Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics)

Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections

CARMEN FOUGHT, Editor

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Sociolinguistic Variation

OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS General Editors: Nikolas Coupland Adam Jaworski Cardiff University Recently Published in the Series: Talking About Treatment: Recommendations for Breast Cancer Adjuvant Treatment Felicia D. Roberts Language In Time: The Rhythm and Tempo of Spoken Interaction Peter Auer, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Frank Müller Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse Maryann Overstreet A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar Julie Lindquist

Sociolinguistic Variation Critical Reflections

EDITED BY CARMEN FOUGHT

1 2004

3

Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sociolinguistic variation/critical reflections / edited by Carmen Fought. p. cm. “. . . this volume grew out of a conference held at the Claremont Colleges to honor Ronald Macaulay”—Preface. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-517039-3 1. Language and languages—Variation—Congresses. 2. Sociolinguistics—Congresses. I. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. II. Fought, Carmen, 1966– P120.V37S6 2004 306.44—dc22 2003058033 Chapter 11, “Spoken Soul” copyright © 2000 by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Ronald Macaulay

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

We are delighted to introduce Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections as the first volume to appear under our general editorship of Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. Carmen Fought has assembled a set of important, original commentaries on the study of sociolinguistic variation that push the variationist enterprise forward. As we know, intellectual progress is not to be equated with generating more knowledge of familiar sorts. Progress often demands stocktaking and reflexive review. This book presents many of the field leaders in the study of language variation who are taking a dispassionate, critical look at several of the key assumptions and conventions of variationist research. How secure are our ways of generalizing from the data of language variation? How can we enrich our interpretations of interview talk and of narrative accounts? How should we theorize “place” as a correlate of variation, beyond the conventional but ultimately troublesome concept of speech community? How can we be more open to subjective factors in variation such as language attitudes and language ideologies, and where should we locate the traditional boundary between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics? We take it as an index of the maturity of variationist sociolinguistics that this set of questions can now be posed and debated. The volume represents two sorts of critical reappraisal and challenge: how can we strengthen the middle ground of our own research practice, but also how can we engage more directly with topics and agenda of shared interest in other fields of research in the humanities and social sciences? The study of language variation and change has perhaps been the most contained and autonomous subfield of sociolinguistics up to now. But this volume shows its wide potential reach—in this case into theories of social identity, community, conflict, politics, cognition, and human development. Variationist sociolinguistics, and

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SERIES EDITORS ’ PREFACE

sociolinguistics generally (where it will become less relevant to differentiate between its component parts), will undoubtedly become more and more important as an intellectual space where multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary themes relevant to language and social life can be productively entertained. Under Ed Finegan’s expert guidance for more than a decade, Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics has played a leading international role in disseminating excellent interdisciplinary sociolinguistic research. The backlist is daunting for incoming editors. It is certainly one of our ambitions to maintain the series’s commitment to publishing excellent research of whatever methodological design and to extend its impressively broad reach into important empirical domains of language use. The phrase “language in society” has, nevertheless, tended to have a rather selective application in the discipline: it is almost a Whorfian cryptotype. The family, and especially childhood, peer groups, social class networks, gender, health and counseling, education, workplace, politics, and mass media have been uncontroversial fields for sociolinguistics. Fields like forensics, religion, sport, leisure, communication technologies, tourism, and the arts have been less so. Historical sociolinguistics still seems a minority concern. Taste, globalization, consumerism, and authenticity are some of the potent interdisciplinary themes that sociolinguistics has yet to contribute to substantially. “Older” sociolinguistic themes such as performance, style, mobility, reflexivity, ritual, ageing, sexuality and desire, and even sociolinguistics’s staple of social class are ripe for reinterpretation. Sociolinguistics needs to model and assess the implications of profound global shifts in the organization of social life and communicative interaction. Shifting patterns of work and leisure, the rise of the service sector, transnationalism, neonationalism and neocolonialism, the drive toward multimodal and multisensory communication, and the changing nature of the public sphere are some of them. With a consciously open agenda, we will seek to publish books on all aspects of sociolinguistics that offer new insights into older and newer social configurations and problems. We firmly expect to maintain sociolinguistics’s longstanding commitment to the study of social inequalities and conflicts, as well as to bridge the gap between social critique and policymaking. Books that help to reassess sociolinguistics itself and the nature of sociolinguistic theory will also be welcome. To reflect the widening readership for sociolinguistic research, it will also be a priority for us to ensure that books in the series are written as accessibly as possible. It should therefore be possible for books in the series to be used as higher-level textbooks or secondary readings in advanced courses. Authored monographs, edited anthologies, and indeed other formats can be considered. It is particularly appropriate that Carmen Fought has presented Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections in part as a tribute to Ronald Macaulay’s sociolinguistic career. Ronald’s research into language variation, style, and discourse has been genuinely pioneering. His voice has been among the most persuasive in arguing that sociolinguistics must respect the dignity and humanity of people we risk treating only as “informants” and must show no respect for the unnecessary boundaries that divide schools and theories. We warmly endorse the dedication of this volume to him. NC, AJ September 2003

