Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T21:19:48.578Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation: Theoretical Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2021

Lauren Hall-Lew
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Emma Moore
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Robert J. Podesva
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Get access

Summary

How expansive are the social meanings inferred by a nonstandard syntactic variant, and how are these social meanings constructed? This chapter suggests that the social meanings of syntax lie at the nexus of pragmatics and social distribution. Furthermore, the analysis shows that certain social meanings are enriched when syntactic items co-occur with specific phonetic variants. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of adolescents, this chapter focuses on the social meanings of negative concord by exploring the correlation between social class, social practice, topic of talk, nonstandard phonetic variants and instances of negative concord. Negative concord increases across social groups in-line with their placement on a pro-/anti-school continuum, but a topic analysis suggests that this a consequence of different groups talking about different things: there is more negative concord in talk about delinquent behaviour than there is in talk about non-delinquent behaviour (irrespective of social group). In exploring why negative concord is a useful device for talking about delinquency, the pragmatics of the construction itself are examined, exposing a relationship between social distribution and pragmatic function. Finally, an analysis of the relationship between negative concord and co-occurring phonetic variants suggests that different levels of linguistic architecture work synergistically to create social meaning.

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation
Theorizing the Third Wave
, pp. 1 - 24
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agha, Asif. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23, 231–73.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ashby, William J. 1988. The syntax, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of left- and right-dislocations in French. Lingua 75(2–3), 203–22.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986 [1952–53]. The problem of speech genres. In Emerson, C. and Holquist, M. (eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (transl. by McGee, Vern W.). Austin: The University of Texas Press, 60102.Google Scholar
Barrett, Rusty. 1999. Indexing polyphonous identity in the speech of African American drag queens. In Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A. C., and Sutton, Laurel A. (eds.), Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 313–31.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard, and Briggs, Charles L. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 5988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2007. Accent, (ing), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech 82(1), 3264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2011a. Intersecting variables and perceived sexual orientation in men. American Speech 86(1), 5268.Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2011b. The sociolinguistic variant as a carrier of social meaning. Language Variation and Change 22(3), 423–41.Google Scholar
Chandler, Daniel. 2017. Semiotics: The Basics, 3rd ed. New York: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1987. Syntactic variation, the linguistic variable, and sociolinguistic theory. Linguistics 25(2), 257–82.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1999. Taming the vernacular: Some repercussions for the study of syntactic variation and spoken grammar. Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa, 8, 5980.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D’Onofrio, Annette. 2015. Persona-based information shapes linguistic perception: Valley Girls and California vowels. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(2), 241–56.Google Scholar
D’Onofrio, Annette. 2018. Personae and phonetic detail in sociolinguistic signs. Language in Society 47, 513–39.Google Scholar
Dickson, Victoria, and Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2017. Class, gender and rhoticity: The social stratification of non-prevocalic /r/ in Edinburgh speech. Journal of English Linguistics 45(3), 229–59.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. 2007. The stance triangle. In Englebretson, R. (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 139–82.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4), 453–76.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 78100.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2016. Variation, meaning, and social change. In Coupland, N. (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 6885.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2019. The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority. Language 95(4), 751–76.Google Scholar
Flores-Bayer, Isla. 2017. Sociolinguistic Variation in Practice: An Ethnographic Study of Stylistic Variation and Social Meaning in the Use of Chicano Language in ‘El Barrio’. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Fretheim, Thorstein. 1995. Why Norwegian right-dislocated phrases are not afterthoughts. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 18(1), 3154.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2013. Tastes of talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs. Anthropological Theory 13(1/2), 3148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2016. Social differentiation. In Coupland, N. (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 113–35.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, and Irvine, Judith T.. 1995. The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research 62(4), 9671001.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1983. The interaction order: American Sociological Association, 1982 presidential address. American Sociological Review 48(1), 117.Google Scholar
Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, and Drager, Katie. 2010. Stuffed toys and speech perception. Linguistics 48(4), 865–92.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Jannedy, Stefanie, and Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1999. Oprah and /ay/: Lexical frequency, referee design, and style. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 14, 1389–92.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Warren, Paul, and Drager, Katie. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34, 458–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Hudson, Richard A. 1975. The meaning of questions. Language 51, 131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irvine, Judith T. 2001. ‘Style’ as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In Eckert, P. and Rickford, J. R. (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2143.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T., and Gal, Susan. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Kroskrity, P. V. (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 3583.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara, Andrus, Jennifer, and Danielson, Andrew E.. 2006. Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese’. Journal of English Linguistics 32(2), 77104.Google Scholar
