Sunday, December 4, 2011
10:28 AM
Three Ways Writing Skill
There are several ways to improve your writing skill. You can check in the following link
Three Ways Writing Skill
Three Ways Writing Skill
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Design of House
When you build a new house, you have to think the design of the house.Check it out
Design of House
Design of House
Definition of Register
Variation of
language can be seen from its user and its use with the characteristics such as
social-class membership, regional, origin, age, and sex. A useful term in
connection with this characteristic is dialect. While the term dialect is
convenient to refer to variation according to user, register can be used to
refer to variation according to use or sometimes also known as style (Leech et
all, 1982: 9).
Similarly, Sari
(1988: 149) point out that the term register has been applied to varieties that
is set apart from others by the social circumstances of their use.
The concept of register is typically concerned with
variations in language conditioned by uses rather than users and involves
consideration of the situation or context of use, the purpose, subject-matter,
and content of the message, and the
relationship between the participants" (Romaine, 1994:20). Register is thus a product of the
context of speech. Differences in registers consist solely of differences in
vocabulary. In summary, Registers function to reflect the relationships which
exist between speakers. Additionally, the register used in conversation
(especially when meeting people) communicates the assumptions that speakers
make about each other and the types of relationships which are sought and/or
established in communication. It is concerned with variation in language
conditioned by uses rather than users and consideration
of the situation or context of use
In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language
used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example,
an English speaker may adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending
in -ing with a velar nasal (e.g. "walking", not
"walkin'") and refrain from using the word "ain't"
when speaking in a formal setting, but the same person could violate all of
these prescriptions in an informal setting.
The term was first used by the linguist Thomas Bertram Reid in
1956, and brought into general currency in the 1960s by a group of linguists
who wanted to distinguish between variations in language according to the user
(defined by variables such as social background, geography, sex and age), and
variations according to use, "in the sense that each speaker has a
range of varieties and choices between them at different times" (Halliday
et al, 1964). The focus is on the way language is used in particular
situations, such as legalese or motherese, the language of a biology research lab, of a news
report or of the bedroom.
Hunt et. al states that register is the level of formality used when speaking or writing.
Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, authors of An Introduction to Language,
call it "a stylistic variant of a language appropriate to a particular
social setting, also called style" (535). Dell Hymes suggests that register, or social variation
in speech, is located along such dimensions as the kind of speech event being
engaged in (e.g. sales talk as compared to man-to-man talk), the roles of the
various parties (e.g. talk to children compared with talk to adults), the topic
of the discussion (e.g. children's talk about toys compared with their talk
about discipline), and the style of the discussion (e.g. whether informal or
formal). From this, we can conclude that the determinants of register include
social setting, situation, addressor and addressee, and topic. In other
words, language has to be appropriate to the individuals speaking and hearing
it, and it also must match particular occasions and situations. For
example, a sportscaster would not recount highlights from a football game in
the legal language used by lawyers and judges in a courtroom, nor would a
minister order a hamburger at a fast-food restaurant in the same style he
delivers his Sunday morning sermon. Both the sportscaster and the
minister adjust their style of speaking, or register, to fit the setting and to
avoid embarrassment, just as most people adjust their language constantly in
everyday speech depending upon whom they are speaking with and where they
are.
Linguistic varieties that are linked to occupations,
professions or topics have been termed registers. The register of law,
for example, is different from the register of medicine, which in turn is
different from the language of engineering--and so on. Registers are usually
characterized solely by vocabulary differences; either by the use of particular
words, or by the use of words in a particular sense. Registers are simply a rather special case of
a particular kind of language being produced by the social situation.
Moreover, register refers to a set of specialized vocabulary
and preferred (or dispreferred) syntactic and rhetorical devices and
structures, used by particular socio-professional groups for special purposes.
A register may have a set of derivational devices. It means that a register is
a property or characteristic of a language, and not of an individual or
a class of speakers. The example is abbreviations, blends, acronyms for
informal oral use, and lay use (journalism etc.)
Halliday and Hasan define register as "a
configuration of meanings that are typically associated with a particular
situational configuration of field, mode, and tenor. Register is a variety
according to use, or the social activity in which you are engaged. Halliday
says, "Dialects are saying the same thing in different ways, whereas
registers are saying different things." A speaker can use both a dialect
and a register at the same time. Imagine a speaker from the USA's "Deep South"
engaging in talk in situations where certain registers are required. For
example, a speaker from Alabama
speaks with her southern pronunciation, while the topic she discusses is the
latest programming language of her dot-com firm (register).
Register as a Variety of Language
Each language has its dialects and we can travel across one country and
find that each region speaks in quite a different dialect and that accents
differ from one place to another.
Then, we can take the example of the English and Spanish languages which have
variety depending on the countries where they are spoken. Therefore, if we are
in South America we will hear and speak a somehow different variety of Spanish:
the accent is totally different from the one in the Peninsula,
and in terms of vocabulary we can also find some 'false friends'. The fact that
English has been spoken in England
for 1,500 years but in Australia
for only 200, explains why we have a great wealth of regional dialects in England that is more or less totally lacking in Australia .
It is often possible to tell where an English person comes from to within about
fifteen miles or less. In Australia,
where there has not been enough time for changes to bring about any regional
variation, it is almost impossible to tell where someone comes from at all,
although very small differences are now beginning to appear.
It is unlikely however that there will ever be
as much dialectal variation in Australia
as there is in England.
This is because modern transport and communication conditions are very
different from what they were 1,500 or even one-hundred years ago. Even though
English is now spoken in many different parts of the world many thousands miles
apart, it is very unlikely that English will ever break up into a number of
different non-intelligent languages in the same way that Indo-European and
Germanic did. German and Norwegian became different languages because the
ancestors of the speakers of these two languages moved apart geographically,
and were no longer in touch and communicating with one another
Definition of Genre
Nowadays, the term “genre” is familiar for the educational institution
because of the reformation of the curriculum. It is one of the materials of
English teaching in junior and senior high school.
But actually, the term “genre” is used for many forms of expression in
some context. Movie critics refer to certain types of film as a genre. In
addition, music fans, talk about pop and rock as a genre.
On the contrary, Mulyani (2007:18) points out that genre is text which
are patterned in a distinctive way to achieve particular goal. It is obviously
states that the text which is called genre is written in certain arrangement to
achieve certain goal. In other word, each text of genre has different
arrangement and goal.
As far we know that people achieve certain goal, social goal especially
through language. It means that language is used to achieve social goals. In
this sense, language function to complain, to entertain, to amuse, to inform,
etc among other things.
Moreover, Mulyani states that genre is a way for accounting for the
predictable pattern of language (Mulyani, 2007: 19). Considering that
quotation, genre is concerned with the overall purpose of a text.
Meanwhile, Gerot and Wignel (1994:15) state that
So genres are
culture specific, and have associated with particular purpose, particular
stages, and particular features. Most people appreciate the fact that
Narratives (stories) and procedures (a set of instructions for doing
something), for example, differ in purpose and in the way they begin, develop
and end.
From the quotation above, genre is always associated with particular
purpose, stages, and linguistic features. The particular stages are distinctive
beginnings, middles, and ends.
In secondary education genres do not occur in isolation. Different
curriculum areas employ particular selections and patterns of genres. They do
this because they are trying to achieve different things.
In summary, genre in educational institution can be
defined as different text which has different goal or purpose, stages, and
linguistics features. This becomes the main material of teaching English in
high school in Indonesia
nowadays.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