PREFACE

The idea for this volume grew out of a conference held at the Claremont Colleges to honor, upon his retirement, Ronald Macaulay, the founder of the linguistics program there and a pioneer in the field of variationist sociolinguistics. We saw this event as a chance to bring together prominent researchers in the field of sociolinguistics, giving them the opportunity to highlight the directions they felt were central to current and future research. The conference began with the topic of sociolinguistic methods, and a number of chapters do address methodological issues, particularly those in the first part. But most of these chapters go beyond this theme, revisiting some traditional areas of sociolinguistic study in new ways or moving into areas that have received little attention in the past but reflect emerging trends in linguistic research. All established conferences have a kind of rhythm that develops over the years, shaping the types of work researchers choose to present. Perhaps because this conference was unique, many of the impressive roster of scholars who responded to our invitation brought research in areas that were new to them or simply new in general. Gillian Sankoff, for example, an expert on language contact and bilingualism, presented work on how dialect can change after puberty. John Rickford talked about AAVE (AfricanAmerican Vernacular English), his area of long-standing expertise, but included a very recent source of data: internet chat rooms and the attitudes expressed there. The papers overall had an intimate tone, different from those at the usual, established conferences, which this smaller, celebratory setting seemed to facilitate. This is not a tribute volume in the usual sense. The presenters were told that it was not necessary for their work to tie in specifically with Ronald Macaulay’s

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research, and most do not make this connection explicitly. An exception is William Labov’s chapter, which reanalyzes a narrative from Macaulay’s fieldwork in light of theories of the linguistic correlates of interest in narratives. However, many of the authors did mention in their introductory remarks the influence of Macaulay’s research on their own career paths and on the field in general. These personal expressions of gratitude have been edited out of this volume. However, I will reproduce here the preamble to the presentation given by John Rickford, which summarizes well the sense of what the various presenters had to say about Macaulay’s work and influence: [Ronald Macaulay] is, I think, an underheralded pioneer and leader in sociolinguistics, and I thank Carmen Fought, whom I taught as a Stanford undergraduate, for bringing us together to honor and celebrate him. I first discovered his (1976, 1977) work on language and social class in Glasgow when I was writing my 1979 dissertation. In a field where this central topic has still received far less critical consideration than it merits, I found his work on class-based variation extremely insightful, and it is certainly still very relevant and important. His several papers on attitudes to language and dialect, especially Scots English, and its conflicted evaluation as remarkable eloquence or tongue-tying badge of shame (e.g., 1975, 1995/1996) are inspirations to all of us who work on nonprestige varieties. They are similar to work that Elizabeth Traugott and I did some years ago on contradictory attitudes to pidgins and creoles (Rickford and Traugott 1985). And they relate directly to what my son Russell and I have written about America’s love/hate relationship with the African-American vernacular (Rickford and Rickford 2000), the subject of my paper today. Macaulay’s 1988 paper on the ambiguities of the term “vernacular” is one of the most valuable discussions of the topic in sociolinguistics; I have referred many students to it, and still pull it out for clarification when I find myself uncertain about its meaning. His work on narrative and discourse analysis (1987, 1991) is penetrating, and he has also made valuable contributions to the study of style (2001). Finally, there is an element of his research that I have always vaguely admired, but only clearly identified when I heard him presenting his paper at the 1999 NWAV conference in Toronto last month. This is the fact that he derives intense pleasure both from the content and the language of his Scots English speakers, as if a lifetime of recording, analyzing, and writing about them were not a burden or professional responsibility but a joyous privilege. Those of us who have our own groups of favorite speakers elsewhere can resonate with him (as Haj Ross would put it) on this point. But we sometimes forget it. Thank you for helping to remind us of this pleasure, Ronald, and for helping us to convey it to our students.

I, too, thank Ronald Macaulay for his contributions to the field and for bringing together the group of extraordinary linguists in this volume. In addition, he has played an important role in my life personally, as a colleague and a mentor; for this I am profoundly grateful. Finally, the completion of this volume would not have been possible without the patient assistance of Lea Harper (whose work was funded by a grant from Pitzer Research and Awards), Ken Olitt, and my husband, John Fought. A special thanks also to Peter Ohlin for standing by this project.

