Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 10 Notes Anglistics

Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 10 Notes Anglistics Study Programme www. singidunum. ac. rs/admission

Anglistics Study Programme • Gerard Van Herk’s “What Is Sociolinguistics” Chapters 8 and 9

Anglistics Study Programme • In any social interaction, the language used is determined by more than just the social characteristics of the participants-our communicative competence (meaning our awareness of how language interaction works in our community) also lets us express the same idea in various ways.

Anglistics Study Programme Content-wise: saying “Would you please pass the remote? ” is basically the same as saying “Gimme the remote!” But obviously they will be interpreted very differently by people who are socially capable. People evaluate an interaction and decide which way of speaking is best suited to it, and change their language (and expectations) accodigly.

Anglistics Study Programme • Style is what we use to describe this intraspeaker (’within the speaker’) variation. • During a relaxed conversation with friends you may not consciously say to yourself “Oh, this might be a good time to use contracted forms and fewer educated words” but your language shows you’ve made that decision anyway-you must be carrying around information about how other people evaluate contractions and educated words-as well as how they assign social meaning to any particular type of interaction.

Anglistics Study Programme • Our style choices include deciding which social characteristics to reveal or perform-just as people ‘do’ gender they also ‘do style’ (it’s all part of a performance!)

Anglistics Study Programme • The simplest sociolinguistic conceptualization of style is degree of formality-we use formal style when we are looking for (overt) prestige and when we pay attention to our speech. We use informal style in a more relaxed situation and/or when overt prestige is not our goal. • Labov’s early sociolinguistic discussions of style focus almost entirely on the formal/information distinction as it relates to attention to speech.

Anglistics Study Programme • Since researchers were most interested in obtaining and analyzing natural speech they paid attention to the style component in order to find the most natural part of their recordingswhere speakers used casual, rather than careful, speech. • Their earliest work measured paralinguistic channel cues-tempo, pitch, breathing rate, and laughter-to identify casual speech.

Anglistics Study Programme These paralinguistic channel cues were used to tap into different levels of awareness of speechthe basic pattern identified was that the more formal your style was, the more your speech resembled the prestige groups above you.

Anglistics Study Programme • Early sociolinguistic research developed a range of tasks that lead speakers had to pay more or less attention to in their speech in order to elicit the less formal to the more formal speech:

Anglistics Study Programme • The sociolinguistic interview-not as informal as completely casual speech among intimates but tries to focus speakers’ attention away from language through a structure that approximates normal conversations and through questions that engage the speaker

Anglistics Study Programme • Reading passages require people to read a paragraph or two aloud-they are constructed to include all the sounds that might interest the researchers. • A word list-to be read aloud, involves even more focus on languages since the words don’t link to create meaning-lists are constructed to include all the sounds that might interest the researchers.

Anglistics Study Programme • Minimal pairs of words that differ by only one sound-leads to even more attention to speech, especially if the pronunciation different between the words is affected by the speaker’s local accent-ex. Of New Yorkers being r-less (God and guard) • This only works if your informants can readideally fairly fluently. If not, you need to develop other tasks-like repeating what the researcher says, or having them retell a story.

Anglistics Study Programme • The data that researchers get from this allows them to determine whether the speakers are actively conscious of the social meaning of a particular variable-for example, if a speaker does more g-droppin’ in an interview than in a word list, it’s a sociolinguistic marker. If the speaker has the same pronunciation of the LOT vowel but another pronounces it differently, it’s a sociolinguistic indicator.

Anglistics Study Programme • Some methodological problems with the attention-to-speech model: it’s hard to separate casual from careful speech-people can consciously shift into informal and formal styles. Some even slip into stylized vernacular ‘performances’ –but the attention-to-speech model was never intended to explain all style shifting-just what was needed to evaluate data from sociolinguistic data collection methods.

Anglistics Study Programme • Audience design was developed partly as a result of the limitations of the attention-tospeech model. People shift styles to accommodate to audience members. Basically, people try to sound more like their interlocuters -to converge toward the people they’re talking to (and occasionally if their interlocutors are not nice people, or if they want to establish social distance from them-to diverge-that is, to sound less like them).

Anglistics Study Programme • We can talk about degrees of closeness: interlocutors, auditors (part of the conversation group, but not addressed), overhearers (nonparticipants within hearing), eavesdroppers (not participants or known) and referees (people who aren’t there, but act as a model for the speaker-an invisible judge). • The ‘closer’ the person is, the more the speaker accommodates them. See example of travel agency employee who shifted toward the (class) variety of customers.