Kaplan, David. 1989. Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics, logic, metaphysics and epistemology of demonstratives and other indexicals. In Almog, J., Perry, J., and Wettstein, H. (eds.), Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 481563.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott. 2009. Style as stance: Stance as the explanation for patterns of sociolinguistic variation. In Jaffe, A. (ed.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Stance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 171–94.Google Scholar
Kimps, Ditte. 2007. Declarative constant polarity tag questions: A data-driven analysis of their form, meaning, and attitudinal uses. Journal of Pragmatics 39, 270–91.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19(3), 273309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. On the mechanism of linguistic change. In Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 122–42.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. Dislocation. In Haspelmath, M., Konig, E., Oesterreicher, W., and Raible, W. (eds.), Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook, Vol. 2. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1050–78.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Daniel. 2017. Sound Change and Social Meaning: The Perception and Production of Phonetic Change in York, Northern England. PhD dissertation. Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked (trans. John, and Weightman, Doreen). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Levon, Erez. 2006. Hearing ‘gay’: Prosody, interpretation, and the affective judgments of men’s speech. American Speech 81(1), 5678.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez, and Fox, Sue. 2014. Social salience and the sociolinguistic monitor: A case study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain. Journal of English Linguistics 42(3), 185217.Google Scholar
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2011. Gender, Sexuality, and Meaning: Linguistic Practice and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Emma, and Podesva, Robert J. 2009. Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society 38, 447–85.Google Scholar
Niedzielski, Nancy A. 1999. The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Social Psychology (Special Edition) 18(1), 6285.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 335–58.Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles S. 1895. Of reasoning in general. Rpt. in Houser, N., De Tienne, A., Eller, J. R., Lewis, A. C., Clark, C. L., and Bront Davis, D. (eds.), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893–1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 1126.Google Scholar
Pharao, Nicolai, Maegaard, Marie, Møller, Janus Spindler, and Kristiansen, Tore. 2014. Indexical meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: Social perception of phonetic variant in different prosodic contexts. Language in Society 43, 131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. 2006. Phonetic Detail in Sociolinguistic Variation: Its Linguistic Significance and Role in the Construction of Social Meaning. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. 2007. Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(4), 478504.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. 2008. Three sources of stylistic meaning. Texas Linguistic Forum. Proceedings of the Symposium about Language and Society – Austin 15(51): 114.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J., and van Hofwegen, Janneke. 2016. /s/exuality in small-town California: Gender normativity and the acoustic realization of /s/. In Levon, E. and Mendes, R. B. (eds.), Language, Sexuality, and Power: Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 168–88.Google Scholar
Rickford, John R., and Eckert, Penelope. 2001. Introduction. In Eckert, P. and Rickford, J. R. (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 118.Google Scholar
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Schilling, Natalie. 2013. Investigating Stylistic Variation. In Chambers, J. K. and Schilling, N. (ed.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 325–49.Google Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2004. Constructing ethnicity in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(2), 163–95.Google Scholar
Schlenker, Philippe. 2019. Indexicality and De Se reports. In Portner, P., von Heusinger, K., and Maienborn, C. (eds.), Semantics: Noun Phrases and Verb Phrases. Mouton: de Gruyter, 562618.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1994. Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sharma, Devyani, and Rampton, Ben. 2015. Lectal focusing in interaction: A new methodology for the study of style variation. Journal of English Linguistics 43(1), 335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Basso, K. and Selby, H. A. (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1156.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23, 193229.Google Scholar
Snell, Julia. 2010. From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(5), 630–56.Google Scholar
Soukup, Barbara. 2018. Contextualizing the third wave in variationist sociolinguistics: On Penelope Eckert’s (2018) Meaning and Linguistic Variation. Vienna English Working Papers 27, 5167.Google Scholar
Stanford, James N. 2010. The role of marriage in linguistic contact and variation: Two Hmong dialects in Texas 1. Journal of sociolinguistics 14(1), 89115.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2008. Colonial dialect contact in the history of European languages: On the irrelevance of identity to new-dialect formation. Language in Society 37(2), 241–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William, and Herzog, Marvin. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Lehmann, W. and Malkiel, Y. (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Wong, Andrew. 2005. The reappropriation of tongzhi. Language in Society 34, 763–93.Google Scholar
Zhang, Qing. 2005. A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the construction of a new professional identity. Language in Society 34(3), 431–66.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×