Discourse-pragmatic variation across situations, varieties, ages: i don't know in sociolinguistic and medical interviews

What do Listeners Know about Sociolinguistic Variation?

A pair of experiments addressed two questions regarding listeners’ sociolinguistic knowledge: First, how do listeners use facts about speech to inform their beliefs about speakers? Second, and conversely, how might listeners use facts about speakers to inform their perceptions of speech? Results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that listeners can infer characteristics of speakers from their use of a...

Introduction: discourse-pragmatic variation and change

Following Macaulay’s (2002, 2005) repeated calls for a fuller integration of discourse-pragmatic features into the variationist research agenda, the last decade or so has seen an unprecedented upsurge in quantitative research investigating patterns of variation and change in the use of conventionalised, polyfunctional linguistic items and constructions such as innit, you know, as I say, and stu...

Style and Sociolinguistic Variation

A Sociolinguistic Study of Mark Negotiation Discourse in Iranian Universities

Ideology, power, and identity are truly reflected in people’s daily discourse including mark negotiation discourse of students. Peculiar power relations in Iranian academic settings and the unique features of politeness in Farsi extending up to Ta’arof motivated the researcher to statistically analyze a total of 50 mark negotiation discourse samples of Iranian university students from diverse d...

Ethnicity and Sociolinguistic Variation in San Francisco

California’s San Francisco Bay Area has long been one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the United States, and ethnicity is an integral aspect of any research on language use in the region. This article gives a brief social history of San Francisco with respect to settlement patterns since the 1850s’ gold rush, paying particular attention to Chinese Americans, who are argued to play an es...