Domande e risposte per orale: Lingua Inglese e comunicazione multimediale

English dialects

Dialect variations

Can you provide any example of a dialect? A dialect describes variations not only at phonological level, but also at the level of lexis (vocabulary) and syntax (grammar). Dialects are the broad range of social as well as regional varieties.

English as a social dialect

English is a social dialect; it depends on the speakers:

• General American in the US (also in many Asian countries, Latin America, and South Africa).
• Standard British English for educated speakers (England, Wales, Scotland, Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand). Also exists British English variety, formal and informal. In Britain, 12-15% speak Standard British (9-12% with regional accent).

Main differences between British English and General American

What are some of the main differences between British English and General American (or US English)?

Standard British English is spoken by educated speakers from England, Wales, Scotland, Republic of Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, but it also exists as a British English variety: formal and informal. In Britain, 12-15% speak Standard British (9-12% with regional accent). Standard English is applied in grammar and language, but not in pronunciation. General American is spoken in the US, but also in many Asian countries, Latin America, and in South Africa.

Accents

What is an accent? An accent describes variation at the phonological or sound level.

RP and Cockney

What are RP and Cockney?

RP stands for Received Pronunciation. It emerged in the early 19th century at Cambridge and Oxford University. It became popular thanks to the BBC during the '20s. The accent became "aspirational" because it was associated with the middle class, and everyone imitated them. The standard form of British pronunciation is based on educated speech in southern England, widely accepted as a standard.

• Non-rhotic "R", pronounced if followed by a vowel (e.g., mother and father)
• Intrusive "R" (I saw(r) it happened)

Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent most identified with the BBC (sometimes it is also known as the Queen's English or Public School English). In the 19th century, the "standard pronunciation" of English was largely associated with the army, public schools, universities, and civil service. RP is not associated with a region or a country, but it is an accent of socio-economic status, most notably membership of a traditional upper class. RP became much more influential as a style of speaking when the first head of BBC adopted it in the early 1920s as the preferred broadcasting standard, hence the term BBC English. More recently, there has been a shift in Britain towards regional accents among television and radio presenters. With less than 2% of the British population speaking with an RP accent, this "standard" has been increasingly widely recognised as no longer reflecting the voice of most of the audience.

Cockney English instead is the opposite of RP. Socially marked (it tells the level of education of the speaker), it’s especially used in East of London, working class.

• Dropped "H" (ouse - house)
• TH-fronting (bruvver - brother; fin- thin → alveolar)
• Glottal stops, replace "T" sound, closing vocal cord (wa’er - water)
• Rhyming slang (trouble and strife - wife; he’s quite Piccadilly - silly)
• Part dropping (I’m Calvin thanks - I’m fine)

Standard English

What is Standard English? Standard English is applied in grammar and language, but not in pronunciation. Standard English refers to any form of the language considered by some people as the ideal use of language for educated native speakers. It encompasses grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and to some degree pronunciation. It is normally considered the "correct" written version of the language.

Register

What is register? Register describes a variety of language which is distinctive for a specific context. It is a combination of choices that a speaker makes in each area of language graduation: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and layout.

The main register labels in the Oxford Thesaurus of English (2006) are the following:

• Informal: normally used only in contexts such as conversations or letters between friends
• Vulgar slang: informal language that may cause offence
• Formal: normally used only in writing such as official documents
• Technical: normally used in technical and specialist language, though not necessarily restricted to any specific field
• Literary: found only or mainly in literature written in an "elevated" style
• Dated: no longer used by the majority of English speakers
• Historical: still used today, but only to refer to some practice or article that is no longer part of the modern world
• Humorous: used with the intention of sounding funny or playful
• Archaic: very old-fashioned language, not in ordinary use at all today
• Rare: not in common use

Genre

What is genre? Genres are different types of media discourse, such as those found in tabloid newspapers, adverts, television soaps. Each type is identifiable because of specific features commonly associated with both its form and function.

Number of ways in which genres can be classified based on properties:

• Formal arrangement (structure, e.g., sonnet, poetry)
• Topic (e.g., biography, drama)
• Mode of address (how the text addresses its audience)
• Attitude or anticipated response (how the audience’s response is elicited in a variety of ways)

Genres are importantly about expectations that people bring with them when they go to see a film. It helps audiences to make sense of chapter and plot, for example.

