SOCIOLINGUISTICS

LESSON 10

INSTRUCTOR: LE NGUYEN NHU ANH

LESSON 10
STYLE,
CONTEXT,
AND
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Lesson Contents
Key takeaways:

Addressee as an influence on style

Accommodation theory

Context, style and class

Style in non-Western societies

Register
Addressee as an influence on style
- More standard forms to those they don’t know well
- more vernacular forms to their friends.

Kid to adult

Kid to kid
Addressee as an influence on style

Age, gender, Degree of social

distance/solidarity
social roles,
whether people
work together, or
are part of the
same family, and
so on.
Social status
Addressee as an influence on style
Age of addressee
- People generally talk differently to children and to adults
- To children:
- Sing-song intonation
- ‘baby-talk’
- Simpler vocabulary and grammar
- Many speakers would use features similar to speech to
children when talking to elderly
- Sing-song intonation
- Simpler vocabulary and grammar
- Use of we rather than you
Addressee as an influence on style
Social background of addressee
Example 6
a) Last week the British Prime Minister Mr David
Cameron met the Australian Premier Ms Julia Gillard
in Canberra . . . Their next meeting will not be for
several months.
b) Las’ week ||British Prime Minister ||David Cameron
met ||Australian Premier ||Julia Gillard in Canberra .
. . Their nex’ meeding won’t be for sev’ral months.
Addressee as an influence on style
Social background of addressee
- Audience design: the influence of the addressee or audience on a speaker’s style
=> Speech accommodation
Accommodation theory
Speech convergence
- Speech accommodation: When people talk to each other their speech often becomes more similar
=> each person’s speech converges towards the speech of the person they are talking to.
- When the speakers like one another OR
- One speaker has a vested interest in pleasing the other or putting them at ease
- A polite speech strategy
Accommodation theory
How do speakers accommodate?
- At a party when you respond to and develop a topic
introduced by your addressee

- When a complicated technical message is ‘translated’ for the

benefit of someone who does not know the jargon

- When people simplify their vocabulary and

grammar in talking to foreigners or children
Accommodation theory
How do speakers accommodate?
- When, in an interview with the hospital matron, a nurse
adopts some of the matron’s pronunciation features

- In multilingual countries, people may accommodate to

others by selecting the code or variety that is most
comfortable for their addressees

- In the market-place, people sometimes accommodate

to the language of the person selling goods in order to
secure goodwill and, hopefully, a good bargain
Accommodation theory
Speech divergence
- Speech divergence: The respondents deliberately diverged from the speech style, and even the
language, of the person addressing them

