Repertoire

Another useful concept that focuses on the user rather than on the use of special registers is that of linguistic or verbal repertoire (Gumperz 1964:137). Trudgill defines this as the ``totality of linguistic varieties used [in different social contexts] ...by a particular community of speakers ...."

Since different speakers may have repertoires different from the set of varieties shared by the group as a whole, I would define repertoire as an individual's particular set of skills (or levels of proficiency) that permit him/her to function within various registers of (a) language(s). Different individuals' repertoires will vary (plus or minus, active or passive) and will be gradient (scaled from low to high proficiency).

This claim is based on certain observable phenomena:

• No individual (even highly educated) controls all registers of a language; each individual's repertoires vary when compared to other people's, both in domain and proficiency.
• A person's individual repertoires may be diglossic and/or multilingual: s/he may be able to function in the H and L domains of hsr. language and the registers assigned to those domains, but also perhaps in a `foreign' (or classical, etc.) specialized register (e.g. for medical/technical/scientific usage, or religious usage.)
• Certain members of the linguistic community may lack active proficiency in certain registers but may passively understand them; this passive knowledge is culturally appropriate and not to be considered in any way aberrant.This would be the case for the Todas, where all adult males are expected to understand trance language but are not expected to speak it, or for language situations where men's and women's language differs dramatically, or for `bilingual' communities where groups understand each other's language but would never produce specimens of the other's speech, except to mock them, make jokes, or whatever.
• Despite the appearance of multilingualism, even of fluency in the manipulation of a particular register, particular individuals may be not have communicative competence in other registers of the same language. This is particularly true in the case of so-called `bilinguals' who have learned a particular register in a non-native situation.For example, a Pakistani doctor trained in her own country may be very fluent in an English medical/technical register, but may lack communicative competence in a `bedside-manner' register for speaking to patients in English; she might be more likely to possess the latter in Urdu, but not the former.

Examples of preferred syntactic patterns/rhetorical devices of a particular register:

• Legalese: prefers redundancy, long sentences: ``The party of the first part did willingly and knowingly will, bequeath, convey, impart, and transfer said property (described in Exhibit A) to party of the second part..." ``Plaintiff alleged that the defendent did slash, hold, beat, punch, kick, strike, stomp, pummel and beat (the plaintiff) ..."
• Medicalese: prefers acronyms and abbreviations, Greco-Latin vocabulary: ``Let's run a CAT-scan and then also check her SGOT's; take a look at that hematoma near the right-lateral tibia. Oh, and check the beta-quants in her lipids."
• Psychology: The APA Publication Manual, the style book of the American Psychological Association, sets policy for sixteen member journals and over two hundred non-member journals. In over 200 pages, it specifies that psychological writing should be clear and maximally informative, writers should use short sentences, the active voice of verbs, and eschew metaphors and figurative writing (Rhodes and Thompson, 1990).
• Linguistics: specialized jargon, lots of abbreviations (`LP', `GPSG', `GB'), rhetorical preferences (e.g., certain imperative verbs): ``Consider the following data from Madurese..." ``Observe that daughter-adjacency is more common in ..." ``Recall that lenition must precede palatalization..." but not ``*Think about the fact that...", ``*Remember that there is an ordering paradox iff..." or ``*Take a gander at these data from Okeefenokee..."
• Financial/Stock-market: Inanimate objects (commodities) are anthropomorphized: ``Silver suffered today, gold took a beating, but oil futures and aerospace are looking hopeful."
• Other registers: may prefer the active voice or the passive voice; multisyllabic words to monosyllabic (`An ornithological specimen in digital captivity is more valuable than double that number concealed in the umbrageous foliage' for `A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.'); rhyming slang (Cockney), alliteration (`nattering nabobs of negativism'), etc.

It may be instructive to compare linguistic registers and repertoires in a way that shows both the properties of registers (as characteristics of a particular language) and individual linguistic repertoires that may be diglossic or multilingual (but not fluently multilingual, only controlling a particular set of registers). The chart in Fig. 2.3 attempts to display a wide range of possible registers that might be found in a selection of languages; it also shows that particular inventories of registers of particular languages are a subset of all the possible registers, and that an individual's repertoire may show mastery of some registers in one variety of a language, some in another variety, and some in a totally distinct language.

 

Figure: Particular registers, general registers, and one individual's diglossic repertoire.