Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 1416
Part of Session 171: Experimental methods in the study of social meaning (Other abstracts in this session)
Experimental sociolinguistics: off the shelf or under the counter?
Authors: Tipton, Phillip
Submitted by: Tipton, Phillip (University of Essex/Universiät Bern, United Kingdom)
The advent of third-wave approaches to sociolinguistic research (Silverstein 2003; Eckert 2008), which seek to understand how social meaning is created and negotiated through indexical links between linguistic features and social entities, has brought methodological considerations to the forefront of sociolinguists' engagement with the speech communities and communities of practice. Such third-wave approaches can often be differentiated from their earlier counterparts both by their theoretical stance, which might be described as one which emphasises the primacy of social meaning, and the extent to which their methodologies place this theoretical stance at the heart of their operation. In practice, third-wave approaches have employed ethnographic techniques to a much greater extent than studies carried out within the first and second waves of sociolinguistic research.
Recent developments in variationist sociolinguistics have seen an increase in the use of experimental methodologies, yet there has been relatively little discussion in the literature of the implications of such innovation, both in terms of the utility of the data obtained and the wider ramifications for sociolinguistics as a discipline. The notion of context has played a crucial, yet largely implicit, role in the development of variationist sociolinguistic theory and methodology. Context can, however, be understood as an entity which crosses many of the intra-disciplinary boundaries which have emerged within sociolinguistics as a field; most notably, the dichotomy of linguistic and social constraints on variation (e.g. Torgersen & Kerswill 2004) can be understood, in different ways, as aspects of the contextual environment within which structured variation emerges.
This paper seeks critically to examine the implications of experimental studies which purport to find a link between linguistic variation and social meaning. It will be argued that not all variables are equal when it comes to experimental approaches to sociolinguistic variation. In particular, Milroy’s (2007) division of ‘off-the-shelf’ and ‘under-the-counter’ variables will be invoked as a critical fault-line in determining the theoretical import of experimental approaches; that is, finding bidirectional effects in the processing of the social and linguistic contexts of ‘off-the shelf’ variants is unsurprising considering what we know about general priming effects from the psycholinguistic literature; this holds even without assigning the speaker to an agentive role in the manipulation of linguistic and social meaning. Relatively few studies, however, have examined the processing of their ‘under-the-counter’ counterparts, and it will further be argued that it is within this latter condition that lies the greatest potential for experimental approaches to elucidate our understanding of the cognitive relationship between linguistic variation and social meaning. In conclusion, this paper proposes a new method of eliciting experimental data which seeks to show how global, non-linguistic context acts as both the conceptual and processing bridge between linguistic and non-linguistic perception. In this connection, I argue for a pragmatic-situational account of contextual appropriateness in which the ability of the social-indexical properties of the speech signal to impact upon processing is contingent upon their temporal co-occurrence in clusters rather than in isolation.