‫لم نعد نرغب في أن يُنظر إلينا على أنها تستوعب‬

‫القوى الناطقة باإلنجليزية الغربية‬. Dun Mihaka
We no longer wish to be seen as accommodating to the
Western English-speaking powers
Accommodation theory
Speech divergence
- Accent divergence:
e.g.
Working-class men’s increasing swearing &
vernacular forms when responding to university-
educated students
People aspiring to a higher social status
• Speech divergence does not always indicate a speaker’s
negative attitudes towards the addressees.
• Where the divergent forms are admired, divergence can
be used to benefit the diverger.
Accommodation theory
Speech divergence
- Referee design:
Speakers may also deliberately diverge both from their
own usual speech style and that of their addressee(s)
towards the style of a third party (reference group, may not
be present) for special effect.
• Students imitate their teachers to amuse friends
• Adopt a prestige accent to impress somebody
• Television adverts include accent of other groups to
create humour or enhance attractiveness of products
• Singers draw on referee design when adopting features
of overseas singers’ styles…
Accommodation theory
Speech divergence
- Stylisation
When someone goes beyond their usual or normal ways of speaking and behaving and
engages in a ‘high’ or ‘strong’ performance of some sort
• Speech of comedians and singers
Accommodation theory
Speech divergence
Stylisation can draw on any aspect of language.
• features of a particular regional accent,
• stigmatised vernacular grammatical features
• very formal grammar
• very erudite vocabulary
• high pitch
• a distinctive intonation pattern => Parody & pantomime
Accommodation theory
Acocommodation problems
• Overdoing convergence can offend listeners => perceived as
as patronising and ingratiating, as sycophantic, making fun of
others
• If the reasons appear manipulative => less likely to feel
positive about convergence => reactions to speech
convergence and divergence depend on the reasons people
attribute for the convergence or divergence
• If divergence is perceived as unavoidable => more tolerant
than when it is considered deliberate.
• Deliberate divergence will be heard as uncooperative or
antagonistic.
Context, style and class
Formal contexts and social roles
• The choice of appropriate form is influenced by the formality
of the context and their relative roles and statuses within that
setting.
Context, style and class
Different styles within an interview
• Amount of attention people pay to their speech => more formal styles
• Casual style => more challenging to elicit
• Vernacular: the style in which the minimum of attention is given to the
monitoring of speech (person’s most relaxed/basic style)
• The observer’s paradox: observing (and recording) the way a person
speaks when they are not being observed.
➢ use strategies to distract people from concentrating on their own
careful speech style
➢ When people were emotionally involved in the story they were
telling, they were not so aware of other factors which favoured a
more formal style
Context, style and class
Colloquial style or the vernacular
• Other strategies to capture people’s most relaxed/vernacular speech style:
• Record small groups of people rather than individuals
• Choose a very comfortable or informal setting
Context, style and class
Interaction of social class and style
• The same linguistic feature often distinguishes
between speakers socially (inter-speaker
variation), while within the speech of one person
it distinguishes different styles (intra-speaker
variation).
• Shift styles => adopt the linguistic features of a
different group. => the lower social groups shift
their speech more as they move from one style
to another than the higher social groups do
Context, style and class
Hypercorrection
• Hypercorrect usage goes beyond the norm; it
involves extending a form beyond the standard.
(‘Hypercorrect’ speech = ‘super-standard’)
• tend to occur when people are involved in
unfamiliarly formal situations
Style in non-Western societies
Register
• Styles are often analysed along a scale of formality.
• Registers tend to be associated with particular groups of people or sometimes specific
situations of use.
• Journalese, baby-talk, legalese, the language of auctioneers, race-callers and sports
commentators, the language of airline pilots, criminals, financiers, politicians and disc
jockeys, the language of the courtroom and the classroom
• Register: language of groups of people with common interests or jobs OR language used in
situations associated with such groups
Register
Sports announcer talk
• Play-by-play description: focuses on the action
• Telegraphic grammar: syntactic reduction + inversion of
normal word order
• colour commentary’: more discursive and leisurely speech
with which commentators fill in the often quite long spaces
between spurts of action
• Syntactic reduction & syntactic inversion
• Heavy noun modification
• Routines and formulaas
Register
Routines and formulas
• Extensive use of oral formulas &
routines (a small number of fixed
syntactic patterns and a narrow
range of lexical items)
• To reduce the memory burden on
the speaker https://youtu.be/dmd3xWy-KEE?t=247
• Particular intonation patterns or
tunes are used
Register
• Specialised registers of occupational groups <= initially from the desire for quick,
efficient and precise communication between people who share experience,
knowledge and skills.
• Over time: more and more characteristics (lexical, syntactic and even
phonological) developed => communications different from those of other
groups.
• Eventually very difficult for outsiders to penetrate
 References

• Bodine (1975) on Chiquita(no). See also www.et-

hnologue.com
• Bortoni-Ricardo (1985) on Brasília
Resources • Bradley (2011) on Yanyuwa
• Cheshire (1982a, b) on Reading speech
• Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams (2005) on (th)-
fronting in Milton Keynes
• Coates and Cameron (1988) on explanation in
social dialectology
• Downes (1998) on age-gradingEckert and
McConnell-Ginet (2013) Ch. 10 on Detroit
adolescents’ speech