Language and Occupation - Notes

http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/occupation.htm


Candidates will be expected to have studied in detail texts and data exemplifying language use and issues, and to have studied the relevant theory and research.
In preparing this topic area candidates should study: the forms and functions of talk; registers and styles of writing; historical and contemporary changes, where appropriate. In particular, they should examine:
  -everyday functions and activities (e.g. the role of interpersonal language)
  -discourse features.


Occupations are an important feature of society. Any analysis of how society works is likely to consider occupations - these are a very common feature of social organization. Occupations develop their own special language features, and use those of the common language in novel or distinctive ways. Occupations are a source of language change.

In studying language and occupation, you should consider particular forms (instruction, interview, discussion, conference, briefing, appointing, disciplining) in relation to their functions. We can understand forms;
  - in an explicit sense as those kinds of activity that we can name (job interview, team briefing, disciplinary
    tribunal, conference, marriage ceremony) or
   -in a looser descriptive sense (discussing a problem, telling a manager about an incident, asking an expert
    for guidance).

Here are some general functions of language in occupational contexts: 
  -communicating information
  -requesting help
  -confirming arrangements
  -instructing employees or colleagues to do something
  -making things happen or enacting them

Language interactions may occur between or among those within a given occupation, or between those inside and those outside (customers, clients, the “general public”). This distinction will affect significantly a speaker's (or writer's) language choices. Some uses are exclusive, because they shut out people who do not know them. It is opaque to outsiders, and meant to be. Some occupations are notorious for promoting neologisms (newly-invented words or compounds). These may be used for competition or individual advancement within an organization rather than for linguistic efficiency.


Almost every occupation has its own special lexicon - a vocabulary that is specific to the occupation generally (the legal profession, the Merchant Navy, teaching) or more narrowly to the particular solicitors' practice, ship or school. That is, there will be
  -forms used only in the occupation, or 
  -forms in the common lexicon but used with meanings which are special to the occupation: justify means
   very different things to a printer or typesetter and to a priest.

You may think that register is more or less the same as special lexis - but this is not the case. Lexis is one (admittedly an important one) of various language features that might go to make up a register, which is, in Professor Crystal's phrase “a socially defined variety of language”. It is perhaps only helpful to introduce the idea of register, if this leads to an account of the different things that make up the (particular) register in question, or an observation of a particular feature - say that the register of;
  -professional orchestral music includes a lexicon of Italian loan words (forte, andante, allegro, pizzicato
   and so on) with cross-cultural meanings;
  -soccer players (and managers and commentators) allows use of the perfect tense in a specific way (he's
   gone past the defender and given me a good pass, and I've knocked it in);
  -particle physicists includes a lexicon of old forms with novel meanings that we cannot describe verbally,
   but can represent only mathematically, like spin, strangeness and charm.