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138 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
age-grading
change in the speech of the individual as he or she moves through life
style-shifting
alternation between styles of speech included in a linguistic repertoire of an individual speaker
audience design
inguistic style-shifting occurs primarily in response to a speaker's audience. (Bell 1984)
sociolinguistics
the study of language in society/study of social worlds through language/language in a social context
What's the difference between socio and linguistic anthropology?
-socio research is quantitative, involving technical measurements and statistics, while ling anthro is firmly qualitative
the rainbow vowel space
There are basically an infinite number of colors in a rainbow, because any point along the rainbow is going to be a slightly different color.
Similarly, as you move parts of your mouth around and vocalize, any point at which you stop is going to be a slightly different vowel sound.
variables
-abstract structural unit
-set of variants that "each mean the same thing"
-example: TUlane, tuLANE
sociolinguistic variable
-a variable whose variants co-vary with an independent set of social variables.
-if the choice of one variant or the other correlates significantly with social factors.
speech community
A group of speakers who speak a common language, are in the same geographic area, and who all share similar ideas about speech norms (but don't all necessarily speak the same way.)
-shared norms
-shared sociolinguistic knowledge
-an individual can be a member of multiple speech communities
first wave of variation research
Research Methodology: Conducting surveys and sociolinguistic interviews in geographically defined settings (often urban).
Major contribution: Established connections between linguistic variables and the primary social categories of class, age, sex, etc. The first “official” first wave study was William Labov's 1966 study of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
second wave of variation research
Research Methodology: Ethnographic, longer- term studies of more locally-defined populations.
Major contribution: focusing on local social categories that link to broader demographic categories.
First second wave study was William Labov's 1963 study of Martha's Vineyard
third wave of variation research
Views variation not as a reflection of social place, but as a resource for the construction of social meaning.
generativist methodology
data is drawn not from actual speech, but from intuitions about the acceptability of grammatical patterns, called grammaticality judgments.
descriptivist methodology
Traditional fieldwork uses informants, native speakers who the researcher asks directly about features of their language.
Labov
founder of modern linguistics
-martha's vineyard study
-lower east side study
-not a fan of chomsky
vernacular
style that people use when they are not paying attention to their speech
observer's paradox
in order to observe natural speech, you have to collect it. But in order to collect it, you are changing the speech situation and making it unnatural.
sociolinguistic interview
an interview designed to elicit a range of speech styles, including the vernacular.
principle of quantitative modeling
We can examine the forms that a linguistic variable takes, and note which contextual features co- occur with those forms. With enough data, we can then predict the likelihood of a co- occurrence of a form and a contextual feature.
principle of multiple causes
It is unlikely that any single contextual factor can explain the variability observed in natural language data.
input probability
basic rate of use of a variable rule
Fischer 1958: The first (accidental) variation study
Fischer argued that the difference in behaviors between these two groups were related to their conformity to established adult norms. Typical boys were not interested in conforming to those norms. (ing/in)
Labov (1966) NYC Study
The Social Stratification of English in New York City.
-Labov looked at several variables, including some vowels and post-vocalic /r/, as in “car,” which historically is deleted in NYC dialect.
He also looked at (ING), our favorite.
-●
●
NYC Study: Key Claims
Labov noted that, if we just looked at individuals within this community on their own, their language use would look really irregular and random.
But, if we put them together and look at the community as a whole, a coherent pattern of variation forms.
-neighborhood study
neighbourhood study
a study that seeks to characterize the speech of an entire neighborhood, using rigorous sample selection methods and sociolinguistic interview data collection methodology.
Martha's Vineyard
Looked at 6 communities in MV: Aquinnah, Chilmark, Tisbury, Vineyard Haven, Oak Bluffs, and Edgartown.
Some of these communities were “Down- Island,” closer to big tourist areas, and others were in more rural “Up-Island” areas.
Canadian raising
Raising of /ay/ before voiceless consonants, even in the US
Labov MV
Labov found that age, desire to remain on the island, and occupation were the most significant social factors predicting centralization.
