EngLang formal metalanguage

Social distance 

Authority (the perceived power that a person or group holds)

Expertise (high level of knowledge on a specific subject)

Clarifying (using clear language to ensure that audiences can clearly understand the speaker/writer's meaning)

Manipulating (emphasising specific elements of a message (and downplaying others) to influence the response from the speaker/writer's audience)

Obfuscating (using deliberately vague or confusing language that is difficult for an audience to follow)

Referential

Emotive

Conative

Phatic

Metalinguistic

Poetic

• Positive politeness strategies:
• - emphasising similarity
• - showing interest
• - humour
• - offering compliments
• - using inclusive language

• Politeness markers:
• - interjections
• Eg. "Thank you" "You're welcome" (opposes informal language: "thanks" "no worries")

• Negative politeness strategies:
• - hedging
• - being indirect and ambiguous
• - using low modality verbs
• - apologising
• - applying other mitigating strategies

ensures all participants feel respected

builds connections as a way of achieving social harmony

shows respect for participant's autonomy

aims to not directly challenge or impose on audience

• Promoting social harmony:
• non-discriminatory language
• euphemism
• politeness strategies

• Negotiating social taboos:
• (avoids negative connotations)
• euphemisms
• figurative language
• neutral lexical choices
• highly technical language
• nominalisation
• use of tense

• Building rapport:
• (provides participant the agency to engage in the discourse or not)
• (respects social distance/autonomy and allows for connection in a methodical and considered way)
• positive/negative politeness

• (aims to not offend or isolate anyone)
• (aims to not divide audience while achieving purpose)
• (used with strong hierarchies - authority)

• euphemisms
• mitigating strategies 
• Passive sentences/agentless passive voice (syntactic)

• jargon (can clarify or obfuscate)
• complex/embedded sentences

• Patterning:
• (articulates complex ideas and demonstrates planning)
• antonymy 
• parallelism

• Clarifying:
• (ensures clear communication)

• Manipulating:
• (can be used to manipulate audiences by focusing the message on one viewpoint)
• (can promote a particular viewpoint as fact rather than opinion
• front focus/end focus)
• clefting

• Obfuscating:
• (intentional use of language to make it more difficult to discern)
• rhetoric (persuasion)
• "we're denied our agency, choice, and fundamental rights to be safe."
• jargon
• "Premium GRZ1 zoning"
• double speak
• "developer's dream"

• (often planned, edited and rehearsed)
• (often prioritizes clarity and promotes a professional and authoritative tone)
• (control communication and help ensure their purpose is achieved)

• Used to contact or introduce people/topics
• Eg - Acknowledgement of Country

• Used to meet politeness strategies
• Establishes whether the interaction was successful for the participants

• Used to meet politeness strategies
• To ensure clarity (FAQ section on a website

Provide feedback for the speaker - affirmation, showing support, or signaling enthusiasm

• (less common in formal than informal)
• can signal a power imbalance between participants
• can signal that the social environment is not harmonious

• Often used to organise conversation or speech
• Can help improve the flow of speech by signaling topic chances, of to soften blunt statements

• (less common in formal than informal)
• May signal that the speaker is taking time to formulate a thought or trying to remember their prepared talking points 
• Can be used in a planned way to create emphasis

• Malapropism
• Elongating a word
• Mispronunciation 
• false starts
• fillers

• Can be planned and woven carefully into discourse
• Reveals information about the power structures between speakers (social heirarchy/authority)

• Smooth and directed - interlocuters fulfil societal expectations of completing adjacency pairs and responding to interrogatives/imperatives
• Person of greater power uses imperatives

Impacted by whether they are aiming to present themselves as authoritative or having expertise, or the situational context and hierarchal roles.

• Repetition (may be used to compound an idea)
• substitution and ellipses (may be used to avoid redundancy and overused phrasing)
• Lexical choice
• synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, hypernymy, jargon
• Collocation
• co-occurring words
• Information flow
• clefting
• front focus
• end focus
• Refencing
• anaphoric, cataphoric and deictic referencing
• Repetition
• Used to ensure audience understands main arguments
• Emphasises key points
• Creates rhythm
• Substitution
• replacement of words
• Elipses
• when a word is assumed to be understood in a context
• Conjunctions
• Tying phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs
• Formal texts avoid using conjunctions to begin sentences
• Adverbials
• acts to signpost the order of the texts

• Cohesion
• Inference
• helps audience make connections that are not explicit in the text
• Logical ordering
• demonstrates it has been planned to flow in a logical manner
• Formatting
• the expected positioning and appearance of the information contributes to the ease in which it can be found
• Consistency
• spelling, punctuation, tense, voice and referencing
• Conventions
• Can communicate authority and expertise
• Indicating established knowledge and familiarity of the required expectations

• Fits in
• Exhibits
• Supports
• Underscored by
• Can be observed
• attempting to
• attends to
• this is continued
• demonstrates/shows
• uses
• reflected in
• shifts
• to refer to
• coupled with
• addresses
• furthermore
• is an example of
• clearly indicative of
• implemented to