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The five clocks
- 主题发起人 melissa
- 时间
who can tell me where I can find the details of the book the five clocks by Martin Joos? I want to know the specific criteria of the five styles discussed in this book.回复: The five clocks
The Five Clocks by Martin Joos (Harcourt, 1967, c1962) is a delightful essay that takes a more sophisticated stance toward linguistic variation. In his introduction to the Harbinger paperback edition, Albert Marckwardt (himself a distinguished linguist) recalls the origin of Joos’s original essay. He had been teaching a course in Modern English Grammar to a group of thirty-eight experienced teachers. He began by inviting their response to a two-paragraph passage. They unleashed the red pen of their critical minds and castigated the work as the messy, awkward work of a teenager, full of slang and grammatical errors. Actually the passage was an excerpt from the memoir of a Pulitzer-prize winning author.
The author’s style had drawn the ire of Miss Fidditch. Working with his class, Joos came up with his “five clocks” as a way to explain stylistic variations in language.
Language varies for many reasons. Joos particularly points out several scales: age (baby talk, teenage slang, for example), breadth (from provincial to standard to genteel), responsibility (bad to good). The scale that he dwells on is style; he identifies five variations or “clocks,” all of which are appropriate (indeed, almost required) in certain situations.
We have children living in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; Madison, Wisconsin; Portland, Oregon; and Canberra, Australia. If we want to know when to call them on the telephone or how to talk with them when they answer, we need to keep four clocks—five if we happen to be in London. Just as we adjust our clocks to different time zones, so we adjust our language to different situations.
The first three of Joos’s “clocks” are all informal: (1) intimate, the language used between, say, a husband and wife, almost nonverbal; (2) casual, for friends, acquaintances, insiders, making use of slang, ellipses, and verbal formulas (“Been there; done that!”); (3) consultative, language used in negotiating with strangers, distant acquaintances, or colleagues of unequal rank. The fourth clock, formal, is required when the group becomes too large to permit participation, and the speaker is uncertain how much the audience already knows or how they might react. Hence, the language must become more cohesive, more detached, more carefully informative. The fifth, and most enigmatic clock, Joos labels as “frozen” language, or a “formative clock.” It is language used in a text that is read and re-read, that must stand intact, that must address an audience of absolute strangers, that cannot depend upon the speaker’s intonation or the reader/hearer’s asking for clarification. Literary texts, religious rituals, historic documents exemplify “frozen” language: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Lord’s Prayer, the Preamble to the US Constitution.
“Good intimate style fuses two personalities. Good casual style integrates disparate personalities into a social group . . . [in which] the personalities complement each other instead of clashing. Good consultative style produces cooperation . . . . Good formal style informs the individual separately, so that his future planning may be the more discriminate. Good frozen style, finally, lures him into educating himself, so that he may the more confidently see what role he chooses.” (p. 40)
So is one style right or wrong? Is one style better than another? Do educated folk avoid colloquialisms? Are sentence fragments always a sign of incompetence? Skillful users of language will adjust their style to each situation. Informal styles reward spontaneity. (That makes language use difficult for the reticent.) Formal style rewards planning and empathy. (That makes language use difficult for those who are impatient or self centered.) Frozen style rewards multiple drafts and linguistic choices that will engage an unknown reader. (That makes language use difficult for the unimaginative person.)
One must adjust one’s clock to the time zone one is in. Let’s see now, what time is it where you’re talking from? Gotta reset our watches when this crate passes the border. Time is ’t?
cf: http://www.librarything.com/work/118087
The Five Clocks by Martin Joos (Harcourt, 1967, c1962) is a delightful essay that takes a more sophisticated stance toward linguistic variation. In his introduction to the Harbinger paperback edition, Albert Marckwardt (himself a distinguished linguist) recalls the origin of Joos’s original essay. He had been teaching a course in Modern English Grammar to a group of thirty-eight experienced teachers. He began by inviting their response to a two-paragraph passage. They unleashed the red pen of their critical minds and castigated the work as the messy, awkward work of a teenager, full of slang and grammatical errors. Actually the passage was an excerpt from the memoir of a Pulitzer-prize winning author.
The author’s style had drawn the ire of Miss Fidditch. Working with his class, Joos came up with his “five clocks” as a way to explain stylistic variations in language.
Language varies for many reasons. Joos particularly points out several scales: age (baby talk, teenage slang, for example), breadth (from provincial to standard to genteel), responsibility (bad to good). The scale that he dwells on is style; he identifies five variations or “clocks,” all of which are appropriate (indeed, almost required) in certain situations.
We have children living in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; Madison, Wisconsin; Portland, Oregon; and Canberra, Australia. If we want to know when to call them on the telephone or how to talk with them when they answer, we need to keep four clocks—five if we happen to be in London. Just as we adjust our clocks to different time zones, so we adjust our language to different situations.
The first three of Joos’s “clocks” are all informal: (1) intimate, the language used between, say, a husband and wife, almost nonverbal; (2) casual, for friends, acquaintances, insiders, making use of slang, ellipses, and verbal formulas (“Been there; done that!”); (3) consultative, language used in negotiating with strangers, distant acquaintances, or colleagues of unequal rank. The fourth clock, formal, is required when the group becomes too large to permit participation, and the speaker is uncertain how much the audience already knows or how they might react. Hence, the language must become more cohesive, more detached, more carefully informative. The fifth, and most enigmatic clock, Joos labels as “frozen” language, or a “formative clock.” It is language used in a text that is read and re-read, that must stand intact, that must address an audience of absolute strangers, that cannot depend upon the speaker’s intonation or the reader/hearer’s asking for clarification. Literary texts, religious rituals, historic documents exemplify “frozen” language: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Lord’s Prayer, the Preamble to the US Constitution.
“Good intimate style fuses two personalities. Good casual style integrates disparate personalities into a social group . . . [in which] the personalities complement each other instead of clashing. Good consultative style produces cooperation . . . . Good formal style informs the individual separately, so that his future planning may be the more discriminate. Good frozen style, finally, lures him into educating himself, so that he may the more confidently see what role he chooses.” (p. 40)
So is one style right or wrong? Is one style better than another? Do educated folk avoid colloquialisms? Are sentence fragments always a sign of incompetence? Skillful users of language will adjust their style to each situation. Informal styles reward spontaneity. (That makes language use difficult for the reticent.) Formal style rewards planning and empathy. (That makes language use difficult for those who are impatient or self centered.) Frozen style rewards multiple drafts and linguistic choices that will engage an unknown reader. (That makes language use difficult for the unimaginative person.)
One must adjust one’s clock to the time zone one is in. Let’s see now, what time is it where you’re talking from? Gotta reset our watches when this crate passes the border. Time is ’t?
cf: http://www.librarything.com/work/118087