Style Flashcards
What is an accent?
A distinctive way of pronouncing a language: so this term concerns differences or variation at the level of pronunciation only (phonetics and/or phonology). This may index a speaker’s regional/geographic origin, or social factors such as level and type of education, or even their attitude.
What are acts of identity?
LePage’s proposal that intraspeaker variation is a result of the speaker’s desire to present or foreground a different social identity under different circumstances
What is attention to speech?
A theory proposed by Bill Labov to explain different distributions of forms in different styles. In activities, such as reading aloud, reading word lists or minimal pairs, Labov argued that speakers are focusing more on their speech than they are in interviews, and in interviews they focused more on their speech than when conversing with friends and family. This theory contrasts with accommodation-based accounts of style-shifting such as audience design. It also contrasts with more agentive theories of style-shifting such as acts of identity.
What is audience design?
Proposal that intraspeaker variation arises because speakers are paying attention to who they are addressing or who might be listening to or overhearing them, and modify their speech accordingly. It is derived from accommodation theory.
What is covert prestige?
A norm or target that is oriented to without the speaker even being aware that they are orienting to it. It is often used (wrongly according to Meyerhoff 2011) to refer to the value associated with non-standard or vernacular varieties.
What is a dialect?
A term widely applied to what are considered sub-varieties of a single language, which differ on more than just pronunciation, i.e. also on the basis of morphosyntactic structure and/or how semantic relations are mapped into the syntax.
What is individual agency?
Recent approaches to sociolinguistics have tried to emphasise individuals’ freedom of choice in their analyses. Analysts argue that speakers are social actors or agents, (re)defining themselves through linguistic and other social behaviour
What is the observer’s paradox?
The double-bind researchers find themselves in when what they are interested in knowing is how people behave when they are not being observed; but the only way to find out how they behave is to observe them
What is overt prestige?
The high evaluative status associated with a variant that speakers are aware of and can talk about in terms of standardness, or aesthetic and moral evaluations like being ‘nicer’ or ‘better’
What is participant observation?
The practice of spending longer periods of time with speakers observing how they use language, react to others’ use of it, and how language interacts with and is embedded in other social practices and ideologies
What is a rapid and anonymous study?
A survey used to gather data quickly in the public domain
What is a sociolinguistic interview?
A speech event, usually one on one, in which different tasks or activities are used to elicit different styles of speech and covering a range of topics
What is speaker design?
An approach to analysing style-shifting that stresses the speaker’s desire to represent her-/himself in certain ways
What is a speech community?
A concept that has been variously defined on subjective or objective criteria in order to delineate which speakers belong together. Objective criteria would group speakers together in a(n) X if the distribution of a variable was consistent with respect to other factors (e.g., style). Subjective criteria would group speakers as a(n) X if they shared a sense of and belief in co-membership.
What is style-shifting?
Variation in an individual’s speech correlating with differences in addressee, social context, personal goals or externally imposed task
