Language & Society 2019

Impoverished data:

• Documents from the past survive by chance not by design: the selection available is the product of historical accidents
• Only written forms of the language are available, not spoken 
• There was no written norm in earlier forms of the language 

a) people will write more like they speak, or

b) the lack of conventions may mean that similar sounds are transcribed in a different way.

• Literacy was low and contact between literates and the majority illiterates low. 
•  language used by the scribes representative?
• We know little about the social positions of the scribes and even less about the social structures of the communities of the masses.
• Only provides positive evidence of what existed: we don't know that certain structures/sounds etc. DIDN'T exist, because of holes in data.

• Historical linguists believed it was impossible to study language change in progress
• now we have the facilities and means

The task of the historical linguist is to explain the difference between past and present. But we have no way of knowing how different the past was from the present

'The factors that produced changes in human speech five thousand or ten thousand years ago cannot have been essentially different from those which are operating to transform living languages' (Whitney 1897).

• simulating diachrony
• Tracks variation in language use across different age levels.
• If a feature A is not used (or used less) by the old, used somewhat more by the middle aged and used most by the young, we could assume that this is a sign of language change in progress.
• It signals the lack of existence of a feature when the old were acquiring language, but the emergence of that feature among later generations.

1. Very few variationist studies include very very old speakers

• Labov 1994 puts this down to the physical deterioration of speech among old (loss of teeth, articulatory lapses etc.)

1. Very few variationist studies include very young children, and most have post- adolescents as their youngest age group.

• Labov: ‘their deviations from the adult pattern are most likely developmental differences’ (1994: 47).
• Eckert: ‘Studies of children focus on socialisation, studies of adolescents and young adults on learning adult roles, and studies of the elderly focus on the loss of adult abilities, thus only the middle-aged life-stage is treated outside of a developmental perspective... a mature-use perspectiverecognizes that sociolinguistic competence is age- specific, and that the speech of members of an age group is fully appropriate to that life stage’ (1997: 157)

1. Most variationist studies rely on chronological age rather than ‘age-related place in society’ (cf ETIC v EMIC approaches)

• Sudbury: Falklands. People before the Argentina conflict vs. after

1. The model assumes that our speech doesn't change after childhood . It assumes that a 60 year old today is speaking the same way as s/he did 20, 40, 50 years ago.

According to Labov: yes

According to Howard Giles, Penny Eckert etc. : no

• Accommodation theory: we adjust our speech to reflect our attitudes and mark shared or non-shared identities with our interlocutors.

-> Consoir’s 7-Up research: language is ‘stable-ish’

Panel studies: a survey at time x, then at time y, (then at time z), with the same sample of informants.

• Ellen Prince's study of Sarah Gorby, a Yiddish folk singer;
• Consoir’s research on 7-Up.
• Harrington et al’s research on the Queen, comparing 1950 and 1980.

Problems:

• Possible unwillingness of sample to reparticipate.
• people leave the community: emigrate, die etc.
• takes too long to do

a survey at time x, then at time y, with a sample not of the same people, but with a similarly structured sample.

• The restudy of the New York Department Store research after 20 years (Labov 1994)
• Van de Velde's (1996) research looking at language change in live Dutch Royal and sports commentaries in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Problems:

• never sure how comparable the samples are takes too long to do?

Conduct a survey now, and search for recordings from previous times with which to compare the present survey:

• Labov's research on Martha's Vineyard in USA.
• Most variation studies?

Problems:

• there are few earlier studies
• often previous studies are non-sociolinguistic, and have been carried out without the methodological rigour usually associated with sociolinguistic research.
• previous records are often in the form of transcriptions not recordings: how reliable are they?

Sankoff and Blondeau’s (2007) trend and panel study of Montreal:

• Trend studies are better: “increases made by panel-study members were only a pale reflection of what was going on in the wider community”
• “apparent-time UNDERESTIMATES the rate of change”

“Change is dramatic in childhood, but it does not stop there. To understand the dynamics of change in the speech community, we must follow change across the lifespan”

AGE GRADING:

• Features associated with particular age groups: usually lexical
• words for "cool" 
• “Z” in Canada

STABLE VARIATION:

• Different generations use different amounts of the standard and non-standard forms but this pattern is repeated generation after generation. No linguistic feature finally replaces the other.
• (ing) in English speaking world; multiple negation?
• Causes of stable variation: linguistic marketplace?

1. The perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interests of a specific social or cultural group.
2. Ideologies are multiple.
3. Awareness of the ideological nature of these views differ.
4. Mediation between social structure and structure / forms of language.
   tools for revealing linguistic ideologies: Iconization, Fractal recursivity, Erasure.
5. Ideologies are productively used in the creation / representation of various social and cultural identities, such as nationalism and ethnicity.

• Linguistic isolationism
• Linguistic mundaneness
• The linguist as obstacle to linguistic authenticity
• The linguist as arbiter of authenticity

• The emergence principle
• The positionality principle
• The indexicality principle
• The relationality principle
  (Adequation, Distinction, Authentication, Denaturalisation, Authorisation, Illegitimation)
• The partialness principle

• Constraints problem (Markedness)
• Transition Problem (Neogrammarian sound change, Lexical diffusion)
• Embedding Problem
• Evaluation Problem
• Actuation Problem

multilingualism, language planning, language death, language contact

interactional sociolinguistics, sociopragmatics, conversation analysis, ethnography of communication

language variation and change

language variation and change

conversation analysis/ethnomethodology

ethnography of speaking, discourse analysis, sociology of language

discourse analysis (constructing language building on what has been said before)

most sociolinguistics (taking into consideration the different contexts, settings, relationships and identities)

critical discourse analysis (one utterance is context for what follows. Speakers can try to influence the interlocutor by strategic linguistic choices that manipulate the context)

Example: defenseles marchers vs. anarchists

it’s a ‘crossdisciplinary’ subject which makes it hard to find an institutional home

different backgrounds/training/assumptions àdisciplinary divide, also: disciplinary pressures

-> institutional pressures do not encourage convergence or interdisciplinarity

-> contested terrain, disputes, umbrella label

• Reaction to Chomskyan linguistics
• Rejection of competence-performance distinction
• Rejection of the perceived rejection of performance as worthy study
• Rejection of intuition-based methods
• Reaction to traditional dialectology (restricted speaker sample, specific methods of data collection, atheoretical stance) 
  -> Sociolinguists accept burden of debt for collecting very large databases & historical snapshots of variation
• Discovery of poverty and disadvantage as political issues
• Labov: Failure of black children in school -> structure of AAVE as a normal linguistic system
• Hymes: cross-cultural communication: language function & form are culture specific, miscommunication occurs when the norms of two cultures don’t overlap
• Fishman: multilingualism (awareness to the suffering of many minority language communities, present strategies to save dying languages)

• Treats language as an internal property of the human mind
• “a system represented in the mind/brain of a particular individual” (Chomsky 1988:36).
• “A grammar describes the speaker’s knowledge of the language, not the sentences they have produced” (Cook and Newson )
• Evaluation of sentences
• Approach relies on intuitionof native speakers as evidence of the nature of grammar and the language faculty

Evidence suggests that intuitions about language are inaccurate in certain respects

• “based on intuition ànot science. Needs to rely on the empirical” (Sampson)
• “a linguist’s introspections are private and not open to criticism of others” (Stubbs)

-> correctness of introspections can be challenged

• Linguists often invent examples

-> there are statements against all of these