{"title":"Technical vocabulary in government spoken communications: The team of five million in bubbles, PPE and CBACs","authors":"Timothy Rossiter, Averil Coxhead","doi":"10.1111/ijal.12581","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The New Zealand government delivered regular 1 p.m. televised COVID-19 briefings from March 2020. These events had a crucial communicative function and were usually headed by top government and medical officials. This study focuses on technical vocabulary in a corpus made up of these briefings, including single words (grouped into technical word families) and acronyms (e.g., <i>bubble</i> and <i>PPE</i>) as well as the most frequent two to five-word multiword units (MWUs; e.g., <i>case numbers</i>, <i>genomic sequencing</i>, and <i>chains of transmission</i>) containing at least one technical single-word family member. The corpus consists of 20 prepared speeches: 10 each in 2020 and 2021 by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield (50,782 tokens). The results showed that 6.02% of the single-word families (e.g., <i>outbreak(-s)</i>, <i>contact(-s/-less</i>)) in the texts were technical, which may present a challenge for comprehension. Unsurprisingly, the Director-General of Health used more technical vocabulary than the Prime Minister. The top 20 MWUs containing technical vocabulary were identified in the corpus. Most were two-word collocations (e.g., <i>negative test, testing centre/s</i>, and <i>number of tests</i>). Implications for identifying and dealing with technical vocabulary in both government communications and language education are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":46851,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Applied Linguistics","volume":"34 4","pages":"1556-1574"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Applied Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijal.12581","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The New Zealand government delivered regular 1 p.m. televised COVID-19 briefings from March 2020. These events had a crucial communicative function and were usually headed by top government and medical officials. This study focuses on technical vocabulary in a corpus made up of these briefings, including single words (grouped into technical word families) and acronyms (e.g., bubble and PPE) as well as the most frequent two to five-word multiword units (MWUs; e.g., case numbers, genomic sequencing, and chains of transmission) containing at least one technical single-word family member. The corpus consists of 20 prepared speeches: 10 each in 2020 and 2021 by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield (50,782 tokens). The results showed that 6.02% of the single-word families (e.g., outbreak(-s), contact(-s/-less)) in the texts were technical, which may present a challenge for comprehension. Unsurprisingly, the Director-General of Health used more technical vocabulary than the Prime Minister. The top 20 MWUs containing technical vocabulary were identified in the corpus. Most were two-word collocations (e.g., negative test, testing centre/s, and number of tests). Implications for identifying and dealing with technical vocabulary in both government communications and language education are discussed.
期刊介绍:
The International Journal of Applied Linguistics (InJAL) publishes articles that explore the relationship between expertise in linguistics, broadly defined, and the everyday experience of language. Its scope is international in that it welcomes articles which show explicitly how local issues of language use or learning exemplify more global concerns.