语言变异

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and variationist linguisticsstudies the variation foundwithin languages, especially variation that isgeographically or socially conditioned. Dialectology is one of the oldestbranches of linguistics, especially on the way language variesgeographically. Sociolinguistics focuses on the social conditioning ofvariation. Since the rise of the “orderly heterogeneous”in middle of the 20th century, language variation has become one of the an important research objectand research units.social linguisticsstudy Social linguistics has a unique perspective on the understanding of language variation, WilliamLabov believes that language variation is "different views on the same thing.In the 1960s Labov demonstrated that variationnot only existed along social lines, but also that these same social lines likewise demarcatedthe path of change for some linguistic innovations (see Chambers and Trudgill,1998).

In 1996,Labov's Social Stratification of English in New York city has opened up a new phase of the urban dialect bov has produced evidence to show that almost all speakers in New York City share a common set of linguistic norms, whatever their actual linguistic performance, and that they hear and report themselves as using these prestigious linguistic forms, rather than the forms they actually do use. This 'dishonesty' in reporting what they say is of course not deliberate, but it does suggest that informants, at least so far as their conscious awareness is concerned, are dis-satisfied with the way they speak, and would prefer to be able to use more standard forms. This was in fact confirmed by comments New York City informants actually made about their own speech.

Inspired by Labov, Peter Trudgill found overt comments made by the Norwich informants on their own speech were also of this type. Comments such as 'I talk horrible' were typical. It also began to appear, however, that, as suggested above, there were other, deeper motivations for their actual linguistic behavior than these overtly expressed notions of their own 'bad speech'. For example, many informants who initially stated that they did not speak properly, and would like to do so, admitted, if pressed, that they perhaps would not really like to, and that they would almost certainly

be considered foolish, arrogant or disloyal by their friends and family if they did.

It is common in the study of variationto interpret variables as reflections of speakers’ membership in socialcategories. The early moments of the quantitative study of variation held promise for then analysis of socialmeaning.In his study of Martha’sVineyard,Labov(1963)foundcorrelations of centralized /ay/ with a range of social categories – fishermen,people living at the fishing end of the island, teenagers who planned to spendtheir adulthoods on the island. He interpreted these correlations as evidenceof an association of the old island variant with local authenticity based in thEnglish-descent island-based fishing community and its resistance to mainlandincursion. This very local construction of meaning in variation, the recruiting ofa vowel as part of a local ideological struggle, suggested that variation can be aresource for theconstruction ofmeaningandanintegral part of social change.Butthis power of variation was lost in the large-scale survey studies of sound changein progress in the years that followed, as social meaning came to be confusedwith the demographic correlations that point to it. Socialmeaning remained as asubtext in community studies, but with no real place in the theory.

Peter Trudgill(1972), for instance, called upon the perceived toughness of working-class menas a motive for middle-class men to adopt local working-class sound changes,accounting for the upward spread of change. But this account was vague aboutthe nature of the connection between toughness, gender, and class, and did notopen up an account of how meanings become associated with social categoriesor with variables. Rather, it was absorbed into a view of the meaning of variablesas consequences of the abstract demographic categories that structure surveyresearch – socio-economic class, gender, and ethnicity.

Others have argued more recently that variables are associatednot with the categories themselves, but with stances and characteristics thatconstitute those categories.Penelope Eckert (2008) did a survey b uilding on MichaelSilverstein’s notion of indexical order, he argued that themeanings of variablesare not precise or fixed but rather constitute a field of potential meanings –an indexical field, or