Ch. 6 - Language Variation Flashcards
Regional Variation, The Linguistic Variable, Social Variation, Data Collection and Analysis
Phonetic Variation
e.g. diphthongization
Phonological variation
R vocalization, h dropping, incidence
Phonemic Incidence
one phoneme occurring rather than another
- e.g. the british bath vs. american bath
Morphological Variation
Syntactic variation
Discourse variation
situational variation sort of
- the same guy gets called dad, john, buddy, jonathan, and sweetie
- quotation verbs
prosodic variation
phrasal stress or pitch
- raising at the end of sentence
- using creaky voice
- research or research
semantic variation
variable meaning of words
lexical variation
variable words for the same meaning
- brid course or gut course or easy A
what level of variation are ING variables?
both phonological and
indicator
a linguistic variable to which little or no social import is attached
- e.g. cot and caught
Marker
carries social significance
- ing or in’ denoting class and formality
stereotype
popularly known and conscious characterization of a specific group’s speech
- boid instead of bird for new yorkers
- these die hard
Sociolects
The speech characteristics of a given group
idiolects
The speech characteristics and behaviours of an individual
- once free variation is taken into account, idiolects are very similar to the speaker’s sociolect
Informant
a speaker who is taken to represent a population
Participant Observation
Observer becomes a long term presence in the participants’ community
Sociolinguistic Interview
- Audio-recorded
- Get them to talk about something where they end up disregarding the fact that they’re being studied
Rapid and Anonymous
- Brief interactions where they’re not aware of participation
- Asking for directions on department stores
A level of Sociolinguistic Interview
Casual
- needs to be carefully elicited
- emotionally-engaging narratives of personal experience
- not true vernacular, since they’re still very conscious of observation
C level of Sociolinguistic Interview
Reading style
- usually much more formal and careful
B level of Sociolinguistic Interview
careful speech
- direct responses to interviewer questions
D level of Sociolinguistic Interview
reading a word list
D’ level of Sociolinguistic Interview
Invoke the pronunciation of minimal pairs without saying them
typical independent Variables
Age
Sex
Social Class
Urban/Rural
Ethnicity
“Personality” in some cases
Smaller Socially defined groups
Dependent Variables
Basically the different types of variation
- Phonetic
- Phonological
- morphological
- syntactic
- Discourse
- Prosodic
- Semantic
- Lexical