Labov (1963) Martha’s Vineyard – speech drew tourism brought $- Sutdied Chilmark
• looked at /ay/ raising – Canadian raising in Northeast
• looked at a variety of variables – middle aged fisherman most likely” Old time Yankees”
• redone in 2003 /ay/ no longer social id marker
what has changed in MV?
Income has increased dramatically: income is now average for the state, while in 1963 it was the lowest.
The town is larger than it was, with some summer tourists becoming year-round residents.
Young people are no longer going into fishing, so it is a dying profession.
Access to the mainland has improved, young people generally leave, at least for a while.
the great vowel shift
Happened during the 15th - 16th centuries
Marks the transition from Middle English to Modern English
Some changes:
– –
eh --> ee (“feet”)
aw --> oh (“boat”)
- ee --> ay (“mice”)
- oh --> ooh (“boot”)
Arbitrary relationship between form and meaning
In language, there is nothing about the word “dog” that inherently means a dog. It is an arbitrary relationship.
arbitrary relationship between form and social meaning
For the most part, there is no inherent reason why any particular form is considered prestigious, or correct, or stigmatized, etc.
Example: in America, we consider “dropping r's” to be stigmatized (e.g., “park”). In England, it is considered standard, while “r-ful” dialects are stigmatized.
four types of language change
1. Generational change
2. Community-wide change
3. Lifespan change
4. Age grading
generational change
“Regular” language change, the kind historical linguists are interested in.
Individuals don't necessarily change the way they speak over their lifetimes, but younger people speak differently from older people.
Community-wide change
For some reason, the whole speech community changes their language use abruptly.
Examples: taboos, extreme social upheaval like slavery.
lifespan change
●
●
Lifespan Change
Individuals change how they talk over their lifetime, generally to match changing community norms.
Example: Politically-correct language.
age grading (again)
Individuals change how they speak over their lifetimes, but there is no community-wide language change going on.
Generally involves “stable variables,” where variants exist in the language but don't seem to be increasing or decreasing in popularity over time.
Example: in/ing, t vs. flap (“butter”).
apparent time
We can look at speakers of different ages as a window into how language is changing from generation to generation.
Transforms a synchronic view into a diachronic view.
In the apparent time model, when we look at a group of 20, 40, and 60-year-olds...
We are actually looking at:
– – –
20-year-olds today 20-year-olds 20 years ago 20-year-olds 40 years ago
critical period hypothesis
Most researchers agree that adults have trouble learning new languages, while children seem to pick them up more easily.
Some researchers believe this is because there is a critical period in which children are able to acquire language.
apparent time: strengths
The history of high-quality audio recording is quite short. We can collect much better data today than we could 25 years ago.
When you collect your data all at once, you can make sure you are being consistent.
There are almost no communities with good real-time language data from long ago, so apparent time is our best (and only) option.
apparent time: problems
It's not actually a time machine – we don't know for sure how people were speaking many years ago.
It is hard to distinguish a real change in progress from age-grading, where younger people speak differently from older people but will change their speech to match the older people when they get older.
real time
-does the queen speak the queen's english
-we have recordings of her every year so we can do a case study in real time
trend study
a real time study that uses corpora (collections of data) from different time periods, involving different speakers, to look at change over time.
panel study
real time study that uses the same set of speakers, recorded over time.
age
“Age is a person's place at a given time in relation to the social order” (Penny Eckert)
Age as life stage.
language acquisition
Key principles that guide acquisition:
– –
Conventionality: say the same thing in the same way.
Contrast: if you say something different, it means something different.
the fis phenomenon
Children's comprehension abilities are often ahead of their production abilities.
Famous example: a child might pronounce “fish” as /fis/, but they won't accept that pronunciation from an adult because they can hear that it's wrong.
Child-Directed Speech
pecial type of speaking style people use when talking to children.
Higher-pitched, clearer, slower, and may contain more formal variants and fewer vernacular variants.
