Reconstructing sociolinguistic variation

Style and Sociolinguistic Variation

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...

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...

Situation: Stylistic Variation in Sociolinguistic Corpora and Theory

Deciding what to code for in archived online corpora from sociolinguistic recordings is important, but enriching such recordings to include more variable situations is an important prerequisite if these corpora are to serve as a resource for the analysis of situational or stylistic variation, still a neglected variable in sociolinguistic theory and analysis. Accordingly, much of this paper is d...

Men's identities and sociolinguistic variation: The case of fraternity men

The variation patterns of the variable (ING) in an American college fraternity are explained by analyzing individual men's contextualized discourse. While most of the fraternity men predictably use a lower rate of the `vernacular' variant in weekly meetings, several men use a higher rate. I argue that all of the men index alignment roles associated with power, but that these alignment roles are...