Sociolinguistics Three

1.    Cut to the chase

I’m going to skip over most of this, merely pausing to provide a link to the Wikipedia article on keigo, before getting into the real business of the final discussion task. I might also include a brief diversion here to note that I recognize the slight clash of mode and field I’ve got going on here, where I’m quite deliberately discussing academic matters in a style and medium more usually associated with more casual discourse. Whether you consider that to be successful or not is largely up to you.

2.    Death

It’s always the death penalty for these kinds of examples, isn’t it? Anyway, these two passages apparently come from different ‘types’ of British newspaper. Apparently that means tabloid and broadsheet, but could equally be left and right, or even editorial and reportage.

The primary task was to calculate lexical density, which I absolutely blew at last time, so I’m showing my working here. Lexical words are highlighted.

Passage A

The short, ugly life of Nicholas Lee Ingram ended as much of it had been lived: in anger, defiance and misery. The 31-year-old British-born murderer eschewed the traditional ritual of a last meal and a plea for mercy. When asked if he had any final statement, he turned and spat at the warden of the Death Row prison where he had spent a third of his life. Even his last, involuntary movements seemed to mirror his stony unrepentance. When the first massive charge was sent coursing through copper electrodes attached to his shaved head and right leg his fists clenched and his body snapped back in Georgia’s 1924 vintage electric chair.

62/111 = 56%

Passage B

British-Born killer Nicholas Ingram walked defiantly to his death in the electric chair early today, just minutes after two last ditch court appeals were turned down.

              The 31-year-old murderer – on death row since 1988 – spat across the chamber at the prison warder when asked if he had a last statement moments before his execution at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Centre at Jackson, Georgia. He had got into the chair himself – and even pushed himself back into it as the first 2,000 volt surge was applied. He shot back into the chair and remained motionless there with fists clenched until the current was turned off.

56/105 = 53%

I am now hugely paranoid about my ability to calculate lexical density. It’s basically nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs on the one hand, and everything else (including auxiliary verbs) on the other, right? What about noun phrases or other fixed expressions that may or may not be hyphenated according to style (31-year-old, last ditch, death row); how many words are they? How to you count proper nouns? Is Death Row really a proper noun? Am I just overthinking what is admittedly a pretty crude tool?

Gotta be honest, on the first read through I thought that passage A was ‘quality’ and B was ‘tabloid’, based almost solely on the use of the word ‘eschewed’  in A and the split-infinitive and adjectival form of ‘early’ where you might usually expect the comparative ‘earlier’ in the opening sentence of B.*

But good lord, A is opinionated and emotive. The vocabulary is just so much more marked than in B; ‘short, ugly life’, ‘anger, defiance and misery’ (no Oxford comma, note), ‘stony unrepentence’. In a few instances it’s possible to make a direct comparison –

A	B
…the first massive charge was sent coursing through copper electrodes…	…the first 2,000 volt surge was applied…
…when asked if he had any final statement…	…when asked if he had any last statement…
…the Death Row prison…	…the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Centre at Jackson, Georgia.
…where he had spent a third of this life…	…on death row since 1988…

It’s also interesting how the passages ascribe agency. In both the actual flicking of the switch is described in the passive voice (‘…was sent coursing…’ ‘…was applied…’) as you would expect. No-one wants to be the hangman, and even reporting on it as such represents something to be glossed over. More explicit is the movement of the executionee (a word I’ve just made up to avoided deciding between murderer, condemned man, victim, dead-man-walking, or any other more loaded term). In A, ‘his body snapped back’ and in B it ‘shot back’, but B also ascribes agency in the most explicit terms when it says that ‘[he] even pushed himself back as the first 2,000 volt surge was applied.’ I’m left wondering exactly how the reporter came by that information.

Then we also get to consider the steam-punk torture-porn details implicit in A’s final clause; the ‘1924 vintage electric chair.’ It’s why I mentioned the (admittedly vague, artificial) difference between op-ed and reportage before: B has more of the ‘neutral’ factual tone you’d expect of straight-up reporting, whereas A contain the kind of value-laden language you’d more typically expect to find in an opinion piece.

A’s The Mail, isn’t it? The only thing missing is a claim that electrocution can cure cancer.

*I’m very much in the ‘these are fine’ camp, but your more pompous style guides tend not to be.