Smith et al. methodology (scottish babies)
To avoid the Observer's Paradox, researchers asked the mothers to do their own recordings, using minidisc recorders.
Got 10 hrs of data for each pair, which is good because you need a lot of time to get enough data from kids.
Also did sociolinguistic interviews of adults in the community, to get adult-to-adult data.
scottish, smith et al observations
The youngest kids use the least of the local variant.
As the children get older, caregivers use more and more of the local variant.
There is a statistically significant correlation between caregiver use and child use.
kids
Children are able to pick up on and adopt the sociolinguistic patterns they hear around them, by at least ages 3 or 4.
Children learn patterns of variation from their caregivers.
teens
“Adolescents and pre-adolescents are the movers and shakers in linguistic change.” (Penny Eckert)
-slang
slang
Slang: a casual, in-group synonym.
Slang has a short shelf-life. If it becomes part of a dialect and remains in use for several generations, it is no longer slang.
teens and sound change
Teens, and in particular teen girls, tend to be at the forefront of sound change.
Example: /uw/ and /ow/ fronting, currently (quietly) sweeping the nation.
adults
Most linguistics studies are about adults.
We have a tendency to see adults as the normal speakers, with all the other life stages working towards or falling away from this normal stage. This isn't necessarily a great view about how language works.
Most theories of how language works in society are based around the notion of the working adult speaker.
The Linguistic Marketplace
language varieties are competing in a market, where some types of language are valued more than others.
old people
Old people tend to be more linguistically conservative.
Also, they tend to use more informal speech forms than working adults.
-not a lot of research
social class
-most americans think of themselves as middle class
-not the same as caste; flexible
Max Weber (1864 - 1920)
German sociologist considered to be one of the founders of modern sociology.
Most famous for “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” studied how different religions have shaped Eastern and Western societies.
Weber's notion of class
Class is a combination of:
– – –
economic wealth social behavior attitudes and aspirations
Language use falls under social behavior.
operationalization
Defining an abstract concept like social class and creating a concrete method for measuring it
Class in sociolinguistics
SEC is a common factor in first wave variation studies, which tend to look at broad demographic categories (like class), and study urban areas with a lot of class variation.
Important relationship between class and the notion of standard language.
negative concord
Today, we consider this to be non-standard:
I didn't see nothing
-In fact, many European languages require negative concord, and so did English, back in the day
-This started changing in the 16th century, when negative concord fell out of favor.
different ways of collecting data
Department store study: Rapid anonymous survey
NYC study: Sociolinguistic interview
-ethnographic methods
hypercorrection
a phenomenon in which speakers attempt to fix a non-standard feature, and end up over-applying the rule.
spelling pronunications
Many “standard” pronunciations we have today are actually new pronunciations that people assume are correct because they sound more like the way the word is spelled.
Examples:
– – –
Often pronounced with the “t” Forehead pronounced as “fore-head” Palm pronounced with the “l”
Hyperforeignisms
n English, we have certain sounds that sound more “foreign” to us, and others that sound more “Englishy.”
We like to use these foreign-sounding sounds in foreign words, even when they don't belong there.
Examples:
– – –
Beijing (should rhyme with “paging”) Punjab (should be pronounced like “pun”)
Cannes (should be pronounced more like “can” than “con”)
Linguistic Insecurity
degree to which a speaker feels their speech differs from the variety they aspire to use (often assumed to be the standard).
The functional model
-Looks at society as an integrated system
-Various classes perform different roles in society, rewarded according to the importance of their functions and level of skill they require.
-Everyone is working toward a common good.
the conflict model
-Different classes have different interests
-classes struggle which leads to societal change
participant observation
an ethnographic method of fieldwork in which the researcher becomes part of the community. (ex. rickford, cane walk guyana)
Rickford's key point
It is a mistake to assume that everyone wants to speak the standard, prestige variety.