Media rhetoric

What is media rhetoric? Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Two main purposes of much media language are:

• Informative: with statements of information (scientific discourse, public information), factual and objective discourses
• Persuasive: with statements of opinions (blogs, magazine features, personal reports), persuasive and based on a given point of view with modality markers (I think, in my opinion, apparently)

Level of certainty: He is right, He must be right, He is probably right, He may be right, He might be right. Medias are hardly neutral, functions are often intertwined. Rhetoric is not just persuasive speech but persuasive public speech. Rhetoric originates in classical Greek times. According to Aristotle, there are three ways that an audience can be persuaded:

• Ethos: audience believes the speaker to be fair and honest
• Pathos: what is said arouses emotion
• Logos: audience is persuaded by reasoning

Strategies most used are:

• Lexical choices (register, denotation vs connotation, expression of positive or negative evaluation)
• Figurative language: to alter and enrich the meaning (metaphor and metonymy)
• Sound patterning (alliteration, assonance, rhyme)
• Other types of verbal patterning

Newsworthiness

What is newsworthiness? An event, fact, or person that is considered to be interesting enough to be reported in newspapers or on the radio or television.

There is a list of qualities that make a story not simply informative, but newsworthy:

• Negativity (the basic stuff of news)
• Recency (something which has only just happened)
• Proximity (geographical closeness)
• Consonance (compatibility with readers' preoccupations)
• Unambiguity
• Unexpectedness (the rare is more newsworthy than routine)
• Personalization (that can be pictured in personal terms)
• Eliteness

Tabloids in business

What are the topics that keep tabloids in business?

• Negativity: damage, injury, death, conflict, deviation
• Unexpectedness: unusual events more valuable than routine
• Supportiveness: outstanding, e.g., the biggest building, the most violent crime
• Recency: something just happened
• Proximity: geographical closeness
• Consonance: compatibility with reader’s preoccupations
• Relevance: direct effect on reader’s experience
• Personalization: pictured in personal terms rather than generalized
• Eliteness: reference to elite people rather than the ordinary
• Attribution: quality of sources
• Unambiguity
• Facticity: figures at the basis of hard news - politics, war, crime, economics

News value

What gives an event news value?

The psychologist Jerome Bruner suggests that there is an "innate" human propensity to organize events into memorable stories. This is also common as a rhetorical vehicle for news, documentary, and advertising. Stories are useful as illustrations or ways of propagating points in favor of an organization. Stories function as a vehicle for stereotypes and are used for that purpose in propaganda and to manipulate.

To make a good story, the plot must consist of three conditions that combine to form a minimum structure:

• Temporality (the beginning, the middle, and the final state)
• Causation (the middle state causes the final state)
• Human interest (without this there is no narrative)

A narrative illustrates is a "sort of general truth with implications for the world in which the story is told as well as for the impact of events in the story itself". Media storytelling, including stories found in news, presents many examples both of first-person accounts of events and more distanced and impersonal styles of reporting.

Influence of news

How does the news shape the way we see the world?

I think the news doesn't always tell us the entire truth. In my opinion, most of the news that the media shows us now is just a few amounts of information that is not entirely complete at all. I think that news must be always similar in any country. Because personal interests are so different in other countries that news should meet the requirements of the people. There are a lot of things that don't matter at all and just feeds gossip. News is to inform people of what is important, not to feed the lust of Hollywood media.

Images in storytelling

How can images contribute to storytelling?

Media texts are combined with sound and music. There is an interaction between language (words and phrases) and "media language" (words, images, and sounds). Many media appear primarily visual.

Historically there have been a range of forms of combination: illustrated books, captions added to paintings, taglines in posters. Even with text that has no pictures, we might say that features of design (font, color, layout) are significant in our perception of printed text. One reason why television news is considered so believable is because of the simultaneous observation of action and verbal description of events that it allows. It is as a confirm, but at the same time, it leads you towards an interpretation.

Digital media versus traditional media

How does digital media differ from traditional speech in writing? What does its...