Oral and Written Communication: Elements and Strategies
LD&C 5
1. Introduction
This document explores the elements and norms governing oral discourse, routines, and formulae, as well as typical strategies in oral communication. It examines the characteristics of oral communication, differences between spoken and written language, elements and norms governing oral discourse (including turn-taking and the cooperative principle), routines and formulae, and oral communication strategies (planning and politeness strategies).
2. Oral Communication Characteristics
2.1 Differences Between Spoken and Written Language
Speakers have a greater range of possibilities than writers. They can vary their intonation and stress to emphasize important parts of their message. They can also rephrase, speed up, or slow down their speech. Additionally, speakers receive feedback from their listeners through gestures, expressions, and interruptions. However, not all speakers have this benefit; for example, those on the phone lack visual clues.
Perhaps the most important difference between written and spoken language concerns the need for accuracy. Natural speakers constantly make mistakes when speaking or change the subject mid-sentence. However, a piece of writing with mistakes and half-finished sentences would be judged as ungrammatical.
The following can be considered formal characteristics of spoken English:
- It involves first-person narration, therefore, there’s a preference for the active over the passive voice.
- Its informal character allows the use of parataxis, contractions, slurring (“kinda” instead of “kind of”), discourse fillers, and the repetition and reformulation of discourse.
- Other features such as body language, interaction, tag questions, and expressiveness are common as well.
3. Elements and Norms Governing Oral Discourse
3.1 Elements of Oral Discourse
The field that studies elements of spoken language and conversation is called Conversational Analysis (CA). CA has identified a system of management of conversations called turn-taking.
Within turn-taking, we must highlight the term adjacency pair. It refers to the intuitive understanding that speakers have in taking up what the last person has said and answering accordingly. Typical pairs are greeting/reciprocation, request/compliance, answer/question, etc. These are all predictable and have a specific purpose.
3.2 Norms Governing Oral Discourse
The planning of conversations is complex. Each participant is aware that the other participants have goals of their own, and they need to coordinate their speech to reach their respective goals. Hence, we must consider the details of turn-taking and the cooperative principle.
3.2.1 Turn-Taking
Turns are units with varying forms, especially due to prosody and intonation. This system has three requirements:
- Each participant should have a chance to talk.
- Only one person should talk at a time.
- The gaps between turns should be brief.
3.2.2 Cooperative Principle
In order to communicate accurately and efficiently, speakers and listeners try to cooperate with one another following a set of conventions. Grice’s theory, the Cooperative Principle, is a set of maxims that describe the norms which govern oral exchanges. If any of the participants flouts this principle of cooperation, oral communication breaks down. It consists of four maxims:
- Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as possible.
- Maxim of Quality: Do not say what you believe is not true.
- Maxim of Relation: Make your contribution relevant to the aims of the ongoing conversation.
- Maxim of Manner: Be clear, avoid obscurity and ambiguity, and be brief and orderly in your use of language.
4. Routines and Formulae
In communication, we also find routines, which are more or less unvarying procedures used to construct discourse and can be applied to formal speech, a sermon, an informal conversation, etc. Then, a formula is a fixed form of words used as a conventional or ceremonial expression.
These are some types of formulae:
- Tags: Elements added as an afterthought to a grammatical unit, used as a retrospective qualification loosely attached to the preceding clausal material. Some examples of tags are retrospective comment clauses (e.g., “You eat ice cream, right?”) and question tags (e.g., “That guy is nice, isn’t he?”).
- Interjections: They express the speaker’s emotion (e.g., “Wow!”).
- Attention Signals: They attract the attention of the addressee (e.g., “Hey!”).
- Response Elicitors: They seek a signal that the message has been understood (e.g., “Ok?”).
- Response Forms: They are inserted to answer a previous remark to show that the message has been understood (e.g., “Yeah”).
- Greetings and Farewells
- Discourse Markers: They occur at the beginning of a turn (e.g., “Well”).
- Polite Speech-Act Formulae: Like “please”, “thank you”, “sorry”.
- Expletives: They are used for swearwords (e.g., “damn”, “bloody hell”, “god”).
- First-Person Imperatives with “Let’s”: (For instance, “Let’s move on to the next section!”)
