Style and Sociolinguistic Variation

by Edited by Penelope Eckert , John R. Rickford

• ISBN13: 9780521591911
• ISBN10: 0521591910
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This study of sociolinguistic variation examines the relation between social identity and ways of speaking. Studying variations in language not only reveals a great deal about speakers' strategies with respect to variables such as social class, gender, ethnicity and age, it also affords us the opportunity to observe linguistic change in progress. The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation. Beginning with an introduction to theoretical issues, the book goes on to discuss key approaches to stylistic variation in spoken language, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology.

Table of Contents

List of figures	ix
List of tables	xi
List of contributors	xiii
Acknowledgments	xvi
Introduction	1	(20)
John R. Rickford
Penelope Eckert
Part I Anthropological approaches
``Style'' as distinctiveness: the culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation	21	(23)
Judith T. Irvine
Variety, style-shifting, and ideology	44	(13)
Susan Ervin-Tripp
The ethnography of genre in a Mexican market: form, function, variation	57	(21)
Richard Bauman
The question of genre	78	(7)
Ronald Macaulay
Part 2 Attention paid to speech
The anatomy of style-shifting	85	(24)
William Labov
A dissection of style-shifting	109	(10)
John Baugh
Style and social meaning	119	(8)
Penelope Eckert
Zeroing in on multifunctionality and style	127	(12)
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Part 3 Audience design and self-identification
Back in style: reworking audience design	139	(31)
Allan Bell
Primitives of a system for ``style'' and ``register''	170	(15)
Malcah Yaeger-Dror
Language, situation, and the relational self: theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics	185	(26)
Nikolas Coupland
Couplandia and beyond	211	(9)
Howard Giles
Style and stylizing from the perspective of a non-autonomous sociolinguistics	220	(15)
John R. Rickford
Part 4 Functionally motivated situational variation
Register variation and social dialect variation: the Register Axiom	235	(33)
Edward Finegan
Douglas Biber
Conversation, spoken language, and social identity	268	(11)
Lesley Milroy
Style and the psycholinguistics of sociolinguistics: the logical problem of language variation	279	(26)
Dennis R. Preston
References	305	(33)
Index	338