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Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:53:11 -0000
From: "Watson, Kevin" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: NWCL Annual Lecture 2004: Professor Penelope Eckert
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The North West Centre for Linguistics is delighted to announce
The 2004 Annual Lecture
Professor Penelope Eckert, Stanford University, CA.
"The Stylistic Turn: Getting serious about the social meaning of
variation"
Monday 29 March 2004
Arts Building, University of Manchester.
ALL WELCOME
***********
Abstract
Sociolinguistic variation is a central means by which the social is
embedded in language. And while traditional approaches to variation
acknowledge social meaning, they give precedence to the grammatical
system at the expense of the system of social meaning. This talk will
explore an alternate approach to variation, which focuses on personal
styles as the interpretive basis for individual variables.
Analytic practice in the study of sociolinguistic variation has grown
primarily out of a concern with the linguistic and social constraints on
linguistic change. Variables have been selected for study by virtue of
their integration into grammar and change - e.g. in the case of
phonological variables, their status as components of regional vowel
shifts. The focus on large-scale correlations of variables with abstract
categories such as age, gender and class has uncovered critical patterns
in the spread of change through large populations, but has led linguists
to treat variables as direct markers of these categories.
Meanwhile, studies of variation in small communities (Labov 1972;
Holmquist 1985; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995; Mendoza-Denton 1999;
Eckert 2000) have called upon ethnographic methods to uncover the local
dynamics of variable use in day-to-day social practice. Out of this work
has come a focus on the finer, more local, meanings that come to be
associated with variables. In these studies, it has become clear that
linguistic variables generally index social categories indirectly, and
that correlations with gender, class, etc. result from the patterned
evocation of social meanings such as toughness, gentility, conciseness,
anger, childishness, casualness, etc.
Social meaning, then, is not to be found in a particular component of
the grammar, or in changes in progress, but in a semiotic system that
calls on resources from various parts of the linguistic system (and
beyond). Social meaning resides not in individual variables but in
styles. Speakers combine semiotic resources to construct personae, and
individual variables contribute to this construction. A focused study of
social meaning, therefore, must take as its point of departure not
individual variables but styles.
***********
If you have any questions, see http://www.nwcl.salford.ac.uk or email
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Aidan Coveney
University of Exeter
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