Chapter 7 - Sociolinguistics

Question 1

What are the modules of the human mind?

Answer 1

The capacities that make up the mind; morphology, phonology, syntax

Each module operates on different types of objects (morphemes, phonemes, etc) and turns them into output forms (allomorphs)

To do this, they operate by a set of rules

Question 2

Why do we say that language is NOT for communication?

Answer 2

Because phonology, morphology and syntax actually make it more complicated to understand others (for example, since our mental grammar does not stores all syntaxic trees)

Therefore, language is simply a property of humans, that is how we are built

If language was for communication, we would ALL have the same grammars

Question 3

If each speaker creates their own grammar during childhood, why do some people have similar grammars and some not?

Answer 3

Similarity in linguistic systems is linked with spatial closeness, and even more so with social closeness

Question 4

How do we call the study of the different ways of speaking influenced by social and spatial scales?

Answer 4

Dialectology (study of dialects)

Question 5

What is lexical dialectology?

Answer 5

How we call certain concepts (ex; the word for “end of baguette”)

Question 6

What is phonological dialectology?

Answer 6

How words are pronounced

Question 7

What is morphological dialectology?

Answer 7

How complex morphology rules are done

Question 8

What are isoglosses?

Answer 8

The lines that divide a map into “speech / dialect areas”

Question 9

Do isoglosses influence the people who cross them?

Answer 9

No, you keep the isoglosses of where you are from

Question 10

What do bundles of isoglosses form?

Answer 10

Major dialect areas

Question 11

How can we represent such complicated details in city dialects when doing maps?

Answer 11

We cannot, the first instinct was to ignore cities altogether

Question 12

Who were interrogated when first doing dialectological studies?

Answer 12

Old, white men of suburbs who never travelled a lot (since they felt like they were the most representative people of a place, because people of colour had their dialect influenced by their origins)

Question 13

How were sociolinguistics born?

Answer 13

When social pressure made linguists stop ignoring cities and study more people than old white men

Sociolinguistics is interested in the variation of pronunciation, word formation, syntax and lexical items in ALL members of a community

Question 14

Who is responsible for writing the first major work on sociolinguistics?

Answer 14

William Labov

Question 15

What was the goal of Labov’s studies?

Answer 15

To discover WHY and HOW the way people speak is related to their social properties (social class, etc)

Question 16

Describe Labov’s first MA experiment

Answer 16

He went in shopping malls from different neighboorhoods (upper middle class, lower middle class, and working class), and asked directions about something located on the 4th floor.

He would ask again in order to have 2 pieces of data per person, and would record the occurences of postvocalic r’s depending on people’s social class

His hypothesis was that the employees of these stores were also socially stratified, like the stores themselves

Question 17

What were Labov’s observations in his store experiment?

Answer 17

That the second utterance had more r-fulness than the first
the stores were also socially stratified
The age of the workers also indicated their r-lessness (older workers pronounce less r’s)

Question 18

Why did older people pronounce less r’s compared to the rest of their social class?

Answer 18

Because they had been brought up in a world where the people who were r-less were more prestigious, and were therefore trying to imitate them

However by the time they achieved it, the upper classes had switched back to making more r’s to distinguish themselves from the imitations of the lower classes, therefore old people were now doing less r’s

Question 19

People focus more on their diction when they are asked the directions a second time; the shift they are making is directional. Give 2 possible reasons as to HOW they do that.

Answer 19

1 - speakers have 2 systems (one for upper classes and one for lower classes) - called being bidialectal
2- Speakers have a translation device (NOT a second system, since it is more fragile to disturbance and is not necessarily intuitive)

Question 20

What was Labov’s hypothesis regarding HOW speakers had a directional shift?

Answer 20

Employees had a translator for r-lessness and they were able to use it successfully for a very short utterance like “fourth floor”

Question 21

People focus more on their diction when they are asked the directions a second time; the shift they are making is directional. Give possible reasons as to WHY they do that.

Answer 21

People tend to make these shifts in the same circumstances - when they experience the “linguistic anxiety of the lower middle class”; the fear of being mistaken for coming from a lower class than they actually do.

In this study, r-fulness was the prestige norm, therefore people used it when doing the switch

Question 22

Women tend to show fewer stigmatized forms in their speech compared to men. What are those forms and why do they do that?

Answer 22

Stigmatized forms = the one we avoid when we feel like we are being judged

1- women may feel the responsiblity to maintain “social propriety”, since men are not expected to
2- the social standing of women might be more fragile than of men’s

Question 23

How can we evaluate the use of stigmatized forms in one’s speech?

Answer 23

By making someone read; we use less stigmatized forms when reading VS when speaking - therefore we can understand WHICH forms are being stigmatized

Question 24

Compared to women, men overreport their use of stigmatized forms. Why?

Answer 24

Because there is something fundamentally masculine about the working class and feminine about the other classes

Therefore men care about being associated with being feminine more than being associated to a lower class.