Sentence examples for contextual formality from inspiring English sources

This paper presents an investigation into how linguistic and contextual formality interact with one another from the point of view of British Sign Language (BSL) users.

Intriguingly, Halliday and Matthiessen class valuation as a feature of tenor rather than one of field, and although this study did not look into this feature, this categorisation seems to reinforce the idea that the tenor of the situation has the strongest influence on perceived contextual formality and employed linguistic formality.

She also notes that social and contextual variables, including formality, have influence on the linguistic style that BSL users adopt.

In the domain of sign linguistics, including the many sub-disciplines found therein, the links between contextual and linguistic formality are yet to be researched in as much detail as that which is found in the study of spoken and written languages.

This study therefore aims to shed light on the following questions: to what extent do Deaf BSL users agree with their interpretation of formality using contextual information, and what are the contextual features that contribute to the development of more formal or more informal contexts?

The goal of this research is to identify elements of context that have a significant effect on the language employed in particular communicative scenarios, with a further aim of identifying significant patterns of contextual elements that contribute towards formality or informality in language.

For words which might seem to be synonyms, such as soda vs. pop, or yes vs. yup, there is normally a difference in dialect, formality, or other contextual factors governing the use of the word.

The scenarios, when ordered from most informal to most formal (see Table 3), display common contextual themes towards both poles of a formality continuum.

Fig. 2 Cumulative percentage totals of formality level selections per contextual factor.

The results obtained from this study posit that there is an overall agreement shared between British Sign Language users when choosing levels of linguistic formality based on broad contextual description alone.

This visual representation demonstrates the difference in prominence of the four factors, especially with regards to 'Topic.' Fig. 1 Total number of individual formality level selections per contextual factor.