Transcript Sociolinguistics

Language in the City
Pro- und Hauptseminar, SS 2007, Campus Essen
Overview of Sociolinguistics - 2
Definitions of sociolinguistics
1) William Labov (1966:136-7), Social Stratification of English in New
York City
“We can take 2 different routes to the description of social variation in
language. ...We can consider various sections of the population, and
determine the values of the linguistic variables for each group... collegetrained professionals... [or] longshoremen. The alternate approach is to
chart the overall distribution of the variables themselves and then ask, for
certain values of each variable, What are the characteristics of the people
who talk this way? ..[This] will tell us what group membership we can
expect from a person who talks in a certain manner.
“The first approach, through social groups, seems more fundamental and
more closely tied to the genesis of linguistic differentiation.. When we
have finished this type of analysis, we may turn to the second approach..
[Thus] we will be able to avoid any error which would arise in assuming
that a group of people who speak alike is a fundamental unit of social
behavior.”
2) Peter Trudgill (1974: 32), Sociolinguistics:
“Sociolinguistics.. is that part of linguistics which is concerned with
language as a social and cultural phenomenon. It investigates the field of
language and society & has close connections with the social sciences,
especially social psychology, anthropology, human geography and
sociology.”
3) Peter Trudgill (1983: 2-5), On Dialect:
[Trudgill uses ‘language and society’ as the broadest term, and
distinguishes 3 types of study:]
1. ”First, those where the objectives are purely linguistic;
2. Second, those where they are partly linguistic and partly sociological;
and
3. Third, those where the objectives are wholly sociological.
“Studies of [the first] type are based on empirical work on language as it
is spoken in its social context, and are intended to answer questions and
deal with topics of central interest to linguistics... the term
‘sociolinguistics’ [here]... is being used principally to refer to a
methodology: sociolinguistics as a way of doing linguistics.
“The 2nd category... includes [areas] such as: sociology of language;
the social psychology of language; anthropological linguistics; the
ethnography of speaking; & [interactional] discourse analysis.
“The third category consists of studies... [like] ethno-methodological
studies of conversational interaction... where language data is being
employed to tell us, not about language but only about society... [This] is
fairly obviously not linguistics, and therefore not sociolinguistics.”
4) Dell Hymes, Foreword to Gillian Sankoff (1980: x-xi), The Social Life
of Language
“An integration of linguistics and anthropology, of urban ethnography
and cross-cultural ethnology, is taken for granted... The congeries of
interests that coalesced in the 1960s around the goal of a sustained
social study of language have tended to separate out again. In arguing
for the social study of language, each had its specific opponent, its
specific disciplinary world to conquer. For some, it was conventional
sociology, for some conventional linguistics, for others philosophy, for still
others anthropology... the impulse to band together depended on a
sense of marginality in a home discipline. Achieved legitimacy has
weakened the impulse. Old methodological fault lines tend to prevail –
logic, intuition, transcripts, cultural ethnography, survey and
questionnaire, and the like...
“[Sankoff’s work] is micro-evolutionary in both its model of the human
actor & its contextualization of language... People are not tacitly reduced
to what phenomenological sociologist Harold Garfinkel has called
‘cultural dopes’, actors who can do only what cultural roles provide. Yet
the existence of indeterminacy, the fact that behavior and meaning can
be newly interpreted and constituted with each situation, does not lead to
a view of actors whose action is an unchartable miasma... What people
do is variable according to situation, interest, need, yet intelligible to
themselves and others in terms of recurrent patterns... The ingredients
required for an adequate analysis of the social life of language in the
modern world are[:] technical linguistics, quantitative and mathematical
technique, ethnographic inquiry, ethnohistorical perspective.”
5) William Downes (1984: 15), Language and Society
“Sociolinguistics is that branch of linguistics which studies just those
properties of language and languages which REQUIRE reference to
social, including contextual, factors in their explanation.”
6) Janet Holmes (1992, 16), An Introduction to Sociolinguistics
“The sociolinguist’s aim is to move towards a theory which provides a
motivated account of the way language is used in a community, and of
the choices people make when they use language.”
7)
Jack K. Chambers (1995, 203), Sociolinguistic Theory
“Upon observing variability, we seek its social correlates. What is the
purpose of this variation? What do its variants symbolize? … [These] are
the central questions of sociolinguistics.”
