Analyzing Language 2018
Core Curriculum Uni Bern
Core Curriculum Uni Bern
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indirectness
A couple is deciding whether or not to go to a party.
Speaker A: Do you want to go to the party?
Speaker B: Okay.
Does “okay” mean
1) Yes, I’d like to go.
2) I agree to your request to go (though I don’t necessarily have a desire to go myself).
minimal responses
minimal responses / backchanneling (mhm, ok, wow, uh huh) signal “I’m listening” and/or “I agree”
--> Suggest women tend to use and interpret MRs as “I’m listening” and men tend to use and interpret them as “I agree”.
Tested, this hypothesis and its its validity were not proven
Method: Transcription
Transcripts function as permanent records of what has been spoken and heard, in a form that allows us to easily and quickly perform analytic operations.
Transcribing is a way to bring into focus the characteristics of spoken discourse, which are surprisingly obscure to most people.
How do we transcribe?
• make clear who is performing a particular utterance, and how these utterances fit together
• note prosodic and paralinguistic features
• subjectively!
Internal variation
refers to the property of languages of having different ways of expressing the same meaning.
This is a property that is inherent to all human languages and to all speakers of a language.
Thus, no two speakers of a language speak exactly the same way all the time: nor does any individual speaker speak the same way all of the time.
variable
variants
• The abstract feature of investigation is called the variable
• The actual realisations of the variable are known as variants
Example: How do you pronounce the TH (θ) in a word such as think?
Variable: Pregnancy
Variants:
expecting/expectant
preggers
in the family way
eating for two
pea in the pod
up the duff
bun in the oven
in the pudding club
Sociolinguistic variable
A sociolinguistic variable can be defined as a linguistic variable that is constrained by social or non-linguistic factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, social class.
Variant
A variant is the actual realisation of a variable
Constrain / constraints
If the distribution of variants is neither random nor free, and instead shows systematic correlations with independent factors, those factors can be said to constrain the variation, or to be the constraints on thevariable.
Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) refer to this as ‘orderly heterogeneity’ – structured variation.
structured variation / ‘orderly heterogeneity’
the distribution of variants is neither random nor free
Free variation
The idea that some variants alternate with each other without any reliable constraints on their occurrence in a particular context or by particular speakers.
Phonetic Level
Where the same phonological pattern has different realisations – BUTTER
Phonological Level
In southern England, words like blood and cup have the vowel [ä] and words like good and put have the vowel [ú].
In northern English dialects, however, both sets of words have the vowel [ú].
Morphological Level
Where the same word has alternative structures (in terms of roots and affixes)
I sing - I walk
you sing - you walk
he/she sings - he/she walks
we sing - we walk
• Norwich – the local form is he/she walk
• Parts of northern England and southern Wales –s is a general present tense marker I walks, we goes etc
Semantic level (vocabulary choice)
The same meaning can be expressed by two different choices of vocabulary.
A) Words for carbonated drinks differ from place to place.
Soft drink, fizzy drinks, soda, pop, are all different ways of expressing the same thing.
B) He departed at 6 o’clock. He left at 6 o’clock.
Syntactic Level
Most sociolinguistic studies have tended to focus on non-standard constructions vs. standard constructions as in this example:
Nobody saw it
Didn’t nobody see it (Labov, 1972)
dialectology
The concept of a variable constrained by non- linguistic factors emerges straightforwardly from the traditions of dialectology
Traditional dialectologists were interested in documenting the way that speakers use language differently and why language varies depending on what village, town or region speakers come from.
Isogloss
a line drawn on a map separating areas according to particular linguistic features
NORMs
Traditional dialectologists tended to study rural areas and targeted native speakers who were believed to speak the traditional local dialect.
These are usually referred to as NORMs – Non-mobile, Old, Rural, Male (Trudgill and Chambers 1980).
Modern approaches to dialect study focus more on urban speech, often involving new speech forms arising from contact between speakers of different backgrounds.
Social dialectology
The study of linguistic variation in relation to speakers’ participation or membership in social groups, or in relation to other non-linguistic factors.
Interpreting the results: Three waves of variation studies
1. The first wave
Sought to establish correlations between pre-determined macro-level social categories and particular linguistic variables.