5. Oral Communication Strategies
Speaking is an instrumental act since speakers begin with the intention of affecting their listeners in a particular way, and they select and utter a sentence they believe will bring about this effect. This act involves the use of certain strategies.
5.1 Planning Strategies
Speaking appears to be divided into planning and execution. Speakers first plan what they want to say based on how they want to change the mental state of their listeners. In planning what to say, speakers must take into account some considerations:
- Knowledge of the Listener: Depending on what speakers think listeners know, they will refer to a third person as “she”, “my neighbor”, or “the woman over there”.
- The Cooperative Principle: Speakers expect listeners to be cooperative. They can therefore say “What a glorious day!” on a rainy day and be confident that their listeners will catch the irony.
- The Reality Principle: Speakers expect their listeners to assume they will talk about comprehensible events, states, and facts.
- The Social Context: Different social contexts lead to different vocabulary.
- The Linguistic Devices Available: Sometimes there’s no linguistic expression to convey the wanted meaning.
5.2 Politeness Strategies
Oral communication is a highly social activity and it has been analyzed from the point of view of politeness as a factor that influences speakers’ behavior. Brown and Levinson presented a theory of politeness strategies based on universal wants for negative and positive face, which are the following:
- Notice, attend to hearer.
- Exaggerate (interest, approval, sympathy with hearer).
- Claim in-group membership with H.
- Claim common points of view, opinions, attitudes, knowledge, empathy.
- Be optimistic.
- Indicate that the speaker wants H’s wants and is taking them into account.
- Assume or assert reciprocity.
Any application of these strategies in real communication involves adjustments in accordance with deference strategies, maintaining a balance in the conversation. One important point is that such concepts as, for example, an exaggerated show of interest are viewed in different ways in different cultures. A member of one culture can see a concrete show of interest as exaggerated whereas one from another culture can view it as insufficient or normal.
6. Didactic Implications
This section would delve into the pedagogical implications of the discussed concepts for teaching oral communication skills.
7. Conclusion
This section would summarize the key findings and insights regarding oral and written communication, emphasizing their differences and the importance of understanding the elements and strategies involved in effective oral discourse.
8. References
- Legal Framework: D39/2022 RD 217/2022
- Bibliography:
- Halliday, M. A. K. (1973). Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Arnold.
- Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: CUP.
- Widdowson, H. G. (1985). Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: OUP.
- Jakobson, R. (1960). “Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
- Grice, H. P. (1978). Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Words as Linguistic Signs: Homonymy, Synonymy, Antonymy, False Friends, and Lexical Creativity
GR 11
1. Introduction
This document explores words as linguistic signs, focusing on concepts like homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, false friends, and lexical creativity. It delves into structuralism, the nature of linguistic signs, linguistic value, syntagmatic and associative relations, and various types of meaning relations between words.
2. Words as Linguistic Signs
Semantics is the branch of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning, which refers to the idea transferred to the listener’s mind by means of language. Groups of lexemes are interrelated according to sense. These sense relations can be syntagmatic (the way lexemes work in a sentence) or paradigmatic (the way lexemes can be substituted by others). In this topic, we are interested in the latter, so we will deal with several types of paradigmatic relations: homonymy, synonymy, etc. To fully understand those relations, we must first analyze words as linguistic signs.
2.1 Structuralism
This linguistic trend was headed by Saussure, who stated that language was a structure with three main features:
- Wholeness: The system works as a whole, not as a collection of independent parts.
- Transformation: The system is capable of change.
- Self-Regulation: Although new units can enter the system, the basic structure cannot change.
Saussure described the nature of the linguistic sign, which will be analyzed in the next section.
2.2 The Nature of Linguistic Signs
He distinguished between the concept and the sound image (the psychological imprint of the sound in the speaker’s mind). Hence, the linguistic sign is the union of content and form, and it has two features:
- The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (there’s no intrinsic relation between sound and concept).
- The signifier exists in time and can be measured as linear. We cannot say or write two words at the same time, since words form a chain and are connected to each other.
2.3 Linguistic Value
Linguistic value is defined as the collective meaning assigned to signs, determined by the link between signifier and signified and the whole set of signs used within a community. The most important relation between signs is the idea of difference. One signifier has a meaning because it is not any of the other signifiers in the system.
