1. Sociolinguistics
Styles
Dr Emma Moore

2. Contents What does it mean to talk about ‘style’ in sociolinguistics?
What frameworks have been developed for studying style?
How is the latest ‘style’ research undertaken?

3. What we know about style already: Style & attention to speech
Eliciting tokens of /r/
A: “Where is ….?”
B: “On the fourth floor.”
A: “Excuse me?”
B: “The fourth floor.”
Unconscious response
Careful articulation (more attention paid to speech)
Labov (1972): NYC department stores

4. More /r/ in more careful speech styles
Labov (1972) NYC results
More /r/ in more careful speech styles

5. Attention to speech as a continuum of style
Formal to informal styles
Based upon the type of speech event
Word list
Reading
Careful (interview)
Casual (friends)

6. Is type of speech event the only thing that affects style?
Cheshire (1982)
Reading adventure playgrounds
Groups of ‘delinquent’ children (WC)
Considered style shifting
Language used with peers
Language used with the teacher in school
Style shifts according to setting and audience

7. More evidence for the importance of setting and audience…
Coupland (1984)
Travel agency corpus
Travel agent in conversation with clients
Analysed several variables, including the voicing of intervocalic /t/: [bʊtə] – [bʊtə]
The voicing of the travel agent was affected by the level of voicing used by her client ˇ

8. Links to social psychology & accommodation theory
Giles & Powesland (1975): Speech Accommodation Theory
Speakers accommodate their speech to their addressee in order to gain approval

9. Speech accommodation Convergence: movement towards one’s addressee
Divergence: movement away from one’s addressee
Noddy and Barney in Cheshire’s study?

10. Audience Design as an approach to style
Bell (1984): Speakers style shift as a response to their listeners
Studying a radio newsreader’s pronunciations on 2 different stations
Newsreader’s ‘style’ is determined by his audience

11. Audience Design as an approach to style
“Speakers show a fine-grained variability to design their style for a range of addressees, and to a lessening degree for other audience members such as auditors and overhearers” (Bell 2007: 97).
“Style shifts according to topic or setting derive their meaning and direction of shift from the underlying association of topics or settings with typical audience members” (Bell 2007: 98).

12. The latest work on style…
Approaches which view style as the product of type of speech event, context/setting and/or audience may be limited
Suggests that all styles are pre-existing

13. Style as creative
Speakers don’t just use language to express pre-existing styles but can use language to create new styles
Speakers may not just be accommodating to an audience but designing their own talk to determine how they are perceived
Linguistic variables are dynamic and can be used to create a range of meanings…

14. How do things mean?: The case of the Mickey Mouse watch
What does the wearing of a Mickey Mouse watch say about someone’s style?
Depends whose wearing it!
What is it worn with?

15. Style and its meaning Eckert (2000): (ay) in the Detroit suburbs
The raising of the nucleus of (ay) is an urban feature, and is favored by kids who are alienated from school, and who resist adult domination
Tends to be used by Burnouts rather than Jocks

16. Audience design interpretation?
Burnouts use raised (ay) more, so this feature probably means ‘burnout’
Traditional accounts might say that a non-burnout using raised (ay) is accommodating to burnout style, or associating themselves with burnout status

17. Judy = the most burned-out burnout
Is it that simple?
Connie = a working class jock who prides herself in being more authentic & independent than her peers.
Judy = the most burned-out burnout
Jock, Burnout

18. The meaning of (ay): a linguistic Mickey Mouse watch?
Is Connie trying to be a burnout (Audience designing her talk to converge towards her burnout peers)?
Or is she using (ay) to create a new identity as an ‘independent’ jock?
(ay) raising’s association with resistance serves as a useful resource for Connie

19. Style as bricolage (Hebdige 1979)
We ‘decode’ linguistic variables according to their context
Sociolinguistic style is no different to style in any other other realm of life (Irvine 2001)
Style is a socially meaningful clustering of features, within and across different linguistic levels and modalities
(The Half Moon Bay Style Collective 2006)

20. Styles and ethnography
The understanding of speakers’ styles requires ethnography
Who do speakers hang around with?
What practices do they engage in?
What repertoire of linguistic features do they use?
How do they dress?
How do all of these things make language meaningful?

21. Linguistic features and styles
Linguistic features can be intimately tied to social practices
Eckert (2000): vowels & jean width

22. Modelling style: Communities of Practice
Community of Practice (CofP): “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992:464).
“The people at the Jones’s breakfast table, in Mrs. Constock’s Latin class, or in Ivan’s garage band get together fairly regularly to engage in an enterprise. Whether the enterprise is being a family, learning (or not learning) Latin, or playing music, by virtue of engaging over time in that endeavour, the participants in each of these groups develop ways of doing things together. They develop activities and ways of engaging in those activities, they develop common knowledge and beliefs, ways of relating to each other, ways of talking – in short, practices. Such a group is what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) have termed a community of practice” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003: 57).

23. Findings from CofP studies
The meaning of nonstandard were in a Bolton high school (Moore 2004)
Townie
Anti-school rebellious behaviour
Sporty/OTT style
Popular
Anti-school attitude
Sporty/
Feminine Style

24. Findings from ‘speaker-design’ style studies
The social meaning of word-final /t/:
Bucholtz (1996) - adolescent geeky girls
Ashburn (2000) - science fiction fans
Benor (2001) - Orthodox Jews after Yeshiva
Podesva et al. (2001) - gay activist lawyer for mainstream audience
Campbell-Kibler (2003) - perceptions of undergraduate students
Sclafani (2007) - parodies of Martha Stewart

25. Attention to speech Determined by levels of formality Informal style
Casual style
Reading style…

26. Audience design Determined by audience School/teacher style
Vernacular culture style
WC style
Female style…

27. Speaker design/creative styling
Determined by the wider ‘style’ of the speaker
Independent jock style
Townie style
Geeky girl style
Gay lawyer style …

28. Summing Up…
Style has always been an important concept in Sociolinguistics
Style can defined as:
Attention to Speech (Labov 1972)
Audience Design (Bell 1984)
Speaker Design/Creative Styling (Eckert 2000, Moore 2004)

29. Selected References
Bell, Allan (2007) “Style and the linguistic repertoire”. In: Carmen Llamas, Louise Mullany & Peter Stockwell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.
Coupland, Nikolas (2007) Style: Language Variation & Identity. Cambridge: CUP.
Labov, William (1972) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Eckert, Penelope (2000) Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Moore, Emma (2004) “Sociolinguistic style: A multidimensional resource for shared identity creation”. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 49 (3/4):
Required Reading: Meyerhoff 2006 (Chapter 3)