Veronica Miatto
The body of literature discussed here provides a broad overview of the methods used in sociolinguistic research within various subdisciplines. Chapter 6 deals with historical sociolinguistics, and the methodological changes that occur between studying variation of the present versus the past. As the author indicates, the first major difference between contemporary and historical sociolinguistics is in the nature of the data that can be studied: the latter is restricted to mostly written records belonging to a small literate elite. Second, historical sociolinguists have to deal with being unfamiliar with the society that produced that data, and with the limited context available. Contemporary linguistics has none of those restrictions. On the other hand, the outcome of linguistic changes tackled in historical sociolinguistic are known, while they are not in ongoing sound changes. The main method used in historical sociolinguistics is corpus analysis. This probably favors studies on lexical or sound/spelling changes, while morphological or syntactic studies are penalized, unless the corpus is fully glossed.
Chapter 7 contends with Corpus linguistics in sociolinguistics. Compared to historical sociolinguistics, or other linguistic subdisciplines that circumscribe a particular area of linguistics, corpus linguistics involves doing linguistics research with a particular method that is very versatile and can be applied to almost any field. Corpora are collections of large numbers of texts and words, which are stored electronically and analyzed through a software. This method allows to make claims about language using an enormous amount of data that would be impossible to analyze manually, which can give more credibility to the study itself, and a more reliable generalization. Key characteristics of a good corpus include being balanced, fit for the research question, and representative of a wide range of population.
Chapter 8 tackles sociophonetics, which is the study of language variation through the analysis of physical realizations of sounds. This subfield is still relatively young, starting to spread to the US and globally only 30 years ago. The two main research questions of sociophonetics are why certain changes occur and how language is structured in the mind. Acoustic analyses are carried out on digitalized sound speech, and most commonly on vowel formants. The author of the chapter spends considerable time depicting ways to carry out good acoustic research. For example, when analyzing formants, it is essential to choose vowels that are representative, which means that they cannot be too influenced by neighboring segments or phonological processes like vowel reduction. In general, there are many pitfalls when doing acoustic analyses, but these can be at least in part avoided by (i) designing a balanced experiment, (ii) having good quality recordings, (iii) knowing the software used in speech analysis well.
Chapter 12 explores discourse analysis in sociolinguistics, which is the study of linguistic social interactions. This usually focuses on the micro-level, such as how a specific group expresses emotions or apologizes. One of the examples in this chapter looks at how workers in different companies use humor and with which goals. Since discourse analysis pays attention to very specific and small populations, this kind of research is mostly qualitative and hard to generalize. My impression is that it would be also very difficult to replicate . To compensate the subjectivity to which some instances must be judged at times, the author of the chapter advises interpreting results through triangulation, which is the use of transcriptions together with video or audio recordings, in order to have more than one perspective.
Geographical dialectology, the theme of chapter 16, is one of the oldest branches of sociolinguistics. It studies variation across space. The aim of the subfield changed over time, from depicting a cartography of how people speak to examining the relations between geographically close localities and how these affects dialect features. While the object of research has not changed much over time – rural, local people are still the ones sought out in this kind of research, though now geographical dialectology pays more attention and differentiates speakers in sociolinguistic categories such as age and gender. The ideal data to be collected is natural speech used in informal environments.
Chapter 17 talks about speech communities, social networks and communities of practice, which are all approaches that complement each other in the study of speech variation. Speech communities attribute the same social meanings to variables, and share the same linguistic norms, as well as dialectal features. Usually speech communities are identified with cities, of which a balanced sample should be studied. Social networks look at variation that happens through interactions. Within this approach, variation is found through weak ties, i.e. acquaintances, and through low-density social networks. The reasoning behind this is that dense social networks and individual with strong ties will speak very similarly, and therefore these environments will inhibit language change. Finally, investigating communities of practice helps understand the social meaning of linguistic variables.
The recurring theme in these chapters is speech variation, with extremely different approaches and methods. Generally, the topics tackled here are not mutually exclusive, so much so that it is completely feasible to construct a study that analyses diachronic variation using a corpus with transcribed natural texts of a particular speech community. Another commonality in most of these research methods is that the researcher is oftentimes required to interpret the individual tokens and instances and place them into context. Even in corpus studies, which deals with a great amount of data, the researcher should make sure that the keywords searched are used in the right contexts, that the population analyzed appear in the same types of texts, and that the data was collected using the same tasks.
As mentioned before, the chapters give very broad overview of their topic, which is very easy to read, and gives a general sense of the field. This, together with the ‘troubleshooting’ and ‘tips’ sections, makes the chapter extremely useful for whomever is becoming interested in the subfield or wants to do research with that particular method. What struck me is that none of these methodologies seems to be flawless. They all have their shortcomings and aspects that they overlook in order to achieve a particular goal. In the end, it is all a matter of finding the best (not the perfect) way to answer the relevant research question.
Questions on chaper 8 (Veronica Miatto)
- How does sociophonetics contribute to the main research question of how language is structured congnitively?
- How can sociophoneticians incorporate social context in their studies?
- What are the shortcomings of not doing so, regarding the research questions they are trying to answer?
