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Style

Style has played a central role in studies of variation from the very beginning. Labov (1966,1972) introduced style as a function of attention paid to speech - a focus that grew out of his primary interest with accessing and identifying a speaker's vernacular. The vernacular emerges in a speaker's most automatic speech which, in turn, tends to emerge in casual situations, when the speaker's attention is diverted from standard norms. When variationists talk about style, they are overwhelming talking about the formal-casual dimension.

At the same time, there is another stylistic dimension that is equally important to variation but that has only recently received attention. That is style as most people understand it - "a way of expressing something (in language or art or music etc.) that is characteristic of a particular person or group of people or period." (cf. WordNet) Stylistic practice in general, and particularly the use of variation to construct personae, has received a good deal of attention at Stanford.

Style Workshop. In 1996, we held a workshop on stylistic variation at Stanford, which brought together variationist and anthropological approaches to style. The proceedings of this workshop appear in Eckert and Rickford (2001).

SLIC (Style, Language and Ideology Collective). In 2001-2, we held a year-long seminar, SLIC, conceived and organized by the sociolinguistics graduate students with the purpose of bringing together social theory with the study of linguistic style. This seminar has played a central role in forming the constructivist view of style that emerges in the work of a number of our people, as listed below.

Style and Learning Retreat. Point Reyes. 2002.
In 2002, we went to Point Reyes for a weekend retreat to think about the relation between style and learning. This retreat was funded by the Spencer Foundation.

Style Retreat. Half Moon Bay. 2006.
In 2006, we went to Half Moon Bay to take up again the issues we discussed in 2002. This retreat was particularly productive, and one of its products was a poster presented at the 2006 NWAV, shown below.

Benor, S. (2002). "Sounding learned: The gendered use of /t/ in Orthodox Jewish English." Penn working papers in linguistics: Selected papers from NWAV 2000.
Eckert, P. (1996). Vowels and nailpolish: The emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace. Gender and belief systems. J. Ahlers, L. Bilmes, M. Chenet al. Berkeley, Berkeley women and language group.
Eckert, P. (2004). The meaning of style. Proceedings of Salsa 11. Texas Linguistics Forum 47. W.-F. Chiang, E. Chun, L. Mahalingappa and S. Mehus. Austin, Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin.
Eckert, P. (in press). Messing with style. Creativity in everyday language. J. Maybin and J. Swann. Maidenhead, Open University Press.
Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic variation as social practice. Oxford, Blackwell.
Eckert, P. and J. Rickford (2001). Style and sociolinguistic variation. New York, Cambridge University Press.
Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC, Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, W. (1972). "Some principles of linguistic methodology." Language in society 1(1): 97-120.
Podesva, R. (2003). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The role of F0 in the linguistic construction of gayness.
Rickford, J. and F. McNair-Knox (1994). Addressee- and topic- influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study. Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. D. Biber and E. Finegan. New York, Oxford University Press: 235-276.