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
constellation of ideologically related meanings, any oneof which can be activated in the situated use of the variable. The field is fluid,and each new activation has the potential to change the field by buildingon ideological connections. Thus variation constitutes an indexical systemthat embeds ideology in language and that is in turn part and parcel of theconstruction of ideology.
There is no doubt that social categorization is central to the study ofsociolinguistic variation. But early researchuncovered structured patterns of linguistic differentiation within urban communities,foregrounding the pervasiveness of social categorization and its influenceon linguistic variation (e.g. Labov 1966, 1972; Trudgill 1974).In order to examinehow the social meanings of phonetic variation in aBritish adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationshipbetween ethnicity, social class, and social practice. S A M K I R K H A M (2008 )analyzed the acoustic realization ofthis vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondaryschool and found that the variable’s community-wide associations ofsocial class were projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation,which he suggestedwas a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographicevidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of theHAPPY vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles,which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuringlocal social practices. He claimed that the patterns of variation reported here represent a formof social practice, but that ethnicity and social class intersect in influencing thesocial practices and ideological orientations of different groups of speakers.
C 1
The author 2008
Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
V ARIATION AND THE INDEXICAL FIELD 455
LANGUAGE V ARIATION STUDIES AND
COMPUTATIONAL HUMANITIES
JOHN NERBONNE, CHARLOTTE GOOSKENS,
SEBASTIAN KÜRSCHNER AND RENÉE V AN BEZOOIJENInternational Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 2 (1–2) 2008, 1–18
DOI: 10.3366/E1753854809000287
© Edinburgh University Press and the Association for History and Computing 2009 Lang. Soc. x, 179I95. Printed in Great Britain Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich PETER TRUDGILL Department o f LinguisticScience, Universityof Reading 2011
Language Variation and Change, 2 (1990), 205-254. Printed in the U.S.A.
© 1991 Cambridge University Press 0954-3945/91 $5.00 + .00
The intersection of sex and social class
in the course of linguistic change
WILLIAM LABOV
University of Pennsylvania
ABSTRACT
Two general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous sociolinguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than
women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in linguistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or
how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of linguistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors
raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by
lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project
on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is independent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction develops
gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that
sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for
all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an initial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-dominated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they
are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 453–476
Variation and the indexical field1
Penelope Eckert
Stanford University
The author 2008
Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
472 ECKERT
Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class,
ethnicity, and social practice
S A M K I R K H A M
Department of Linguistics and English Language, County South, Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL, United KingdomLanguage in Society 44, 629–652.
doi:10.1017/S0047404515000585。