ADAPTATION TO AUDIENCE

Exercise 

Look at the dialogue below. How does A's language change from his first utterance to his second?

Why do you think it changes?

A: Hi ... how's things?

B: I'm sorry ... do I know you?

A: Oh, I do apologize. I thought you were John ... I mean, I thought you were a friend. 

     A speaker's use of language changes depending on the person they are speaking to: their audience. In the dialogue above, A's use of grammar and lexis changes register and becomes more formal because he realizes that B is a stranger. In the same way, an adult will speak differently to a child than to another adult, a doctor will use different medical lexis when speaking to a patient than she would when speaking to another doctor. 

     In A's final utterance, he changes John to a friend because he needs to clarify John for B (a stranger). He is using a repair strategy. The act of saying the same thing but in different words more appropriate to the context, is often referred to as reformulation. Discourse markers such as I mean can be used to introduce a reformulation. 

     Another way we can adapt our language to our audience is to paraphrase (use different words to express the meaning of another word or phrase, often to make its meaning clearer). An example of paraphrasing is in the dialogue below:

In a car mechanic's workshop 

A: I'm afraid your fuel injectors have gone. 

B: I'm sorry?

A: The part that pushes the petrol into the engine. 

B: I see. Is that expensive?

     B has a better understanding at the end of the dialogue because A has paraphrased the problem words fuel injectors. Summarizing, on the other hand, is when you restate the message of a text but in fewer words. Discourse markers such as to put it another way, what I mean is, so and to sum up are used to introduce a paraphrase or a summary. 

😉