Language & Society 2019

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 

Native speakers often are unable to recognize sentences of their own language, and can often do so no better than non-native speakers

-> what does it mean to know ‘your’ language?

-> What is ‘your’ language?

Goodbye: the last utterance of a conversation is considered to be quite ritual, banale, formulaic, ritualistic (often does not equate with sincerity)

Leave taking is difficult and fraught with risks

Syntacticians love these sentences because of their ambiguity, but nobody uses them. 

• Examining our intuitions from decontextualized examples can often provide inaccurate results about use
• The social stigma of certain non-standard forms can lead to native speakers having inaccurate intuitions about their own language use
• Context is crucial. Because so many intuition tests rely on decontextualized sentences, the pragmatic and interactional force of the phrases studied is stripped away and jeopardizes the accuracy of the test
• Literacy and advanced study can cloud the accuracy of intuition as a window on the spoken language
• Speakers don’t always have clear intuitions or even agree with other people from the speech community.

If there is any disagreement on introspective judgements, the judgements of those who are familiar with the theoretical issues may not be counted as evidence

--> subject is not biased towards or against the subject matter as they are not conducting the research!

When the use of language is shown to be more consistent than introspective judgements, a valid description of the language will agree rather than with intuitions 

--> what we actually say is more valid data than what we think we say!

• When a subordinate norm takes precedence over the native dialect, very often either our intuitions are wrong or we become conditioned to accept the ‘standard’ or ‘literary forms’ that we don’t use
• Grammatical patterns which are perceived as regionally or socially stigmatized may be suppressed in intuition 
• We may accept forms unused in the spoken language, but accepted in the literary forms
• We often accept written forms over spoken forms

-> “There was only one person came to see the show”,

-> Dyirbal: ‘ the man is building the hut’

when the physical basis for making a distinction is eroded

-> e.g. near mergers: 

Bill Peters effect: vowels perceived as the same

cot - caught, ‘have’ and ‘of’: could’ve / (could’of)

When the pragmatic function of a form is inconsistent with overt recognition by users out of context,

e.g. goodbye -> Bye bye: childish? Redundant?

Relies on data from real language users as the source of analysis

What is data?

- Spoken vs written

- Notes vs recordings vs videoing

- Formal vs. informal

- Questionnaires?

• It is impossible to use corpora for many things linguists are interested in: some things cannot be searched for, some are too rare to be examined in corpora
• It is difficult to conclude anything from the absence of something in a corpus. It could be that the phenomenon does not exist, it could be that it does exist but the corpus wasn’t big enough.
• It is impossible to say anything about meaning without intuition

We should be more aware that our data are tied intimately to our conception of what language is, but also of the criticisms from other forms of linguistics and the ideological foundations of our own approach to data

--> if an example isn't found in a billion words (corpus), is it even important then?

• Intuition vs data
• Competence – performance
• Variation

Later: I(nternalized)- Language 

E(xternalized)-Language.

innate knowledge that a native speaker has of their own language which allows their to:

• recognize a sentence as belonging or not belonging to their language
•  make a potentially infinite number of novel sentences in their language.

• Actual linguistic behaviour, the use of this knowledge of the language, uttered language, including slips of the tongue, errors etc.
• SLs see performance as important because:

…Variation is functional, a necessary precondition of language change, and highly structured (individual speech and that of communities)

“A grammar describes the speaker’s knowledge of the language, not the sentences they have produced” (Cook & Newson 1996).

- Formal linguistics: grammars often treated as categorical, invariant, discrete

- Sociolinguistics: grammars are variable, fluid, continuous

Hymes: if a child would have to communicate only with its competence, it could not really communicate.

1. Linguistic competence

2. Socio-varietal competence

3. Pragmatic competence

4. Discourse competence

5. Strategic competence

a) Semantics:

• Referential (denotative): what words refer to
• Connotative: the emotional associations which are suggested by a particular word. e.g. December
• Semantic structure: a knowledge of how your language divides up the world: 
  - ‘eat’ v ‘kai’
  - English 'brother' & 'sister' v Maori 'tuakana' (= older sibling of either sex), 'teina' ( = younger sibling of either sex).

b) Grammar: syntax, morphology, phonology etc.

• knowledge of the characteristics of spoken and written language
• the ability to recognize the presence of, the function of, and the linguistic and social differences between standard and non-standard varieties of a language
• the ability to select appropriate language for use in particular contexts
• selecting the appropriate language in multilingual contexts
• selecting the appropriate style in monolingual contexts. 

Setting and scene 
Participants
Ends
Act sequence
Key
Instrumentalities
Norms of interaction 
Genre

Setting (locale) = time and place

Scene (situation) = abstract psychological setting, or the cultural definition of the occasion.

• Family gathering in someone’s living room
• Celebrating someone’s achievement; mourning a lost relative; dealing with a family dispute...

The combinations of speaker-listener, addresser-addressee, sender-receiver, etc. Usually fill specified roles.

The conventional outcome of an exchange, marriage, buying a new sofa, etc.

Conversation?

The (sometimes regulated) form and content of the message. These are sometimes conventionalised / ritualised and have specific language attached to them. 

• traditional & modern (e.g. wedding ceremony)
• adjacency pair (how are you - Fine.)

The tone, manner and spirit in which a particular message is conveyed.

• Medium & Code
• Choice of channel e.g. oral, written, telegraphic, audio-visual
• Choice of code/dialect or register