LING 320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Mantra, William Labov, Diaphoneme
Document Summary
Cities dif cult for studying regional variation because of net migration and social variation. Studying different regional dialects requires control/standardization of social factors. Contrasts w/ traditional dialectology, which looks at rural communities and regional variation. Sociolinguistics looking more at social factors and speech communities within a city. Begins to collect a strati ed sample of a speech community. Looks at data correlations with social factors and speech style. Sociolinguists push for studying urban speech communities; Traditional dialectologists attributed variation in cities to. Linguistic variable: different linguistic ways of saying the same thing. Different variants with the same referential meaning. It is normally the case that there exist both standard and non-standard variants. Non-standard variants often stigmatized (negative social evaluation) Speech communities normally agree on the social evaluation of the variants regardless of personal usage (does not apply between separate speech communities) Often a result of arbitrary relation between linguistic features and social values.