Nonstandard language has value, too: it shows solidarity with your peers, and opposition to the current social order.
social networks
networks of people who interact with one another
ties
-social connections between peopl-information-carrying, meaning that an individual can transmit information to another individual through a tie.
-more likely to hear a new linguistics variant through a weak tie
multiplex
our relationship with someone has multiple facets
spelling pronunications
Many “standard” pronunciations we have today are actually new pronunciations that people assume are correct because they sound more like the way the word is spelled.
Examples:
– – –
Often pronounced with the “t” Forehead pronounced as “fore-head” Palm pronounced with the “l”
Hyperforeignisms
n English, we have certain sounds that sound more “foreign” to us, and others that sound more “Englishy.”
We like to use these foreign-sounding sounds in foreign words, even when they don't belong there.
Examples:
– – –
Beijing (should rhyme with “paging”) Punjab (should be pronounced like “pun”)
Cannes (should be pronounced more like “can” than “con”)
Linguistic Insecurity
degree to which a speaker feels their speech differs from the variety they aspire to use (often assumed to be the standard).
The functional model
-Looks at society as an integrated system
-Various classes perform different roles in society, rewarded according to the importance of their functions and level of skill they require.
-Everyone is working toward a common good.
the conflict model
-Different classes have different interests
-classes struggle which leads to societal change
participant observation
an ethnographic method of fieldwork in which the researcher becomes part of the community. (ex. rickford, cane walk guyana)
Rickford's key point
It is a mistake to assume that everyone wants to speak the standard, prestige variety.
Nonstandard language has value, too: it shows solidarity with your peers, and opposition to the current social order.
social networks
networks of people who interact with one another
ties
-social connections between peopl-information-carrying, meaning that an individual can transmit information to another individual through a tie.
-more likely to hear a new linguistics variant through a weak tie
multiplex
our relationship with someone has multiple facets
uniplex
if your relationship has just one aspect
first-order ties
people we have direct ties to
second-order ties
people our first-order ties have direct ties to
dense networks
-most people know everyone else
-inhibit change
loose networks
networks in which many people don't know each other
core members
at the center of the network with ties mostly in-network
peripheral members
on the edges with lots of out- of-network ties
-more likely to introduce linguistic innovations
friend of a friend method
Once you've got one person, individuals with first-order ties to that person are more likely to be receptive to participating in your research.
Milroy & Milroy's Belfast Study (conducted in 1975)
Even though Clonard and Hammer are geographically close, there is thought to be no interaction between them due to the Protestant/Catholic divide.
So, we expect Hammer and Ballymacarrett, the Protestant areas, to be more alike.
-Milroy found that Ballymacarrett, one of the two Protestant neighborhoods that was off on its own geographically, was more different from the other two that were closer together.
-Milroy found that the speakers with the most dense social networks were the ones using the most vernacular (non-standard) features.
And, the most dense networks were to be found in Ballymacarrett.
Key Points for Social Networks
-Strong ties, weak ties
-Multiplex ties, uniplex ties
-Dense, loose networks
-Dense networks inhibit change
-Peripheral members introduce innovations
-Friend-of-a-friend method
community of practice
-a special type of social network
-a group of people who get together to do something.
ethnography
in-depth, holistic study of the culture and structure of a community of speakers
participant observation
basically observation, but you get to occasionally move around and talk.
sex v gender
you got this
gender exclusive
Features that must be used only by one gender, or only in reference to one gender
gender preferential
Features that are used more often by one gender
-we study more of these than gender exclusive features
ugh effing lakoff
-emtpy adjectives
-hedges
-super-polite forms
-tag questions
-special vocabulary
-question iontonation
-
Labov's Two (or Three) Principles
1. For stable variables, women use more of the standard than men do.
1a. For change from above, women use more of the standard than men do.
2. For change from below, women ALSO lead.

For stable variables and changes that people are aware of, women are more standard.
For changes that people aren't aware of, women are less standard.
local prestige
Desirable according to local norms, when local norms don't match dominant norms.
Southern English would be an example of a dialect with local prestige.
