Like the cooperative principle, the politeness principle also may be divided into a series of maxims Robin Lakoff (1973) formulated these maxims as: – don’t impose – give options – make your receiver feel good these maxims explain – utterances in which no new information is communicated e.g. ‘I am sorry. I was waiting for you …’ ‘I am sorry to...
As proposed by the philosopher Paul Grice, conversation is effective because speakers conform to the cooperative principle which he articulated as follows: Make your conversational contributions such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged This agreement of cooperation can be divided into four maxims or...
Look carefully at the following utterances … – Policeman: you are under arrest – Referee: (pointing to the penalty spot) penalty! – Boss: your services are no longer required The philosopher J.L Austin (1911 – 1960) claims that utterances such as the ones above are equivalent to actions - i.e a new reality (social/psychological) is created when they are uttered...
The transcriptions we have considered so far were phonemic transcriptions, (also used synonymously with broad transcriptions) which contain the minimum amount of phonetic detail needed in order to be able to distinguish between words. A narrow transcription contains phonetic detail which can often be predicted by ‘rules’. Today, we will discuss some of the main “rules” for...
Phonemic Transcription Phonemic transcription uses a restricted set of symbols to capture the meaningful sound contrasts of a language. e.g. The first sound in these words are usually aspirated, but as English does not contrast aspirated vs unaspirated plosives (phonemically) the difference is not annotated in a phonemic transcription. Phonetic Transcription Phonetic transcription uses a larger...
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Vowels are sonorous, syllabic sounds made with the vocal tract more open than it is for consonant and glide articulation. Different vowel sounds (also called vowel qualities) are produced by varying the placement of the body of the tongue and shaping the lips. Vowel articulations are not as easy to feel as consonant articulations at first, since the vocal tract is not narrowed as much. To begin...
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Clefting transformations are used in English and many other languages to mark information structure. It-Clefts are of the form: It is/was/will be … that where what comes between the first and the second part of the construction is the clefted noun phrase, prepositional phrase or adverb. e.g. 1. It is Kareem that makes the wonderful pasta. 2. It was in July that I last went abroad. 3. It is...
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