language variation

Question 1

describe the spitzer Stein variable

Answer 1

• In the 1998 paper by Peter Auer, about linguistic variation in Hamburg from a pool of 77 male and female speakers.
• Their ages ranged from below 10 to over 70 years old and two speech styles were collected: spontaneous speech and reading style.
• one of the social variants studied was age
• the distribution of the spitzer Stein variable showed that the older the person, the more likely they were to use it in spontaneous speech. However people below 40 didn’t use it at all
• Several variables were recorded:
  • Alveolar pronunciation of /{/ before a plosive at the start of a word
  example: spitzer Stein /{p-, {t-/ becomes /sp-, st-/
  • fricative pronunciation of /k/ at the end of a syllable or word (e.g Flug becomes /flu:x/
  • weakening of /t/ to /d/ between vowels: hatte (/hate/, becomes /hade/. weiter (/vaite/) becomes /vaide/

Question 2

why is the spitzer stein variable known as what it is?

Answer 2

/{/ to /s/ in a cluster before a plosive consonant is known as this variable because it changes the pronunciation of words beginning with sp or st from ‘schp’, ‘scht’ to ‘sp’ ‘st’ (phonetically from standard [{] to a non standard alveolar [s]

Question 3

what is a minimal pair

Answer 3

a pair of speech elements in a given language differing in only one respect and thus serving to identify minimum units such as phonemes, morphemes etc
e.g Geld and Gelb

Question 4

what is a variable and how is this usually investigated in research on language variation?

Answer 4

a variable is the thing that can vary, as a whole
variables are split into variants such as the ‘Big Four’ social variables: Social class, gender, race or ethnicity and age

Question 5

describe the Labov theory of language variation

Answer 5

Labov study from 1966
This studied the social and stylistic stratification of (ing) in the random sample of the Lower East Side of New York City adults.
Several social classes were evaluated from lower working class to upper middle class
In every social class as the conversation gets less causal and more formal, the more “ing” rather than “‘in” is used.
The upper middle class pronounce “‘in” the least in casual speech than the lower working class and not at all in reading style
For lower working class they pronounce ‘in’ the most in casual speech and experience a more drastic drop in its use in careful speech than other classes.