Language and Occupation

3 Key excerpts on "Language and Occupation"

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  eBook - ePub

  Politics of Occupation-Centred Practice

  Reflections on Occupational Engagement Across Cultures

  • Nick Pollard, Dikaios Sakellariou, Nick Pollard, Dikaios Sakellariou(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 A Grammar for a Language of Occupation Nick Pollard and Dikaios Sakellariou

  In the language of occupation, grammar occupies a central role of allowing language to function. Grammar provides legibility and stabilizes meaning. It provides the structures that allow the components of doing to be understood, without being so rigid and inflexible as to distort the doing into something unrecognizable. It is the basis on which doing can be dynamic, directed and interconnected.

  A grammar of doing is not something that is isolated from an interactive and social context. Over the course of their cognitive development people learn by observing and participating and are able to interpret the actions of others from their own experience, just as they are able to develop their use of language from its use in relation to social interaction and environmental cues. Human communication involves the simultaneous translation and exchange of many cues, only some of which are linguistic. Others involve posture, gesture and facial expression in addition to the use or display of objects. A concern with individual doing focuses on only a portion of this interaction and conceptualization of the world. The learning of a language is centred on the individual acquisition of verbal competences but, as anyone who has been educated in a second language knows, the experience of expressing themselves in a social situation outside the classroom is very different. Rapid interactions strain the limitations of a new vocabulary and grammatical rules that are not as embedded as those of a native language. Accent, facial expression, dialect words and other nuances that may not have occurred in the classroom have to be interpreted.

  Despite these differences, most people can begin to make themselves understood when placed in a foreign social context. One of the most effective ways to learn a second language is immersion in an occupational context where words and actions are clearly related and opportunities to resort to a first language are restricted or denied. The consequence is often that, while the immersed learners develop a knowledge of new words, the vocabulary they acquire is built on the grammar of their first language. These features have become embedded in the various dialect forms of certain languages. Thus it has been claimed that Yorkshire dialect has strong elements of Old Norse and Danish amongst others (Kellett, 1994), Irish forms of English have a grammatical root in Irish (O Muirthe, 1977), and Caribbean patois contains grammatical structures that show their roots in African languages (McLaren, 2009). These differences can become important components of facility for literary expression and for cultural identity (O Muirthe, 1977). Through their use, they signify aspects of cultural identity and belongingness to a community of expression. Despite the recognizable differences and nuances in the usage of certain specific dialect words and grammatical forms that may not occur in other speakers' vocabularies, they share a sufficiently common range of components to be understood most of the time. This facility is due to linguistic competence which some linguistic theorists suggest is innate, and others suggest is learned. Linguistic competence allows individuals to interpret new words and employ them in speech.

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  The Sociolinguistics of Urbanization

  The Case of the Nordic Countries

  • Bengt Nordberg(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  It could be imagined that these circumstances would influence language use and the demands placed on people's linguistic competence in a variety of ways. First of all, growing urban communities bring together individuals with differing geographical and to some extent — if we confine ourselves to internal migration — cultural backgrounds. They bring with them not only dialects that differ in terms of their linguistic structure, but also different culturally conditioned rules of speaking and what Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz call 'contextualization conventions', i. e. the means by which interlocutors signal their perception of what it is they are actually involved in, what expectations and intentions they have, and how they interpret their own and their interlocutors' behaviour (1982:17 — 18). Secondly, far-reaching specialization of occupations, activities and in-stitutions means that specific varieties of language use, or 'activity lan-guages', arise which can differ appreciably from each other, chiefly in terms of vocabulary, phraseology, textual strategies and rules of interaction. There emerge, as it were, several registers within the language. At the same time, the considerable division of labour creates a great need for cooperation, mediated by linguistic communication, both between repre- Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings 19 sentatives of different sectors and types of activity and between the individual citizen and a host of organizations and authorities. To assert themselves on the labour market, to safeguard their interests and uphold their rights, individuals increasingly need to be able to state their case and convey their views to an often impersonal authority or a group of strangers, and to do so on the formal conditions that have evolved for the particular type of interaction concerned.

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  Speaking Culturally

  Language Diversity in the United States

  • Fern L. Johnson(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The Language System in Its Communicative Contexts L anguage-in-use represents the complexities of social and cultural mean-ing. Erving Goffman (1972) made this point with simplicity in his statement that it hardly seems possible to name a social variable that doesn't show up and have its little systematic effect upon speech behavior: age, sex, class, caste, country of origin, generation, region, schooling; cultural cogni-tive assumptions; bilingualism, and so forth (p. 61). The effects to which Goffman refers include those evidenced in the language code itself as well as those that more generally structure the choices made and interpretations given to communication events. The way we form sentences from words to make statements and ask questions is governed by regular rules. The mean-ings that we attach to words, sentences, and conversations in particular situations are culturally patterned. Grasping the impact of cultural diversity on language and communication processes requires that we consider many levels of the systematicity and pattern to language use. In this section, basic concepts central to understanding language-in-use are introduced. 24 2 The Language System in Its Communicative Contexts 25 Functions and Purposes of Language Language-in-use serves many functions and accomplishes many purposes. Many of these functions and purposes are specific to the situation, such as seeking an account from a friend or family member about how his or her day was, conveying information about a product or service, voicing an opinion on a political candidate, phoning a store to determine its hours of operation, expressing anger because a fellow student failed to show up for a meeting at the scheduled time, explaining to a parent why you do not want to visit a relative, and so forth. One important general function of language is to regulate boundaries between and among people.

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