Occupation + Power Theorists

Studied the pronunciation of 'r'

In NY, the postvocalic 'r' is considered to be socially prestigious - higher social class = more likely to pronounce it

Findings

• In casual speech the upper-middle class used it more than the lower-middle class
• In formal settings it was the other way around
• lower-middle class speakers are more conscious of their speech and want to make a good impression
  • this is called hypercorrectness

Looked at pronunciation of words with -ing at the end

Also looked at use of verbs without 's' at the end, i.e. she go/she goes

Findings

• lower down the social scale more liekly to drop the 'g'
• increased pronunciation according to formality
  • people were conscious of their speech, adopting more socially prestigious features in more formal contexts
• No 's' more frequent among the working class

Examined dropping of 'h' at the beginning of words, e.g. house

Findings

• Lower working class dropped 93%
• Upper working class dropped 67%
• Lower middle class dropped 28%
• Upper middle class dropped 12%

Members of a discourse community share inferential frameworks. These are strong hierachies of power marked with assymetrical relationships of language use.

Importance of phatic talk in getting jobs done. Workers need to establish interpersonal relationships as well as solidarity.

Defined a discourse community as having members who:

• Share a set of common goals
• Communicate internally, using and 'owning' 1 or more genres of communication
• Use specialist lexis and discourse
• Possess a required level of knowledge and skill to be considered eligible to participate in the community.

IRF = Initiation, Response, Feedback

(teacher/student ; parent/child)

Social networks descibed as a 'web of ties'

There are patterns between group members

Social networks = a network of relations between people in their membership of different groups

Business English compared a corpus (a collection of searchable language data) of business language with a more general corpus, the British National Corpus, in order to investigate whether there was such a thing as business' involving a limited number of semantic categories.