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Principles of sociolinguistic investigations
- Cumulative principle
- The unifromation principle
- Principle of convergence
- Principle of subordinate shift
- Principle of style shifting
- Principle of attention
- Vernacular principle
- Principle of formality
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Cumulative principle
More known about language the more we can find out
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The uniformation principle
Linguistic processes we observe around us are the same as the past
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Principle of convergance
Value of new data for confirming/interpreting old finds is directly proportional to the differences in the ways new data is gathered
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Principle of subordinate shift
Speakers of a non-standard variety shift their response either to/from standard
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Principle of style shifting
No one speaks exactly the same way in all circumstances
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Principle of attention
More aware of what you say the more formal you say it
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Vernacular principle
Style most regular in its structure is vernacular
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Principle of formality
Observer's paradox (Labov)
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Mentalist
The philosophy or approach that describes how language is represented in the mind
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Competence
A distinction drawn by Chomsky (1965) (vs. performance) that refers primarily to what speakers know about language
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Performance
What speakers actually produce hen speaking (which might be full of false starts, errors, hesitations, and other such "noise" as well as switches between dialects)
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Empiricist
The philosophy or approach that knowledge comes through sensory experience
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Ethnography
A branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of individual cultures
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Speech community
A group of people who are in habitual contact with one another, who share a language variety and social conventions or sociolinguistic norms about language use.
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Social network
The different groups of people that each of us had interacted with over the years
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Community of practice (CofP)
Unit of analysis that looks at a smaller analytical domain that social networks. A community of practice is characterized by mutual engagement, a jointly negotiated enterprise and a shared repertoire
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Sociolinguistics norms
A combination of expressed attitudes and variable linguistic behaviors shared by all members of a speech commmunity
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Dense
A term used to describe the number of connections within a social network. In a low density network people know a central member but not each other. In a high density network members know and interact with each other
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Multiplex
A term used to describe social networks in which members have multiple connections with one another. The opposite of a uniplex network.
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Speaker agency
The ability of speakers to control what they do and to make conscious choices
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Heuristic
Guidelines for how to approach a research problem
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Brokers
People who participate in multiple communities of practice and bring ideas from one into the other, that is, people who introduce innovations to their social networks
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Corpus linguistics
A linguistic research method based on the quantative analysis of collections of naturally occurring language data, usually very larage
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Qualitative
Usury smaller scale intensive research, using methods like interviewing and ethnography that aims to study meanings and motivation, rather than large scale quantitative frequencies or correlations
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Conversation analysis
Among other things, this method looks at the sequential organization of conversation and how participants manage the conversation using strategies like turn talking
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How we experience the world as part of social groups
- Affects how we use language.
- -We need to specify "language" and "social group" to be rigorous in studying that relationship
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Language in use as a methodological issue
Recording/documenting actual language (empirical methods)
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Language in use as a theoretical issue
What "counts" as a language?
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Many linguists (not sociolinguists)
- Elicit Lang forms of interest: "How do you say this in your Lang?"
- Use that information to build up a grammar: Description of how that Lang is represented in the mind
- Actual use isn't helpful, because it's full of "noise": (false starts, etc), Competence vs. Performance
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Sociolinguistic perspective
- Empiricist
- Lang is actually used and recorded
- Everyday "real" Lang is more structured than you'd think
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Real language is collected through
- Recording people: Sociolinguistic interviews designed to encourage focus on content of speech and not the form
- Harvesting data from existing sources: Media, internet, data collected for other purposes, personal letters, diaries etc
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Sociolinguistic info is about language
- Usage of surveys
- Attitude surveys, experiments
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For non-linguists language often means
- Standard language: From school/formal documents, often seen by non-lings as more "correct"
- Associated with a prescriptive approach: How people "should" talk
- Other Lang (non-standard, dialect): often seen as chaotic, not rule governed
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A necessary attitude for the scientific study of linguistics is
- There's no "good" or "bad" Lang, it's descriptive
- How people actually talk
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Social evaluation of language varieties that we study
- Different ones are seen as good/bad by members of society
- Different ones are considered appropriate in different social contexts
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Language vs. dialect
- Linguistically: mutual intelligibility (Can we understand each other? If yes we are speaking the same Lang)
- Socially/politically: Who gets to decide?
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Mutual intelligibility problems
- Social distance affects how much we expect to understand someone: Power imbalance means more powerful people don't have to try to understand less powerful people
- Context affects how much we understand: what do we expect people to be talking about?
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"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy"
If a subgroups has the power (politically/socially) to convince people that its Lang is distinct it becomes a known as a language (ex. Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian are mutually intelligible but considered different languages)
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Cantonese and Mandarin
Are not mutually intelligible but are considered dialects of the same Lang because there is a political interest in unity over diversity
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Slang
Lexicon that are new or have new meanings
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Accent
Phonetics/phonology (pronunciation)
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Variety
What many sociolinguistics call a subset of a language
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Dialect
Usually a regional subset of a language (sometimes used to mean variety)
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Social group
Lang gets its meaning and power through speaker's participation in language-using groups, but which groups matter/how does the group relate to the language use?
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Groups people belong to
- Speech community
- Social network
- Community of practice
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Speech community
- Group of people sharing social conventions or Sociolinguistic norms about language use
- A Sociolinguistic concept discovered through investigation of the Lang of a community
- But based on other social boundaries (Cities, ethnic groups etc)
- Members don't always agree on norms/usage
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Norms
- Can be expressed attitudes
- Or a variable linguistic behavior
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Shared norms-consensus model
People in a speech community tend to have very similar linguistic behaviors compared to other distinctions so researchers can study a small sample and still "get" how a community's variety works
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Social networks
- Term from social anthropology, we all build networks (personal communities) to deal with life
- Out social networks influence how we use language and how we participate in language change
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Looser social networks
Introduce new forms
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Community of practice
- Term from reach on social learning, it's a groups with mutual engagement in a jointly negotiated enterprise, involving (or leading to) a shared repertoire
- Smaller groups, local practices
- More room for speaker agency, the idea that people make conscious choices
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"Nested communities"
- Speech community: Your town
- Social network: youth street, school, workplace
- Community of practice: your club, study group
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Spreading changes
Some people are leaders of change (brokers) they are more gregarious, plugged into multiple groups and have status or legitimacy within groups
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