Socio Page   |   Faculty   |   Students   |   Alumni

Variation   |   Discourse   |   Education   |   Varieties   |   Style   |   Class   |   Ethnography   |   Age Attitudes and Ideology   |   Gender and Sexuality   |   Urban-Rural Interface   |   Pidgins and Creoles

Language Attitudes and Ideology

White speakers of AAVE Julie Sweetland "Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find you have created a type. Begin with a type, and you find you have created nothing." --F. Scott Fitzgerald Julie's work on white speakers' use of African American Vernacular English takes the stance that the first lines of Fitzgerald's story "The Rich Boy" have much to offer traditional sociolinguistic theory, whose explanatory power is limited by its unproblematized reliance on sociological categories. In particular, her work seeks to complicate our understanding of a "type" frequently mentioned in the literature: the "speaker" of AAVE. Sweetland (2002) documents the strategies of authentication used by "Delilah", a white woman who works as a hairdresser in an African American salon and draws heavily on AAVE syntax. More recent work (2004) investigates the ways in which a white woman who was raised in predominantly African American neighborhood uses AAVE in style-shifting in order to emphasize various aspects of her identity. Sweetland, Julie. 2002. Unexpected but authentic use of an ethnically-marked dialect. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6:514-536. Sweetland, Julie. 2004. An Interesting Predicament: AAVE as a Stylistic Resource in a White Individual's Linguistic Repertoire. Qualifying paper, Stanford University Department of Linguistics. Side effects to prescriptive efforts to change language usage Emily Bender This study asks whether deliberate prescriptive efforts to change one aspect of language use can have effects beyond the intended one. The prescriptive drive in question is that against so-called gender-neutral `he' (starting in the 1970s). The data studied are multiple editions of a sociology textbook and a corpus of ERIC abstracts. In these data, gender-neutral `he' disppears over time, and the use of singular definite NPs with generic referents also reduce. Bender, Emily M. 1998. Are there any side effects to that prescription? Paper presented at NWAV(E) 27, Athens, Georgia. Adventures in the Advice Trade Arnold Zwicky Since 2002, I've been teaching and writing about the advice literature on English grammar, usage, and effective writing -- what's usually called the prescriptivist tradition, though the motive propelling this literature is proscription rather than prescription, and there are several very different strains rather than a single tradition. One prong of the project exposes the ideologies and attitudes about language that serve as the underpinning for the advice literature. Another confronts this advice with facts about elite practice, the usage of highly regarded writers of established formal standard English (roughly, the language described in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language). Still another critiques the usefulness of the advice for its intended audiences (who range from small children speaking non-standard varieties to adults hoping to improve their writing for business purposes). The gulf between the advice literature and the facts of elite practice has long been observed, though its depth might actually have been underestimated. In any case, I argue that the gulf reflects the huge disparity between folk understandings of the principles governing language structure and use (on the one hand) and the conceptualizations of linguists (on the other). The project begins with case studies dealing with famous bits of English syntax: possessive antecedents for pronouns, dangling modifiers, split infinitives, stranded vs. fronted prepositions. It then moves to subtler phenomena, like verb-form government in coordination and the absorption of prepositions. Perception of sociolinguistic variables Kathryn Campbell-Kibler If linguistic variation does, in fact, carry social meaning, then the hearing and interpreting of such variation is equally as important as the use of it in speech. My dissertation explores the study of listener perceptions of a single sociolinguistic variable, in this case (ING) found in workin' vs. working. My findings all are that there are consistent patterns in the interpretation of (ING), but that many of the ways that the variable can influence the listeners perception of the speaker are dependent on other factors: other linguistic features, individual voice traits, the content of the message and variation in the background of the listener. Dialects of Irish on Teilifis na Gaeile R. L. Starr A study of the use of dialects of Irish Gaelic on the Irish-language television station Teilifis na Gaeilge. Discusses the roles of traditional rural varieties and emerging urban varieties of Irish in the media. Undergraduate thesis. Harvard University (Abstract) Global language attitude research Isabel Buchstaller In recent work, I have worked on language attitudes with respect to rapidly globalizing features. In cases where innovations spread outward from an epicenter in the US into other national varieties of English, I have been able to show that British speakers have not borrowed the social attitudes along with the surface item. Rather, just as reallocation of linguistic forms is well attested, my research shows that the reallocation of social attitudes also constrains the outcomes of language contact. (in preparation). Globalizing Attitudes? Quotatives US-UK. To be submitted to Journal of Language and Social Psychology (In press). Putting perception to the reality test: The case of go and like. University of Philadelphia Working Papers in Linguistics 10.2: Selected Papers from NWAVE 32. 2004. Comparing Perceptions and Reality: Newcomers to the Quotative System. Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 13. Institute for Applied Language Studies. The University of Edinburgh. The Politics of Language Shift in Gascon Penelope Eckert My work on Gascon in the commune of Soulan in Ariege focused on variation and change in Gascon. Arguably among the most stigmatized dialects in France, Soulatan and neighboring dialects have given way to French, but have also been marginalized by the Occitaniste movement that was supposed to champion them. (See my Gascon webpage for details.) Ideology and Semantic Variation and Change Andrew Wong This 2003 dissertation examined a semantic change in progress in Hong Kong Cantonese, as gay activists appropriate the term Tongzhi ('comrade') to refer to people with same sex desire; and as other stakeholders deploy this and parallel terms. Wong, A. and Q. Zhang (2000). The linguistic construction of the tongzhi community. Journal of linguistic anthropology 10(2): 248-276. Wong, Andrew. (2005).The Re-Appropriation of Tongzhi. Language in Society.