Interpreting the results: Three waves of variation studies
2. The second wave
Sought to explain variation using more ethnographically determined social groups and cultural norms.
• DENSITY
Social network relationships are described in terms of:
• DENSITY
the more connections between your network, the more dense the social network.
A dense network is one where the members know each other. The fewer the connections there are, the looser the social network.
PLEXITY
Social network relationships are described in terms of:
PLEXITY
If people know each other in just one setting, then this is a uni-plex network.
A multi-plex network is when people share more than one activity.
NETWORK STRENGTH SCALE
Acts to promote and reinforce the norm i.e. pressure to conform to local values. Social cohesion (dense/multiplex networks) sustains and reinforces the vernacular
Strong sense of group identity and solidarity
Interpreting the results: Three waves of variation studies
3. The third wave
Shift in perspective away from investigating how language reflects social identity to how linguistic practices are the means through which speakers position themselves as social beings.
Social meanings of particular ways of speaking are considered to be interactionally constructed as opposed to being associated with particular social groups.
Focus on speaker agency and how speakers use variation to position themselves in conversation.
A third wave study (Podesva 2004, 2007)
StylisticvariationinamancalledHeathinvestigated
Features of Heath’s speech (aspiration of /t/ and falsetto) were analysed according to to their use in the construction of a ‘diva’ personality in one context and a competent and educated medical student in another.
The analysis focuses on how the features are used interactionally to position the speaker.
At different points in the conversation, Heath uses falsetto to position himself as someone who likes fashion and grooming and in other parts he uses it to regain a powerful position in the conversation.
Podesva also notes that Heath may be using falsetto in the construction ofa gay identity (2004: 494-6)
The three waves of variation studies
• Most variationist studies combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to data analysis.
• Whatever the focus of your investigation you will still have to go through the same process of extracting and coding your data!
Approaches to text analysis
Defining ‘discourse’ (again)
”little-d and big-D discourse”
Speech and writing – the debate on difference
What affordances/potentials do they have?
Types of written language, and approaches to it: news media, new media and
technology, CMC, linguistic landscapes
Introducing critical linguistics, and critical discourse analysis (CDA)
Methods training for Critical Discourse Analysis
Heading to Australia, looking at Teo (2000) as well as other examples of CDA
Going 'underneath the surface’ of discourse, finding out how it works
discourse
Commonly understood as:
“language in use”
“language above the sentence”
a form of social practice in which language plays a key role
Discourses are ways and means of communicating that serve as a framework for social
categorisation, configuration and stratification.
Discourse analysis
is about about understanding the function of language. For a discourse analyst, following a functionalist perspective, the form that talk or a written text takes is related to the function it serves in society.
“Discourse analysis [or “discourse studies”] can be seen as a means of investigating the ‘social voices’ available to the people whose talk analysts collect” (Cameron 2014:15)
big-D Discourses
Michel Foucault (1972:49) spoke about discourses as ”practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak”. These are big-D Discourses.
In really basic terms, small-d discourses are the smaller linguistic practices – like using specialized terms like ‘goofy’ – which build up larger big-D discourse like ‘snowboarding’.
Small-d discourse
Small-d discourse denotes the ‘cultural toolkits’ through which social (inter)action is made possible – the scaffolding for “ways of talking, listening ... acting, interacting, believing, valuing and using tools and objects, in particular settings, at particular times, so as to display and recognise a particular social identity”
In really basic terms, small-d discourses are the smaller linguistic practices – like using specialized terms like ‘goofy’ – which build up larger big-D discourse like ‘snowboarding’.
Mode
A semiotic (‘meaning-making’) resource used in communication, e.g. spoken language, writtten language, film, music, colour.
Text
A piece of discourse, spoken, written, or otherwise, which is internally coherent and functions in context as a unit. A text can be a unit of any size, from one word (e.g. STOP) to many thousands of words (e.g. a textbook).
Spoken and written discourse
Written language is a technology – an invented mode of communication, and no more a “natural” means of communicating than emojis, flags, or traffic lights.
“The spoken and written modes provide strikingly different potentials” (Biber & Conrad 2001:190)
Affordance
The possibilities and constraints associated with a particular mode, medium, or technology of communication.
