Lic.

Enseñanza del Ingles

Sociolingüística
Docente TI: Miguel Ángel Montelongo Orella
Alumno: Kevin Daniel Gurgua Lorenzana
Topic 1. Code, style and register

Act. 1
To complete this activity, do a summary from both readings in which you include all
main aspects implied in the terms style and register. The first part of the summary
should focus on style, the second part of the summary should focus on register, and
the third part of it should include a brief definition code as is understood out of the
information read.
STYLES, REGISTERS AND BELIEFS
The study of dialects is further complicated by the fact that speakers can adopt
different styles of speaking. You can speak very formally or very informally; your
choice being governed by circumstances.
Registers
Registers are sets of vocabulary items associated with discrete occupational or
social groups. Your dialect shows who (or what) you are, whilst your register shows
what you are doing
People participants in recurrent communication or situations tend to develop similar
vocabularies, similar features of information, and characteristics bits of syntax and
phonology that they use in these situations.
There is no mistaking the stronger tendency for individuals and communications to
develop register variation along many dimensions. Of course, one person may
control a variety of registers.
Each register helps you to express your identity at specific time or place, i.e., how
you seek to present yourself to others and how you validate yourself to have with
whom you wouldn’t identify or whom you would seek to impress.
One important conclusion from all we have said is that many varieties of languages
exist, and each language exists in several guises.
It is still quite possible to listen to an individual speaker and infer very specific things
about that speaker alter hearing relatively little of his or her speech. The interesting
problem is accounting for our ability to do that.
we may have productive control over only a few varieties of a language, we can
usually comprehend many more varieties and relate all of these to the concept of a
‘single language’. That is, our receptive linguistic ability is much greater than our
productive linguistic ability.
The term register refers to the various ways people use language based on who
they're talking to and their situation. We often talk about register in terms of formality.
For example, our word choices, tone of voice, and body language will likely differ in a
formal situation (e.g., a job interview) compared to informal situations (e.g., hanging
out with friends).
The register we choose to use during communication (consciously or
subconsciously) is determined by several different social factors, such as the context
(where), purpose or occasion (why), and audience (who).
Style
The term style relates more to written text and refers to how the text is written to fit a
specific purpose. Style includes the choice of vocabulary, tone, use of grammar,
sentence structure, and layout, which will all differ depending on the purpose of the
text.
There are four main writing styles: narrative, persuasive, descriptive, and expository.
Narrative: writing is used to tell a story. It's most associated with fictional writing,
such as novels and screenplays, and non-fictional writing, such as speeches and
autobiographies.
Persuasive writing: is used to persuade others of your ideas and thoughts, or to
convince others to change their behavior somehow.
Descriptive writing: aims to 'paint a picture' for the reader. It aims to entertain and
often contains many figurative and decorative language, such as metaphors.
Code-switching is switching between multiple different languages, dialects, and
registers depending on the social situation the speaker is in.
Although we usually talk about code-switching in terms of switching languages,
utilizing different registers in communication is also considered code-switching.