Style and meaning in sociolinguistic structure.
Stylistic stratification
The ideas of organised difference structured heterogeneity.
I noted the empiricist leanings of the lenguage.
We have already touched on some of the political issues behind variationism.
This involved detailed scrutiny of the speech of all social classes.
The variable is an example of what Labov calls a stable sociolinguistic variable.
Labov suggests that the pattern gives us evidence of linguistic change under social pressure.
Standard and non-standard.
We need to look more critically at what Labov's approach implies and assumes.
Non standard speech as deviation.
What Labov brought to stylistics was firstly a comprehensive survey method.
If we consider the history of standard language
ideology, for example in Lynda Mugglestone’s.
One of Ullman’s examples of a stylistic effect, resulting from speaker choice, is inversion of a grammatical subject phrase in French,
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Limits of the stratification model for style.
‘The same sociolinguistic variable is used to
signal social and stylistic stratification.
The simple categories of ‘careful’ and ‘casual’ are intended to account for the full range of stylistic variation in unscripted speech,
Formality or carefulness is assumed to be a matter of
speakers modifying their speech.
Variationist surveys have been enormously successful, if the quest is to demonstrate statistical orderliness
First we should return to a point made in Chapter.
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It presupposes that there is a set of linguistic forms
whose social value is known and uniform.
The speech of indivi-
duals is more or less Zealand
It refers to an ideological contest and it
articulates a position or point or view in relation to that contest
A way of speaking that we are socialised into will in
many circumstances strike us as unexceptional or ‘unmarked’.
I have persisted in using quote-marks around the terms ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ in order to achieve some critical distance from them.
Once again the linearity entailed in this is troublesome.
The contextualisation of variation makes meaning in the interplay between sociolinguistic resources and local performance.
The history of the core idea of linguistic variability in general stylistics, and of standardness in relation to it, is informative.
Social change, at least in Britain, has begun to pull the
rug from under the sociolinguistics of social class.