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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 747

Part of Session 149: Interactional Dialectology (Other abstracts in this session)

Intraindividual conversation-internal variation: interactionally or linguistically motivated?

Authors: Nordberg, Bengt K. R.
Submitted by: Nordberg, Bengt K. R. (Uppsala university, Sweden)

One of  the tasks of interactional dialectology is to describe and explain speakers’ intraindividual variation within one and the same conversation and to do so first and foremost with reference to the local context of the utterance. The goal is to explain why a specific variant is used by a speaker at the specific point in the interaction where it occurs. This approach, it is argued, would be most rewarding in studies of conversations between speakers of different varieties, e.g. two regional dialects or a local vernacular and a standard variety. It is hoped that the findings of this kind of qualitative studies will give a more reliable explanation of linguistic variation and change than the more quantitative approach of traditional sociodialectology or at least be a complement to the solutions offered by structurally based studies. (See, for example, Bockgård & Nilsson 2011, Nilsson 2011.)

There are mainly two interrelated phenomena involved in this line of reasoning. Based on accommodation theory it is argued that a good deal of a speaker’s variation during a conversation can be seen as convergence to his/her interlocutor (there is much less talk about divergence). This may appear as recycling of a word or phrase that a/the former speaker has uttered and/or switching from one’s normal variant to that of one’s interlocutor. This behavior is interpreted as an expression of liking and solidarity with the other speaker or as a way of mitigating disagreements. Another function of switching a sound, a form or a word is to signal a change of topic or change of roles and reciprocal relations.

Very seldom, however, are the findings of this type of analysis compared with and evaluated in the light of the results that a close scrutiny of the variant’s structural properties might yield. The purpose of my contribution is to make such a comparison on the basis of a large corpus of spontaneous everyday speech, collected in the latter half of the 1960s in Eskilstuna, a medium-sized Swedish town 120 kilometers west of Stockholm. The corpus consists of quite informal dialogs and interviews with socially varied informants of all age groups. I take up three variables, two morphologic and one morphophonologic, viz. personal pronoun 3^rd person plural ‘de’, variants dom~di, past part. of verbs 2^nd conj., variants -t~-i, byggt~byggi, and neuter nouns definite form sing., variants -t~-Ø, huset~huse. They have been analyzed in accordance with the methods of variational linguistics, i.e., apart from external social variables, according to grammatical, phonological and prosodic characteristics. The results suggest that language internal factors are at least as important as interactional ones as independent variables. I will also discuss some theoretical and methodological problems with this branch of interactional analysis.

Literature:

Bockgård, Gustav & Nilsson, Jenny, 2011: Dialektologi möter interaktionsforskning. En introduktion till interaktionell dialektologi. In: G. Bockgård & J. Nilsson (eds.), Interaktionell dialektologi. Uppsala. Pp. 7–50.

Nilsson, Jenny, 2011: Dialektal anpassning i interaktion. In: G. Bockgård & J. Nilsson (eds.), Interaktionell dialektologi. Uppsala. Pp.223–249.