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Part of
The Corpus Linguistics Discourse: In honour of Wolfgang Teubert
Edited by Anna Čermáková and Michaela Mahlberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 87] 2018
► pp. 127–162

We can do without these words

Investigating prescriptive attitudes to meaning in a specialised discourse

| University of Macerata
This chapter deals with a Style Guide written in 2013 for the British Civil Service. It included a list of words to avoid, from the difficult and vague, to the metaphorical. Viewing the Style Guide as a genuine attempt to resolve problems with the Civil Service’s notoriously convoluted prose style, the study compares and contrasts the proscribed words with their use in the very documents that it was aimed to improve – online policy documents. It highlights discrepancies that are known to exist between the “proper” meanings of words and those that are found in the texts, and also reveals how comprehension problems are not just caused by lexis (metaphor in particular), but also by unusual or unexpected syntactical patternings.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Style Guides: “plain language” and “proper meanings”
  • 3.The language of politicians and politics
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Online policy documents
    • 4.2Investigating the “banned words”
  • 5.Pretexts for banning words
    • 5.1Difficult words, vague words, and metaphors
    • 5.2Always avoid metaphors
  • 6.Metaphors in administrative prose
    • 6.1A closer look at metaphor: ‘fighting and defending’
    • 6.2Collocational specialisation: ‘crime’, ‘disease’ and other collocates of ‘fighting and defending’
    • 6.3Syntactical specialisation
    • 6.4Summary
  • 7.Phraseological environments, “wrong” meanings and vague language
  • 8.A final word about the words
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.87.06phi
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