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References Macaulay, Ronald. 1975. Negative Prestige, Linguistic Insecurity, and Linguistic Self-hatred. Lingua, 36(2–3):147–161. ———. 1976. Social Class and Language in Glasgow. Language in Society 5(2):173–188. ———. 1977a. Language, Social Class, and Education: A Glasgow Study. R. K. S. Macaulay, assist. G. D. Trevelyan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1987. Polyphonic Monologues: Quoted Direct Speech. In Oral Narratives IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 1(2):1–34. ———. 1988. The Rise and Fall of the Vernacular; Festschrift for Robert P. Stockwell from His Friends & Colleagues. In On Language: Rhetorica, Phonologica, Syntactica, ed. Caroline Duncan-Rose and Theo Vennemen, 106–115. London : Routledge. ———. 1991. Locating Dialect in Discourse: The Language of Honest Men and Bonnie Lasses in Ayr. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995/1996. Remarkably Common Eloquence: The Aesthetics of Urban Dialect. Scottish Language, 14–15, 66–80. ———. 2001. The question of genre. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rickford, John, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1985. Symbol of Powerlessness and Degeneracy, or Symbol of Solidarity and Truth? Paradoxical Attitudes towards Pidgins and Creoles. In The English Language Today, ed. S. Greenbaum, 252–261. Oxford: Pergamon. Rickford, John Russell and Russell John Rickford. 2000. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: Wiley.

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CONTENTS

Contributors

xv

Introduction, Carmen Fought

3

Part I: Sociolinguistic Methods 1.

Some Sources of Divergent Data in Sociolinguistics, Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery 11

2.

Ordinary Events, William Labov

3.

Exploring Intertextuality in the Sociolinguistic Interview, Natalie Schilling-Estes 44

31

Part II: The Exploration of “Place” 4.

Place, Globalization, and Linguistic Variation, Barbara Johnstone

5.

The Sociolinguistic Construction of Remnant Dialects, Walt Wolfram

6.

Variation and a Sense of Place, Penelope Eckert

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65 84

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CONTENTS

Part III: Influences on Adult Speech 7.

Adolescents, Young Adults, and the Critical Period: Two Case Studies from “Seven Up”, Gillian Sankoff 121

8.

Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics: A Psycholinguistic Perspective, Dennis R. Preston 140

Part IV: Attitudes and Ideologies 9.

Language Ideologies and Linguistic Change, Lesley Milroy

10, The Radical Conservatism of Scots, Ronald Macaulay

161

178

11, Spoken Soul: The Beloved, Belittled Language of Black America, John R. Rickford 198 Index

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CONTRIBUTORS

Ronald Macaulay Department of Linguistics Pitzer College Claremont, CA 91711-6101

Guy Bailey Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs University of Texas, San Antonio San Antonio, TX 78249-0603

Lesley Milroy Department of Linguistics University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Penelope Eckert Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150 Carmen Fought Department of Linguistics Pitzer College Claremont, CA 91711-6101

Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824-1027

Barbara Johnstone Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890

John R. Rickford Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150

William Labov Department of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Gillian Sankoff Department of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 xv

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CONTRIBUTORS

Natalie Schilling-Estes Department of Linguistics Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057-1051 Jan Tillery Department of English, Classics, and Philosophy University of Texas San Antonio San Antonio, TX 78249

Walt Wolfram Department of English North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695-8105

Sociolinguistic Variation

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CARMEN FOUGHT

Introduction

The chapters in this volume bring together some of the most prominent researchers in the field of sociolinguistic variation, both established names and newer voices, for thoughtful reflections on the field. The chapters cover a wide range of core issues, but within this diversity is a common theme: the critique of conventional wisdom in the sociolinguistic study of variation and the extension of important concepts in variationist research to new areas. This volume is the kind of work that engages the reader in dialogue, challenges assumptions, and unveils new perspectives. Many of these chapters begin by attempting to define (or redefine) our common language, to explore the terms and concepts that unite us as sociolinguists. For instance, what characteristics are typical of (or necessary for) a remnant dialect? What exactly do we mean by language ideologies? When we propose to do ethnography, what might (or must) that encompass? Several chapters explore the concept of the speech community, directly or indirectly, in new and more dynamic ways. Presumably, there have been speech communities for as long as talking humans have banded together into social groups, but our understanding of how such communities work is continuously expanding. Some of the concepts explored here are relatively new to our field: intertextuality, for example, as it relates to the sociolinguistic interview, or postvernacular—a term for varieties acquired later in life, envisioned as part of a specific psycholinguistic model of variation. The field of sociolinguistics is in a process of rapid evolution, in the sense of both uncovering more information about previously documented linguistic patterns and studying new patterns that have only recently come into existence. In the former category is our evolving understanding of how social contexts and the processes of 3

