Sociolinguistics - Lecture 6

Variationist Sociolinguistics

the empirical analysis of language at a macro level

• highly quantitative approach, focus on mathematical patterns

• primarily relies on data drawn from actual language use

• explain what statistical correlations reveal about linguistic structure and society

• much research focuses on (on-going) language change

Uniformitarian Principle

how language change works in the present doesn’t seem to be different from how language change worked in the past (using the present to explain the past)

Linguistic and Social Patterns

• most patterns are unconscious

• linguistic patterns can be subtle

• can be highly local to the society or speech community

Major Tenets of Variationist Sociolinguistics

• variation is part of the grammar

• variation is systematic

• variation has social meaning

Major Tenet: Variation is part of the grammar

• an inherent part of grammar (despite Chomksy)

• universal feature of language

• normal condition of any speech community is a heterogeneous one

• speakers have multiple grammatical options available to them

Major Tenet: Variation is systematic

• systematic and highly structured, not random or free

• language exhibits orderly heterogeneity

  • we have choices

  • choices are constrained by complex interplay of linguistic and social factors

• not deterministic, but patterns regular enough to make good predictions

  • patterns are probabilistic

Major Tenet: Variation has social meaning

• conveys socially meaningful information

• more than just the denotation of the utterance, can also send social signals

• convey aspects of speakers identity; relationship with interlocutors; perception of formality of the situation; stances and attitudes; group membership…

Indexicality

the way we speak can “point to” aspects of the social world

Linguistic Variables: Definition

• two or more ways of saying the same thing/serving the same function

• different options that people choose between are variants

• an abstract ‘set’ with multiple ‘members/options’ (variants)

Linguistic Variables: Characteristics

• variants must be interchangeable

• variants can be null (we don’t “hear” it, but it’s there)

• variants must co-vary across space, time, social groups, etc… (there must be correlations)

  • patterning is not idiosyncratic

• can exist at all levels of grammar

Linguistic Variables: Lexical

a set of different forms for the same item or concept

ex. (fizzy drink): {pop, soda, soft drink}

Linguistic Variables: Phonological/phonetic

a set of different pronunciations for the same phoneme or morpheme

ex. (ING): {[-ɪŋ], [-ɪn]}

Linguistic Variables: Syntactic

a set of different sentence structures for the same thing (i.e. meaning)

ex. (ditransitives): {IO + DO, DO + IO}

Linguistic Variables: Morphological

a set of different forms of affixes and/or inflection

ex. (past -ed): {-ed form, irregular form}

Linguistic Variables: Discourse/pragmatic

a set of variants that are tricky to define but share a conversational function

ex. (general extenders): {and stuff like that, and stuff, and that sort of thing}

Linguistic Variables: What they are not

• categorical alternations

• synonyms

Categorical Alternations

• variation that is strictly dependent on the linguistic context in which it is embedded

• often called ‘linguistic rules’

• alternations are deterministic - the output of the rule is completely predictable and categorical, given the linguistic context

Synonyms

• some can be construed as linguistic variables, but not all of them

• synonyms generally not completely interchangeable - may have subtle yet different semantic meanings

• if they exhibit systematic co-variation with social or linguistic constraints, then can be construed as variables

Linguistic Variables: Authenticating

• listen to real speech and look for tokens (variants in the data)

• must have at least two variants presents

Supertoken

a single sentence/utterance with multiple variants

Principle of Accountability

we have to consider all instances of all the possible variants of our variable in our study

Linguistic Factors

commonly implicated linguistic factors influencing variation

• position in word/sentence

• preceding/following phoneme

• word class

• verb tense

• stress placement

• number of morphemes

• word frequency

Social Factors

commonly implicated social factors influencing variation

• age/year of birth

• social class

• hometown

• ethnicity/race/cultural background

• educational background

• gender and sexual orientation

• occupation

• community-specific factors

Interspeaker Variation

variation between speakers

Intraspeaker Variation

variation within a speaker

Vernacular

spoken form of language in which people are not paying too much attention to their own use of language (everyday speech, real language in use)

two methodological approaches to get at the vernacular

Vernacular: Rapid and anonymous survey

• like the department store survey

• quick

• don’t know who the people are

• a questionnaire

Vernacular: Sociolinguistic interview

classic method of collecting spoken speech data in variationist sociolinguistics

originally structured into three parts

1. minimal pairs taks

2. reading passage

3. casual speech

Stable Variation

• occurs when two variants are locked in a competition with each other

• one variant does not take over the system

• pattern is stable over time