8) Ronald Wardhaugh (1998, 10-11), Sociolinguistics: An Introduction
“[1] Social structure may either influence or determine linguistic structure
and/or behavior… [2] Linguistic structure and/or behavior may either influence
or determine social structure [Whorf, Bernstein]… [3] The influence is bidirectional: language and society may influence each other… [4] There is no
relationship at all between linguistic structure and social structure… each is
independent of the other… [4a] Although there might be some such
relationship, present attempts to characterize it are essentially premature…
this view appears to be the one that Chomsky holds.”
9) Florian Coulmas (1997), Handbook of Sociolinguistics “Introduction” (1-11)
The primary concern of sociolinguistic scholarship is to study correlations
between language use and social structure… It attempts to establish causal
links between language and society, [asking] what language contributes to
making community possible & how communities shape their languages by
using them… [It seeks] a better understanding of language as a necessary
condition and product of social life… Linguistic theory is… a theory about
language without human beings.
Language and linguistic data
Metalanguage To talk about language one must use language itself. This
is patently obvious. What it leads to in linguistics is a distinction between
the primary data of an investigation, the object language, and the
language used in the investigation itself. The latter is termed
metalanguage.
The source of data Any linguistic investigation will involve data as these
are what the linguist makes statements about. An important
consideration here is ensuring that data are as valid and general as
possible — ‘correct’ is a term which a prescriptivist would use. Valid data
are those which are accepted by a majority of speakers of a language or,
in the case of earlier stages of a language, those which are attested
most widely. It is absolutely essential in this respect that the linguist does
not influence data by his/her procedures of selection. When collecting
data there are basically three sources.
1) The intuitions of linguist themselves This is only permissible where the
linguist is a native speaker of the language in question. But even then it
often occurs that many of the structures which are central to the analysis
being made are not universally accepted by all speakers. This problem has
in particular beset generative analyses of English over the years.
2) Elicitation of data from independent speakers If the linguist is not sure
what structures are valid in a language then he/she may choose to
interview a representative selection of native speakers on this issue. For
instance, some verbs in English take a verbal complement with an infinitive
and others take a participal. To determine what options are valid for a
particular verb one could elicit responses from test persons by presenting
them with templates like the following and asking them to fill in the empty
slot. The answers should be as indicated below: a tick shows valid
structures and an asterisk unacceptable ones (to speakers of present-day
English).
Sheila considered ____ home
Sheila considered going home
* Sheila considered to go home
Sheila wanted ____ home
Sheila wanted to go home
* Sheila wanted going home
3) Consultation of a corpus Especially for earlier stages of languages the
use of a corpus is the best method of attaining reliable data for one’s
investigation. A corpus is in essence any ordered set of data, usually in
written form. The criteria for the complilation of a corpus are always
specified clearly: a corpus could be a collection of works of a single
genre, such as drama, or works from a given epoch or works which share
some structural or stylistic property such as translations or personal
letters. A corpus should also be as comprehensive and objective as
possible. Note that there are also spoken corpora which can be used for
the analysis of speech in a present-day language.
Objections to corpora A corpus contains at once too much and too little
data. Too much in that much of the data is unsuitable for investigation. It
needs to be cleaned up before being analysed. Too little in that it often
occurs that the phenomenon in which one is interested in is not
represented in the corpus at one’s disposal (or only insufficiently so).
Advantages of intuitions One can test particular aspects of language
which one is interested in by eliciting them from native speakers. Indeed
what one frequently wishes to do is to examine dubious constructions to
postulate on why speakers are slow to accept them, or in fact reject them.
It is the impermissibility of many sentences which provides us with vital
information concerning the nature of a language’s syntax.
Disadvantage of intuitions There is basically no control over the type of
intuitions which a linguist may use for an investigation. This is particularly
true if the linguist avails of his own intuitions. The danger of just accepting
the data which fits one’s assumptions looms continuously.
The linguists who sympathise with the use of intuition in linguistic
analysis are termed ‘mentalists’ and the opposing group ‘structuralists’
after the school of structuralism which arose in the first half of the present
century (particularly in America between the wars). Alternative
designations are ‘(neo-)rationalists’ for the former (associating them with
the direction in philosophy which links up with French rationalism of the
17th century, especially that of Descartes) and ‘behaviourists’ for the latter
(establishing a connection between them and those psychologists who
saw empirical data as the only acceptable source from which to draw
conclusions).