Points to Remember from The Whole Woman
Views power as the explanation behind differences in how men and women use language.
Women must rely on status more than men, use symbolic capital, including language, to establish status and construct identity.
Women will linguistically differentiate themselves more than men, as a result of this difference in the importance of status.
power
ability to do what you want
status
the prestige of one's position in society.
discourse
a shared set of thoughts and practices (they are like ideologies except they include practices). This idea comes from Michel Foucault.
Epistemic stance
relationship between speaker and their statements
Interpersonal stance
relationship between speaker and their audience (authoritative, critical, etc.)
four discourses of masculinity
1. Gender difference: men and women are different in biology and behavior.
2. Heterosexism: masculinity is heterosexual.
3. Dominance and Power: masculinity is about
being dominant and powerful.
4. Male Solidarity and Exclusivity: bros before hos.
The “not-too-gay” gay style
Podesva et al. identify his style as being a “not- too-gay” style
This style says, I'm gay but I'm a professional and I'm not frivolous, etc. (traits stereotypically associated with gay men)
Points to remember from Podesva et al. 2001
There is no single gay way of speaking.
Different styles associated with gay communities use linguistic resources that are associated with meanings that go beyond just the gay community, like being precise.
ethnolect
dialect used primarily by a particular ethnicity
mock spanish
the insertion of Spanish words or phrases into English using English pronunciation, and the creation of fake Spanish- like words like “correctomundo,” by Anglo- Americans, in certain contexts.
dual indexicality
it is linked to two types of social meaning at the same time.
aave
AAVE is a dialect of English that has distinctive:
– – – –
Syntax (order of words in a sentence) Morphosyntax (rules about grammatical inflections) Lexicon (vocabulary) Phonology (rules about patterns of sounds)
In some respects, AAVE is more complex than Standard English, and in others it is less complex. It is NOT a “simplified” version of English.
creolist hypothesis
slaves who were brought to America developed a creole, and AAVE is the decreolization of that creole.
anglicist hypothesis
AAVE is different from Standard English today, but it's similar to non-standard dialects of English that were spoken by White colonists. AAVE comes from older varieties of English, not from a creole.
perceptual dialectology
People tend to have not-so-accurate ideas about how people talk where.
In the US, people also tend to have not-so- accurate ideas about basic geography.
Luckily, we can use the terrible state of our nation's educational system to our advantage!
Points to remember about Attention Paid to Speech model
-Views style as a scale from formal to informal
-Scale correlates with attention paid to speech
-Led to creation of sociolinguistic interview
-Notion of the vernacular
accommodation
Making changes in our speech due to others we interact with
upward convergence
speaker is moving toward a more formal or prestigious style.
downward convergence
speaker is moving toward a less formal colloquial style.
style (Bell)
“Style is what an individual speaker does with a language in relation to other people.”
Notice that he takes “situations” out of it entirely.
roles
1. Speaker
2. Addressee
3. Auditor
4. Overhearer
5. Eavesdropper
speaker
the person talking
Addressee
directly addressed (known, ratified, and addressed)
Auditor
considered to be part of the group but not being directly addressed (known, ratified).
Overhearer
speaker knows they are listening (known).
Eavesdropper
speaker doesn't know they are listening.
referee
not physically present during the interaction, but important enough that the speaker is thinking about them.
Points to Remember about Accommodation and Audience
Design Models
-Focuses on audience rather than speaker or contexts
-Speakers can converge, diverge, or do neither
-Experimental methods from social psych
-Audience is more than just the addressee
-Notion of the referee
style
an umbrella term for intra-speaker variation
register
a type of style associated with a particular situation.
genre
a specialized, ritualized style with established conventions, often associated with performance.
examples of registers (jargon?)
Legalese (language used in legal contexts)
Text Message Language
Newspaper Language
Recipe Language
examples of genres
Sermons
Fairytales
Political Speeches
speaker design
Speaker-focused models of style.
Speakers use linguistic resources to create and project their social selves.