Anglistics Study Programme • Topic and setting effects are derived from interlocutors (speakers associate particular addressees with particular topics and settings). The hypothesis requires the amount of style shifting to decline as the ‘gravity’ (closeness, power) of the interlocutor decreases. Thus, the model predicts that topic shifts will be smaller than addressee shifts-and this is usually the case.

Anglistics Study Programme • The thing is, style shift seems to come from speaker prestige differences-as it’s always smaller in range-think of casual salesmen sounding like careful pipe-fitters. The point is that the differences between casual and careful pipe-fitters will be smaller than the difference between casual salesmen and casual pipefitters-implicitly because the differences between salesmen and pipe-fitters to teach us how to style shift.

Anglistics Study Programme • The style axion seems to be true most of the time so we need to find an explanation for the exceptions to this pattern-examples of studies in Ottawa or Tehran where the amount of style shift is much larger than the social shift-maybe these are situations of communities in which deference is foregrounded? Maybe linguistic stereotypes display unusual behavior-some isolated communities have highly distinct dialects-so there could be more of these hyperstyle variables than we think (being a VARIABLE where there’s more VARIATION, across STYLES, than there is between individuals or different social backgrounds.

Anglistics Study Programme • Sociolinguistic data collection methods don’t capture the full range of stylistic variation than speakers use-especially the most casual and intimate speech styles-plus, some of the most style-sensitive behaviors (like swearing) are the kind of things that most people avoid in sociolinguistic interviews-so they’re not the features usually studied.

Anglistics Study Programme • Other potential problems-we don’t know-nor how to measure-how speakers ‘size up’ their audience in order to fine-tune their speech-it’s also entirely reactive-and our languages choices aren’t merely set by the people we talk to-not leaving much room for speaker agency.

Anglistics Study Programme • The speaker design model-speakers use different styles to present themselves differently-leaves more room for the conscious creation and presentation of speaker identity. Linguistic features are seen as resources-and social practice matters more than do structures. In this model, all speech styles play a role in shaping all situations-ex. Of Cardiff radio DJ’s using different kinds of local dialect in different joking keys-to make fun of their inarticulateness, or to connect to local themes.

Anglistics Study Programme • Another example: an interviewee who used hyper-dialect to point out the artificiality of the sociolinguistic interview-something similar happens when sociolinguistics try to interview performers (such as musicians) who are used to being interviewed and thus switch into ‘on’ style in the presence of a microphone. Further: Maori speakers using more Maori English male speech features when speaking to female non. Maori interviewers-the solidarity building values of the features trumps the identitydifferentiating values.

Anglistics Study Programme • Though style shifting is seen as a skill by linguists, as something we all do-but can also have negative connotations-there’s a strong ideology of authenticity to speech (the whole ‘keeping it real’ viewpoint) in which too much shifting is seen as pandering-at the very least, as inauthentic. Ex. of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the 2008 election campaign. Some politicians are famous for adapting to their audiences though-think Fiorello la Guardia. English, Italian-Yiddish-even his gestures changed according to how he spoke, even with the sound off.

Anglistics Study Programme • It’s more likely that these politicians preconsciously shifted their whole way of being based on their audience. The sociolinguist/philosopher Pierre Bourdieu described this as hexis-the way of carrying ourselves that can include language. • Interestingly regional authenticity was rarely raised with respect to former President George W. Bush-even though he was born in Connecticut and attended Yale, his hexis is from Texas.

Anglistics Study Programme • The kind of studies that teach us the most about style shifting involve long-term ethnographic work returning to the same speakers-so we get to see multiple styles-in different genres. They look at broader features, discourse markers, even individual words-they’re often much less big-number quantitative, and more discoursey-the variants are often associated with attributes rather than dialects/varieties-second-order indexing-speakers of a particular variety may be associated with toughness or coolness, so using more of their speech features lets speakers build a tough or cool stance in a conversation

Anglistics Study Programme • In this way, a particular feature can show group affiliation but also do conversational work-like clinching an argument (adopting formal features) or show closeness (adopting local or addressee features). • So which features are most implicated in style variation? The locally salient ways of categorizing language, people, the world. The features will likely be common, salient, strongly associated with (local) social meanings-bringing us back to attention to speech-the features we attend to are going to be the ones that we use when we’re (consciously) creating our speaker identities through style shifting.

Anglistics Study Programme • Style shifting is often used by sociolinguists as a diagnostic-to determine whether a particular variant is a sociolinguistic marker-in which case, its frequency varies (depending on style) or an indicator (in which case it doesn’t).

