Written by a distinguished international roster of contributors, it reflects the vitality, diversity, and growth of the discipline. It is a convenient repository of the essential knowledge about the study of language variation and change. It presents views of linguistic variation in the diverse contexts that give it meaning and significance, across generations, social strata, and domains of interaction and includes an extensive examination of the methodologies emploed by linguists working in linguistic variation and change, addressing the levels of linguistic structure thet have been the main foci of work in the field. Invaluable section introductions by the editors set out the boundaries of the field, and place each of the chapters into perspective. The authoritative resource allows the next generation of academics to perpetuate all of these fields of study and explore them with the kind of depth unimaginable to their predecessors.
Sociolinguistic Variation brings together a group of leading scholars in the field of language variation and change to address the directions that sociolinguistic research is taking in the new millennium. Among the main themes of the volume are the construction of identity, the nature of "place" as distinct from "community", and the role of attitudes in language variation. These themes are explored through a variety of types of data, from traditional sources such as narratives, to relatively new sources, such as postings on the Internet or television documentaries.
Combining the voices of established scholars in the field with the perspectives of promising younger scholars this volume provides crucial guidance for anyone interested in doing research on sociolinguistic variation. Contributors include Guy Bailey, Penelope Eckert, Barbara Johnstone, William Labov, Ronald Macaulay, Lesley Milroy, Dennis Preston, John Rickford, Gillian Sankoff, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Jan Tillery, and Walt Wolfram.
Talk That Counts is a sociolinguistic study of variation in discourse employing quantitative methods to explore age, gender, and social class differences in the use of features such as you know, I mean, adverbs, and pronouns. Unlike many studies of discourse variation that focus on a single social factor, Talk That Counts examines age, gender, and social class differences in a gender-balanced sample of middle-class and working-class adolescents and adults, recorded under the same conditions. Differences between adults and adolescents provided the greatest number of statistically significant results, followed by differences between males and females. The smallest number of statistically significant differences were related to social class. The range of variation underlines the need to look at more than a single extra-linguistic variable when examining discourse. It also shows the dangers of generalizing about social class, for example, on the basis of a limited sample (e.g., adolescent boys). In Talk That Counts, distinguished sociolinguist Ronald Macaulay presents an important new approach to the sociolinguistic investigation of discourse variation.
The origins of this book lie in Lesley Milroy’s Observing and Analysing Natural Language (OANL) which first appeared in 1987. While the general orientation of that work has been maintained, and some of its material has been reproduced here, the tremendous expansion of the field has necessitatedthat the original work be substantially revised and updated for the current project. A good deal of new material has also been included to treat issues that have since emerged as significant (see, for example, the discussions of instrumental techniques for analyzing phonological variation (section 6.3.2) and the treatment of style-shifting as a strategic maneuver (section 8.3) ). The additional perspective provided by the co-author, Matthew Gordon, serves to distinguish further the current work from OANL. The basic structure of the book partly follows that of OANL. Chapter 1 offers a theoretical introduction to the general framework of variationist sociolinguistics, and is followed in chapters 2 and 3 by a discussion of study design and methods of data collection. Chapters 4 and 5 explore issues related to the social dimensions of language variation, and chapters 6 and 7 focus on linguistic issues, discussing various aspects of data analysis and interpretation related to phonological variation, and grammatical variation. Finally, style-switching and code-switching are examined in chapter 8.
