The Formality of the Latinate Lexicon in English

Abstract

The hypothesis tested is that under instructions to be formal or in tasks that very in formality, English words whose origins are Latinate will be chosen in preference to words whose etymologies are Anglo-Saxon. In the first experiment, instructions to be neutral, moderately formal or very formal led to the completion of sentences by words that were Latinate and rare in preference to Anglo-Saxon synonyms. The second study asked subjects to imagine themselves in situations that were less or more formal, e.g., talking to a friend v. a job interview. The choices can be explained by textual frequencies of the words rather than their etymologies. Finally, a replication of the first experiment with neutral and strongly formal instructions indicated again that formality implies Latinate, textually infrequent words. We conclude that the strategy to be formal in writing or speaking must be explicitly given to the subjects and that the situations that call out Latinate choices must be unequivocally formal.