Inglese III - Schemi

Investigating specialized discourse

Specialized discourse

Used for a specific topic and a specialized community.

• Informal language: Used in everyday life, with friends, relatives...
• Formal language: Used in specific situations, with unknown people, at work...
• Table on legal language
• Terms used to define specialized discourse: restricted, special and micro-language

Lexical features

• Mono-referentiality: One term, one meaning, no synonyms
• Lack of emotion: Terms have a pure denotative meaning
• Precision: No euphemism
• Transparency: The possibility to access a term’s meaning through its surface form (suffixes and prefixes)
• Conciseness: Terms are expressed in the shortest possible form
  • No derivation
  • Merging two lexemes into a single word
  • Reduction of words
  • Juxtaposition
  • Acronyms and abbreviations
• Conservatism (only in legal language)
  • Archaic forms
  • Reasons of this phenomenon
  • Reforming legal discourse: changes in legal documents destined to common people
• Redundancy (used in legal language): Saying something not necessary that can be omitted
  • Two terms with the same meaning (sign of conservatism)
  • Expressions in which the meaning of a word is implied in its parallel
  • Repetition of a concept through its negated opposite
• The relationship with general language:
  • Process of specialization of words borrowed from general language
  • New terms alongside existing ones which are no longer appropriate
  • Borrowings from classical languages: 5 phases:
    • Roman occupation (from Latin)
    • 6^th and 7^th centuries (religious terminology)
    • Renaissance (re-discovery of classical languages)
    • 17^th and 18^th centuries (scientific revolution)
    • Last two centuries and nowadays (reservation of original inflection and spelling of suffixes and prefixes)
• Metaphor: Using a word in a figurative way. It’s another device used to create terms drawn from general language. Advantages: transparency, conciseness and the possibility of representing abstract and complex concepts, that would be difficult to define.
• Lexical productivity: Words that before were specialized and now have become general.

Syntactic features

• Omission of phrasal elements (conciseness in grammar): Omission of articles and prepositions, to make the text more compact.
• Expressive conciseness: To avoid relative clauses and make the sentence structure lighter
  • Substitution of relative clauses with adjectives
  • Simplify relative clause with passive form, omitting the subject and the auxiliary or turning the verb into a past participle, used as a pre-modifier
  • If the subject or an adverb are to be specified, they are placed before the participle, linked with a hyphen
  • Transformation of relative clause into a present participle
• Pre-modification: Nouns and adjectives go before the noun they refer to.
  • Nominal adjectivation: the use of a noun to specify another with an adjectival function
• Lexical density: There are more content words than grammatical words, so the lexical density is high
• Sentence complexity: The typical structure of a sentence is simple: noun phrase + verb + noun phrase, they avoid subordination
• Sentence length: Sentences are simple but long, especially in legal discourse.