.

1.7 FURTHER READING

The contributions in Graddol, Leith and Swann 1996 are readable and useful supplements

to much of the substance of this chapter. For a discussion of improprieties, solecisms

and barbarisms see Nunberg 1983. Giles and Powesland 1975 explore language atti-

tudes and report on matched guise tests. A very useful history of English is Baugh and

Cable 2002.

Standardization is treated in: Leith 1983; Milroy and Milroy 1993. Shaklee 1980 and

Fisher 1996 look speciﬁcally at the rise of Standard English. Leith offers a social history

of English in his book.

Detailed treatments of dialects and registers can be found in: Crystal and Davy 1969;

Biber 1988; Quirk and Stein 1990; O’Donnell and Todd 1991; Cook 1992; Thomas 1997.

Research into register differences has taken off in the past 20 years or so.

Akinnaso 1985 investigates the differences between spontaneous conversation and

scripted dialogue in the realization of such tasks as describing, explaining, arguing,

protesting etc. and then analyses the linguistic means used in both media. Biber

et al. 1999 is a treatment of spoken and written English which has set new standards in

research linking grammatical structures with actual language use. The authors look at

corpora representing four different registers (spontaneous conversation, ﬁction, newspaper

language and academic writing) and catalogue the lexical items and syntactic structures.

In many cases, their research has overturned the conventional wisdom.

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THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: STANDARDS AND VARIATION 19

English as a

linguistic system

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Part 1