2.4 Syntagmatic and Associative Relations
Syntagmatic relations refer to the linear relation between units. In English, it is word order that governs meaning, and so the sentence “The cat sat on the mat” means something different from “The mat sat on the cat”.
In addition, there are associative relations between linguistic signs. In this way, signs are stored in our minds in associative groups. For instance, the word “education” may be linked to words like “student” or “teacher”. These associative relations are the main core of this topic. Let us start with homonymy.
3. Homonymy
Homonymy can be defined as the fact that a single word form has different meanings not closely associated. For example, “file” can be a case for keeping papers in order or a tool for smoothing surfaces. Homonymy must be distinguished from polysemy, in which a word has several meanings which are closely associated (e.g., a branch of a tree or of a family).
There are two main criteria to distinguish between homonyms and polysemous words:
- Etymology: Those words that share the same form but have different origins are considered homonyms and usually appear as separate entries in the dictionary.
- Metaphor and Transferred Meaning: Metaphor is a frequent source of meaning change, when a word can have a literal and a transferred meaning. In the cases where the relation between these meanings is to some degree visible, we may have polysemy.
Let us move on to the analysis of another relevant feature of language: synonymy.
4. Synonymy
Synonymy is the relation of sameness of meaning (e.g., kingly – royal – regal). It is important to remember that lexemes rarely have the same meaning in a language, and this is why we distinguish between two concepts when dealing with synonymy: reference and sense.
English is said to be a language rich in synonyms due to the different sources of its vocabulary: Anglo-Saxon, French, and Latin.
Lexemes are said to be complete synonyms when they are interchangeable in certain contexts and have the same meanings. When two words are complete synonyms in all their meanings and contexts, they are absolute synonyms. Complete synonyms are rare, and absolute synonyms are almost non-existent (one example is “court” and “yard”).
There are at least four ways in which synonyms may differ:
- Different Dialects: For example, “fall” is used in American English, while “autumn” is more common in British English.
- Different Styles: For example, the words “gentleman”, “man”, and “lad” convey different degrees of formality.
- Collocation: Some words only occur with certain words. For instance, we use “rancid” with bacon, while the word “addled” applies to eggs.
- Evaluative Meaning: Words may have different evaluative meanings in different societies. This is the case of “liberal”, which has a good connotation in Britain but a negative one in South Africa.
Also, words are associated with certain characteristics of the item they refer to (e.g., “pig” has the connotation of “dirty”). When there are social taboos, some words are avoided since they are considered distasteful.
5. Antonymy
Antonymy is the relation of oppositeness of meaning, but it has a different nature from synonymy. There are several kinds of antonyms:
- Complementary Antonyms: The denial of one word implies the assertion of the other (e.g., dead – alive).
- Gradable Antonyms: There are pairs of words in which there’s an implied degree scale of quality involved (e.g., young – old).
- Converseness: There are cases in which the lexical substitution involves syntactic transformation.
Let us now analyze another important point in terms of lexical study and its teaching implications in second language teaching: false friends.
6. False Friends
False friends are words in the second language whose signifier is similar to the signifier of another word in the first language, but the signified is different (e.g., “actual” and “commodity”).
Let’s move on to the last section.
7. Lexical Creativity
New words are assimilated into the language by means of three main mechanisms:
- Word Formation: New lexical items introduced in the language as a consequence of new realities (e.g., “selfie”).
- Conversion: Change in syntactic function and meaning without any change in the morphological form (e.g., “net” in “net the ball”).
- Semantic Transfer: The morphological and syntactic specifications of a word remain the same, but there’s a change in meaning. For example, the foot of a mountain and the foot of an animal. The most common ways of semantic transfer are metaphor and metonymies.
8. Didactic Implications
This section would discuss the implications of understanding lexical relations and creativity for language teaching and learning.
9. Conclusion
This section would summarize the key concepts related to words as linguistic signs, emphasizing the importance of understanding meaning relations and lexical creativity in language study.
10. References
- Quirk et al. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
- Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.
- Swan, M. (1986). Practical English Usage. Oxford: OUP.