Style and Sociolinguistic Variation Flashcards
What is Style?
• 2 diff approaches
o in terms of scale of formality (Labovian approach)
o as “stylization”, i.e. speakers can stylise the way they use language (e.g. call centres)
Speech community (ways of defining)
- Objective criteria: speakers grouped together based on distribution of a variable that is consistent with other factors (eg. Age, gender..) – EMPIRICAL way
- Subjective Criteria: Speakers grouped together based on own shared sense of and belief in co-membership (more common in the study of communities of practice)
Style-shifting:
- Variation in an individual’s speech (INTRASPEAKER VARIATION) correlating wirh differences in addressee, social context, personal goals, or externally imposed tasks
- Using one type of variant to using another variant
- What do you reckon? Vs What do you think?
- Other speakers also show a similar pattern of style-shifting, so this pattern of variation is common to a SOCIOLECT, not just to an IDIOLECT
3 accounts for consistency of style shifting across community:
- Attention to speech (Labov: more careful styles in reading is because paying more attention to speech)
- Audience design (eg. Newsreaders in NZ study. Changing style according to who ur audience is)
- Speaker design
Attention to Speech:
& labovian example
- Language use differs depending on how much attention speaker is paying to the act of speaking
- Speakers pay more attention to their speech when reading aloud lists of words or minimal pairs than in interviews
- In interviews speakers pay more attention to speech than in conversing with friends and family
- A CONTINUUM most attention to least attention
LABOV EXAMPLE:
• Labov operationalised style as attention to speech: speakers pay more attention to their speech in formal styles than they do in casual styles
• Labovs Hypothesis: Speakers should use more (postvolcaic r) (r) in reading aloud minimal pairs, as in American English, and les (r) when interacting with the researcher during the least formal section of the interview – SUCCESS
o Speakers across stores used more standard American contstricted [r] when repeating fourth floor carefully
o Pattern emerged across staff supporting findings from sociolinguistic interview
Problems with style as attention to speech:
British social psychologist Howard Giles suggested Labov was wrong in attributing speech differences across styles to attention to their own speech: social behaviour is seldom so egocentric
¥ Stylistic variation caused by speakers accommodating to the norms associated with the different addressees
¥ Speakers change the way they talk according to the situation they find themselves in & in relation to WHO they are talking to
Labov’s conclusions about who belongs to the same speech community
o Concluded speakers may be said to belong to a speech community if they share
- Same variants in repertoire
- Same conscious or unconscious attitudes towards these variants
o Consciousness is sometimes inaccessible and so style provides crucial evidence that speakers share underlying attitudes about the variable in question (cf. MARKERS)
Audience Design
- Term derived from accommodation theory (Giles & Coupland 1991) (outside of linguistics)
- Intraspeaker variation arises because speakers pay attention to who they are addressing or who might be listening or overhearing them, and modify their speech accordingly (Bell 1984)
- An example: Bell (1984, 2001) New Zealand Newsreaders city vs ciddy classic vs popular
Audience Design: Kinds of AUdience (Bell 1984)
o Addressee – listeners who are known, ratified (i.e. whose presence is acknowledged), and addressed
o Auditor – listeners who are not directly addressed, but are known and ratified
o Overhearer – NON-ratified listeners of whom the speaker is AWARE
o Eavesdropper – NON-ratified listeners of whom the speaker is UNAWARE
• The impact of audience members on the speaker’s style-shifting is proportional to the degree to which the speaker recognizes and ratifies them
Speaker Design
¥ Stylistic variation seen not as a reactive phenomenon but as a resource and an active creation, presentation and re-creation of speaker identity (think of teenagers talking to parents vs mates).
- People define themselves with relation to others
- Identity is dynamic: people project different roles in different circumstances
¥ Labovian theory – speaker has very little agency. moving to audience & speaker design, the speaker is given more and more agency
EXAMPLE:
Schilling-Estes (1998) shows how a speaker of Ocracoke English (spoken in the outer banks of North Carolina, USA) shifts into exaggeratedly broad dialect
Call centre workers are subject to being scripted. They have preferred ways of speaking imposed on them.
dialect performance definition
‘dialect performance’, i.e. someone being interviewed performs for the interviewer by emphasising all of the non-standard features of their speech!
call centres speaker design
Their style often symbolically feminised, based on co-operation, nurturance, empathy and emotional expressiveness.
- pre-planned and formulaic and created to build relationships across large distances. (Cameron 2000, 2005; Coupland 2007: 188)
So, the call centre worker is using a particular style NOT bc
- paying attention to speech
- thinking about the audience,
but because they know that a particular style will help them to achieve what they need to achieve – e.g. convince you to buy something! WANT TO BUILD A RAPPORT WITH U
Beyond traditional (Labovian) sociolinguistics
“The traditional view of a variable is based on a static, non-dialectical, view of language. […] a variable is taken to ‘mean’ the same regardless of the context in which it is used.”
- Other perspectives: variables = not static. Can change meaning according to context
- The speaker is an agent, and the speaker decides how they want to use language depending on various factors: an ideology they wish to express, an ethnicity, a particular identity etc.
