Style and Sociolinguistic Variation
Style and Sociolinguistic Variation
The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation in spoken language. The book discusses key approaches to stylistic variation, 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.
- Extensive discussion of the major approaches to stylistic variation in spoken language
- Brings together anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to style
- Contributions by leading experts from a range of disciplines
Reviews & endorsements
"It is one of the virtues of this book that what one author suggests or asserts may be supplemented or argued with by another. Reading these papers is therefore not unlike attending a thoughtful debate carried on by experts[...]it is a rigorous and well-referenced (there is a 32-page bibliography) exploration of style from a variety of perspectives. In addition, the work provides fascinating critiques of the many viewpoints presented during the workshop."
-Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
"Taking into account this gathering of refined versions of classical approaches to style with others completely new perspectives on the one hand, and the extensive reflections on each of these that other experts offer, the book constitutes an excellent up to date of research into the role of style in sociolinguistic variation and represents a serious attempt to solve the problems that its analysis poses. The collection is a fundamental reference, therefore, for students and academics whose works have to deal more or less directly with the complex but at the same time fascinating task of interpreting stylistic variation in speech."
-Virginia Acuna Ferreira, Universidade de Vigo, Estudios de Sociolinguistica
"The book is definitely the best integrative and comparative overview of sociolinguistic variation research available[...]The book definitely deserves to be put onto the required reading list for all directly involved in vernacular language programs, and especially those of us who see the importance of register studies for applied issues in literacy. On the whole, one gets much more out of this book than you could out of any average book on sociolinguistics, regardless of whether you work in language description, literacy, or translation."
-Oliver Stegen, SIL International
Product details
January 2002Paperback
9780521597890
360 pages
228 × 154 × 23 mm
0.67kg
10 b/w illus. 26 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction John R. Rickford and Penelope Eckert
- Part I. Anthropological Approaches:
- 1. 'Style' as distinctiveness: the culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation Judith T. Irvine
- 2. Variety, style-shifting, and ideology Susan Ervin-Tripp
- 3. The ethnography of genre in a Mexican market: form, function, variation Richard Bauman
- 4. The question of genre Ronald Macaulay
- Part II. Attention Paid to Speech:
- 5. The anatomy of style shifting William Labov
- 6. A dissection of style shifting John Baugh
- 7. Style and social meaning Penelope Eckert
- 8. Zeroing in on multifunctionality and style Elizabeth Closs Traugott
- Part III. Audience Design and Self-Identification:
- 9. Back in style: reworking audience design Allan Bell
- 10. Primitives of a system for 'style' and 'register' Malcah Yaegar-Dror
- 11. Language, situation and the relational self: theorising dialect-style in sociolinguistics Nikolas Coupland
- 12. Couplandia and beyond Howard Giles
- 13. Style and stylizing from the perspective of a non-autonomous sociolinguistics John R. Rickford
- Part IV. Functionally Motivated Situational Variation:
- 14. Register variation and social dialect variation: re-examining the connection Edward Finegan and Douglas Biber
- 15. Conversation, spoken language and social identity Lesley Milroy
- 16. Style and the psycholinguistics of sociolinguistics: the logical problem of language variation Dennis R. Preston.
