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Sociolinguistic Research (sociolinguistic + research)
Selected AbstractsDimensions of style: Context, politics and motivation in gay Israeli speech1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 1 2009Erez Levon Sociolinguistic research has traditionally examined stylistic variation as a way of understanding how speakers may use language indexically. Quantitatively, research has sought to correlate observed patterns of variation across such external parameters as context or topic with the ways in which speakers linguistically orient themselves to their immediate surroundings or to some other socially-salient reference group. Recently, this approach has been criticized for being too mechanistic. In this paper, I present a new method for examining stylistic variation that addresses this critique, and demonstrate how an attention to speakers' motivations and interactional goals can be reconciled with a quantitative analysis of variation. I illustrate the proposed method with a quantitative examination of systematic patterns of prosodic variation in the speech of a group of Israeli men who are all members of various lesbian and gay political-activist groups. [source] The Study of Variation from Two PerspectivesLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2009Elizabeth Gentry Brunner The field of sociolinguistics has a great deal in common with the field of forensic linguistics. One of their primary similarities is a focus on linguistic variation. Both fields analyze variation across groups of speakers, variation within speakers, variation between speakers, variation over time, and variation in perception. Sociolinguistic research can be directly applied to forensic linguistic issues. Model research projects are presented to demonstrate how to combine sociolinguistic and forensic linguistic goals and techniques into unified projects. This paper highlights how sociolinguists can advance the field of forensic linguistics in the United States. [source] The Apparent-Time Construct and stable variation: Final /z/ devoicing in northwestern Indiana1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 1 2010Brian José As real-time language data becomes increasingly available for sociolinguistic research, a growing number of studies are benefitting from it in order to study language changes in progress, some of which even explicitly seek to scrutinize the Apparent-Time Construct itself. Vanishingly few real-time studies, however, have focused specifically on stable sociolinguistic variables, leaving an important gap in our understanding of the Apparent-Time Construct's abilities to model real-time facts. In an effort to address this gap, the present study analyzes a presumably stable sociolinguistic variable , final /z/ devoicing , in extreme northwestern Indiana through real and apparent time. A series of Varbrul analyses indicate that this variable is, indeed, stable throughout the 20 years of real time covered by the data and that its stability is successfully modeled in apparent time. Additionally, similarities in /z/ devoicing between this community and some other communities where it has also been studied are identified and discussed. [source] Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identityJOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 4 2003Monica Heller The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997; Castells 2000; Giddens 1990). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity. Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. In this paper, I explore ways in which the globalized new economy has resulted in the commodification of language and identity, sometimes separately, sometimes together. The paper is based on recent ethnographic, sociolinguistic research in francophone areas of Canada. [source] Ethnicity and Sociolinguistic Variation in San FranciscoLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 7 2010Lauren Hall-Lew California's San Francisco Bay Area has long been one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the United States, and ethnicity is an integral aspect of any research on language use in the region. This article gives a brief social history of San Francisco with respect to settlement patterns since the 1850s' gold rush, paying particular attention to Chinese Americans, who are argued to play an especially distinctive role in the city's history and current social landscape. This article also reviews the sociolinguistic research on language and ethnicity in and around San Francisco, with a focus on studies on variation and change in English, noting the relative lack of attention to Asian American ethnicities and calling for increased scholarship on the linguistic construction of Asian identities in the San Francisco area. [source] | ||||||||||