For a comprehensive analysis of a range of contemporary linguistic examples please see our Membership Package. It includes a shortlist of the best examples of 2021 that suit a range of essays. Each example includes a metalinguistic analysis with a “link to essay” guide. We also offer extensive plans (key ideas and pertinent examples) on a range of essays. We also offer a guide to the most efficient way of writing commentaries,
Please see: Welcome Page: Overview of English Works Notes and Resources
Link to Area Study 3
“Formal language has a variety of social purposes, including: – maintaining and challenging positive and negative face needs – reinforcing social distance and authority – establishing expertise – promoting social harmony, negotiating social taboos and building rapport – clarifying, manipulating or obfuscating.”
- To analyse “face needs” and “double speak” you need to have an understanding of the context of the discourse.
- Link to linguists’ comments and relevant essays/key ideas: for example Essay 7: negotiating face needs and Essay 4: Formal language
- Examples of doublespeak 2021: (the Aukus Deal; climate change policies; the rape allegations)
Australia Day 26th January 2021
From a discourse perspective, many commentators judged the Prime Minister’s comments regarding Australia Day as linguistically face threatening.
In his Australia Day speech, Mr Scott Morrison said: “When those 12 ships turned up in Sydney all those years ago, it wasn’t a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either,” .
He added that Australians had “risen above” their “brutal beginnings.”
Negative-face threatening linguistic acts.
According to Professor Marcia Langton, an anthropologist and professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, these comments were offensive to all Australians. It revealed a poor knowledge of Australian history – there were 11 ships.
Positive-face threatening linguistic acts and double speak
From a positive-face threatening perspective, she believed it was heartless and inappropriate to compare the deaths of 46 convicts on the ships to a possible 1 million lives lost among the indigenous population. She deemed the attempt to equalise the pain is offensive to the First Nations people.
From a semantic perspective, the adjective, “flash” as in a “flash day” euphemistically camouflages a brutal history.
Professor Langton labelled Mr. Morrison’s comments “cretinous” and an insult to the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Australians who lost their lives following European settlement.
- See Stan Grant’s article (Australia Day 2021): example of group and individual identities; and national identity.
- Many believe that this language perpetuates marketing spin that camouflages and obfuscates.
- See Mr Morrison’s reference to Ask Jenny
- According to Don Watson, author of Death Sentence: Public language is the language of public life … “It is the language of leaders more than the led, the managers rather than the managed.” (1). It is the “language of power and influence”. It veers from “shapely rhetoric to shapeless, enervating sludge”. See Don Watson’s comments and Public language and Don Watson .
- Return to: Essays and contemporary examples 2021 for language variation
- References to linguists and relevant commentators (which ones?)
- A range of commentaries (formal/informal/spoken/written)
- Return to our Welcome Page: Overview of English Works Notes and Resources