Sociolinguistics

1
Sociolinguistics

• Styles
• Dr Emma Moore

2
Contents

• What does it mean to talk about style in
  sociolinguistics?
• What frameworks have been developed for studying
  style?
• How is the latest style research undertaken?

3
What we know about style already Style
attention to speech
Eliciting tokens of /r/ A Where is .? B On
the fourth floor. A Excuse me? B The fourth
floor.
Unconscious response
Careful articulation (more attention paid to
speech)
Labov (1972) NYC department stores
4
Labov (1972) NYC results
More /r/ in more careful speech styles
5
Attention to speech as a continuum of style

• Formal to informal styles
• Based upon the type of speech event

Word list
Reading
Careful (interview)
Casual (friends)
6
Is type of speech event the only thing that
affects style?

• Cheshire (1982)
• Reading adventure playgrounds
• Groups of delinquent children (WC)
• Considered style shifting
• Language used with peers
• Language used with the teacher in school
• Style shifts according to setting and audience

7
More evidence for the importance of setting and
audience

• Coupland (1984)
• Travel agency corpus
• Travel agent in conversation with clients
• Analysed several variables, including the voicing
  of intervocalic /t/ b?t? b?t?
• The voicing of the travel agent was affected by
  the level of voicing used by her client

?
8
Links to social psychology accommodation theory

• Giles Powesland (1975) Speech Accommodation
  Theory
• Speakers accommodate their speech to their
  addressee in order to gain approval

9
Speech accommodation

• Convergence movement towards ones addressee
• Divergence movement away from ones addressee
• Noddy and Barney in Cheshires study?

10
Audience Design as an approach to style

• Bell (1984) Speakers style shift as a response
  to their listeners
• Studying a radio newsreaders pronunciations on 2
  different stations
• Newsreaders style is determined by his
  audience

11
Audience Design as an approach to style
Speakers show a fine-grained variability to
design their style for a range of addressees, and
to a lessening degree for other audience members
such as auditors and overhearers (Bell 2007 97).
Style shifts according to topic or setting
derive their meaning and direction of shift from
the underlying association of topics or settings
with typical audience members (Bell 2007 98).
12
The latest work on style

• Approaches which view style as the product of
  type of speech event, context/setting and/or
  audience may be limited
• Suggests that all styles are pre-existing

13
Style as creative

• Speakers dont just use language to express
  pre-existing styles but can use language to
  create new styles
• Speakers may not just be accommodating to an
  audience but designing their own talk to
  determine how they are perceived
• Linguistic variables are dynamic and can be used
  to create a range of meanings

14
How do things mean? The case of the Mickey Mouse
watch

• What does the wearing of a Mickey Mouse watch say
  about someones style?
• Depends whose wearing it!
• What is it worn with?

15
Style and its meaning

• Eckert (2000) (ay) in the Detroit suburbs
• The raising of the nucleus of (ay) is an urban
  feature, and is favored by kids who are alienated
  from school, and who resist adult domination
• Tends to be used by Burnouts rather than Jocks

16
Audience design interpretation?

• Burnouts use raised (ay) more, so this feature
  probably means burnout
• Traditional accounts might say that a non-burnout
  using raised (ay) is accommodating to burnout
  style, or associating themselves with burnout
  status

17
Is it that simple?
Connie a working class jock who prides herself
in being more authentic independent than her
peers.
Judy the most burned-out burnout
Jock, Burnout
18
The meaning of (ay) a linguistic Mickey Mouse
watch?

• Is Connie trying to be a burnout (Audience
  designing her talk to converge towards her
  burnout peers)?
• Or is she using (ay) to create a new identity as
  an independent jock?
• (ay) raisings association with resistance serves
  as a useful resource for Connie

19
Style as bricolage (Hebdige 1979)

• We decode linguistic variables according to
  their context
• Sociolinguistic style is no different to style in
  any other other realm of life (Irvine 2001)

Style is a socially meaningful clustering of
features, within and across different linguistic
levels and modalities (The Half Moon Bay Style
Collective 2006)
20
Styles and ethnography

• The understanding of speakers styles requires
  ethnography
• Who do speakers hang around with?
• What practices do they engage in?
• What repertoire of linguistic features do they
  use?
• How do they dress?

How do all of these things make language
meaningful?
21
Linguistic features and styles

• Linguistic features can be intimately tied to
  social practices
• Eckert (2000) vowels jean width

22
Modelling style Communities of Practice
Community of Practice (CofP) an aggregate of
people who come together around mutual engagement
in an endeavor (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet
1992464).

• The people at the Joness breakfast table, in
  Mrs. Constocks Latin class, or in Ivans garage
  band get together fairly regularly to engage in
  an enterprise. Whether the enterprise is being a
  family, learning (or not learning) Latin, or
  playing music, by virtue of engaging over time in
  that endeavour, the participants in each of these
  groups develop ways of doing things together.
  They develop activities and ways of engaging in
  those activities, they develop common knowledge
  and beliefs, ways of relating to each other, ways
  of talking in short, practices. Such a group is
  what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) have
  termed a community of practice (Eckert and
  McConnell-Ginet 2003 57).

23
Findings from CofP studies

• The meaning of nonstandard were in a Bolton high
  school (Moore 2004)

Townie Anti-school rebellious behaviour Sporty/OTT
style
Popular Anti-school attitude Sporty/ Feminine
Style
24
Findings from speaker-design style studies

• The social meaning of word-final /t/
• Bucholtz (1996) - adolescent geeky girls
• Ashburn (2000) - science fiction fans
• Benor (2001) - Orthodox Jews after Yeshiva
• Podesva et al. (2001) - gay activist lawyer for
  mainstream audience
• Campbell-Kibler (2003) - perceptions of
  undergraduate students
• Sclafani (2007) - parodies of Martha Stewart

25
Attention to speech

• Determined by levels of formality
• Informal style
• Formal style
• Casual style
• Reading style

26
Audience design

• Determined by audience
• School/teacher style
• Vernacular culture style
• WC style
• Female style

27
Speaker design/creative styling

• Determined by the wider style of the speaker
• Independent jock style
• Townie style
• Geeky girl style
• Gay lawyer style

28
Summing Up

• Style has always been an important concept in
  Sociolinguistics
• Style can defined as
• Attention to Speech (Labov 1972)
• Audience Design (Bell 1984)
• Speaker Design/Creative Styling (Eckert 2000,
  Moore 2004)

29
Selected References

• Bell, Allan (2007) Style and the linguistic
  repertoire. In Carmen Llamas, Louise Mullany
  Peter Stockwell (eds.), The Routledge Companion
  to Sociolinguistics. London Routledge.
• Coupland, Nikolas (2007) Style Language
  Variation Identity. Cambridge CUP.
• Labov, William (1972) Sociolinguistic Patterns.
  Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Eckert, Penelope (2000) Linguistic Variation as
  Social Practice. Oxford Blackwell.
• Moore, Emma (2004) Sociolinguistic style A
  multidimensional resource for shared identity
  creation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 49
  (3/4) 375-396.
• Required Reading Meyerhoff 2006 (Chapter 3)