Anglistics Study Programme • Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 -1975)-the archetypal obscure academic-his ideas: • any language is constantly being subjected to centrifugal forces-which whirl it apart into dialect diversity-and centripetal forces-which push toward the middle and lead to standardization • Language involves addressivity and responseall utterances are addressed to somebody and language results from a reciprocal relationships between speaker and listener-addresser and addressee

Anglistics Study Programme • Languages involve heteroglossia-double voicing-and language at any point is massively internally diverse, full of jargons and dialects, which act to flavor all components of the language-there are no neutral words and forms -they can belong to no one-language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents-all words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day, the hour…all words and forms are populated by intentions

Anglistics Study Programme • Every big of language has social meaning derived from how it has been used and interpreted in the past, so whenever speakers make linguistic choices, they’re drawing on all those social meanings to create their own mashup-which they expect to trigger a social interpretation in their listeners.

Anglistics Study Programme • Style is a shifty thing-but we also vary our language in ways that are not so split-second-register, like style, describes a type of speech, but is more closely associated with a specific speech situation, often related to an occupation or a particular pastime, so we can speak of legal register or ritual language register or sports announcer register-people often speak of recipe register-though we can think of recipe as a genre-it’s a widely recognized category of event with its own name-other genres: the novel, the political speech, the lecture, the knock-knock joke.

Anglistics Study Programme • A register associated with a particular occupation or activity often develops its own special vocabulary items known as jargon. It can involve special terms, as when linguists refer to fricatives or mediopassives, or specialized meaning for existing words, as when we give particular linguistic meanings to the words register or style. Jargon makes communication more effective for in-group members-but it also excludes non-members, or creates barriers to participation-sometimes this is the point-like with criminal ‘secret languages’-often called argot.

Anglistics Study Programme • Example of frequent flyer jargon-it is efficient, some of it may some meaningless to ‘nonmembers’ of the community-sometimes deliberately obscure terms are used to in order to tell members about loopholes or tricks without alerting search engines which would tip off the airline employees.

Anglistics Study Programme • Registers and genres differ across cultures (and perhaps across speech communities)-if a culture sharply distinguishes some occupations or activities, then there are likely to be different registers associated with those occupations or activities. Styles and registers and genres are all associated with particular linguistic properties-the same sentiment is expressed by the formal as the informal-look at examples given in the book.

Anglistics Study Programme • If you have a variety of styles and flavors to draw from when presenting yourself to others, some of those styles are going to be closer to what you and your community usually use, while others are going to ‘belong’ to other groups-we talked about passing-the goal being to be taken as a legitimate members or some group—and dragging, where the speaker and the audience are both aware the speaker is using something that belongs to someone else.

Anglistics Study Programme • Contrast passing and dragging with crossing-a term used mostly to describe the use of language features belonging to another ethnic group-which falls somewhere in between. In crossing, the speaker isn’t trying to pass as a member of another group, but may be claiming the right to be associated with that group-the authenticity itself is in question-does anyone have the right to use the feature associated with another group?

Anglistics Study Programme • Attempts at crossing are far more likely to be remarked on (by members of either the target group or the crosser’s own group). A fourth option is fleeing-speakers make sure that audience members from their own community do not interpret their behavior as an attempt to claim membership in, or familiarity with, another group that is not highly regarded by their community. Can you think of any examples?

Anglistics Study Programme • How well do we shift? Understanding genre differences seems to be more widespread among media-aware youth than among previous generations-people interact more with their media than they used to, and people have wider choices of interlocutors-readers in their teens and twenties are probably better than older people at knowing what linguistic features are appropriate in what genres or registers.

Anglistics Study Programme • To sum up-sociolinguistically competent members of a community may change their speaking style when paying more attention to their speech-they may change depending on their audience-either converge or diverge -or may change depending on how they want to present themselves-by changing styles, people associate themselves with particular groups rather than others, and through constant style shifting-and observing the shift of others-they define or redefine what it means to be a member of those groups. Variation between speakers can be described as style, genre, or register.

Anglistics Study Programme • The field of corpus linguistics is well set up to use a large-scale approach to questions of speaker agency-corpus linguists assemble huge collections (corpora) of language from multiple sources (such as conversations, newspaper/magazine articles, fiction, electronic media, lectures). They can tell us more about how members of a speech community understand the linguistic requirements of a particular genre

Anglistics Study Programme • https: //monoskop. org/images/4/49/Queneau_R aymond_Exercises_in_Style_pp_1 -26. pdf a fun look into how style changes-the same story is retold (about a chance encounter on a bus) 99 times in a different way each time