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INTRODUCTION

linguistic change interact. Johnstone’s and Milroy’s chapters, for example, revisit Labov’s classic Martha’s Vineyard study in this light, looking at it from the vantage point of current perspectives. In the category of completely new patterns are phenomena related to the Internet, which did not exist when many of the linguists in this book began their research careers. Rickford’s chapter, for example, shows us how the internet can reveal important information about language attitudes that might be hard to access in a less anonymous setting. One theme that runs through a majority of the chapters is the exploration of identity—how people conceptualize, construct, and perform who they are. In exploring it, the researchers touch on a variety of perspectives from linguistics and other fields. Schilling-Estes, for example, draws on the theoretical ideas of Bakhtin, whereas Milroy’s and Johnstone’s chapters refer to the acts of identity model of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller. Many disciplines encompass the study of identity: sociology, anthropology, psychology, women’s studies, and so forth. It enhances the work of sociolinguists to incorporate research from these other fields. The relatively new and growing field of sociolinguistics, however, makes a unique contribution to the scientific understanding of identity and its role in social organization, and these chapters illuminate the nature of that contribution. The four main parts of the book provide different perspectives from which particular topics in sociolinguistic research are reappraised and explored. The first part focuses on sociolinguistic methods. These chapters address diverse aspects of the sociolinguistic interview, the base from which variationist data have traditionally been collected. Techniques for the study of narratives feature in these chapters as well since, within the interview, narratives have often been seen as the primary locus for the revelation of the self. Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery emphasize the need to reexamine methods of collecting and classifying data, particularly as a way of improving the applicability of data from one small sample to a larger population. Challenging traditional sociolinguistic methods, they illustrate how elements such as the identity or even the degree of experience of the fieldworker can affect data collection. They stress the need for an in-depth understanding of the community before the representativeness or implications of particular data can be accurately assessed. William Labov presents a framework for analyzing oral narratives on death, sex, and moral indignation. Working with a narrative from Ronald Macaulay’s fieldwork in Scotland, he reveals how ordinary events within such narratives may highlight the extraordinary (or “reportable”) events, by building suspense, suggesting that at least in this respect, such narratives have more in common with film than with works of literature. In unpacking the linguistic and structural elements that accompany the assignment of praise and blame in the narrative, Labov provides a useful tool for narrative analysis. Natalie Schilling-Estes examines intertextuality in narratives and other highly involved sections of the interview, focusing particularly on the role of material remembered from other, earlier narratives, whether it was produced by the speaker or someone else. Her chapter calls attention to crucial issues about identity since, as she points out, a speaker’s voice is presumed to be his or her own but may contain pieces drawn from other people, written sources, and so forth. This intriguing ques-

INTRODUCTION

5

tion of the ownership of styles has crucial repercussions for our understanding of natural speech, the traditional target of sociolinguistic research, and for interpreting the results of quantitative analyses, where distinctions between such styles are often not made. All three of these chapters seek to improve our collection and analysis of data, so that it is informed by and in turn informs our understanding of the sociolinguistic context. The second part presents a number of perspectives on place—the communities in which people live and the different settings, physical and psychological, in which the events of their lives occur. The term community is commonly found throughout the sociolinguistic literature, but it is not often explicitly defined or studied in its own right. Taken together, these three chapters present a critical reappraisal of a crucial issue: the social context in which individual identities are created and against which they are evaluated. They present a view of both places and communities as dynamic rather than static, interwoven rather than isolable, constantly being reevaluated and reshaped by factors in the external world, as well as by the changing worldviews of their speakers. Barbara Johnstone analyzes the importance of both physical and psychological notions of place as significant factors in language variation, drawing on recent discussions of place in geography and social theory. Paralleling the chapter by SchillingEstes, she raises important questions about issues of the ownership and definition of styles and varieties, and she encourages variationists to see the analysis of discourse as a dialogue. Johnstone also stresses the important role of the identification of a form as local by speakers in influencing processes of sociolinguistic variation and change. Walt Wolfram sets out the characteristics of a particular kind of place: the remnant dialect community. Remnant dialect areas are interesting, among other reasons, because they allow us to look at a community where the relationship between individual identity and the social context is shifting and changing. Wolfram presents a comprehensive consideration of the social and linguistic features of remnant dialect areas, in relation to their origins and the changes that have occurred within them, including a rethinking of what terms like remnant and relic actually mean. He also provides variationist researchers with a clear articulation of testable claims about variation and change in such communities. Penelope Eckert demonstrates how local value is expressed in language that is embedded in the community by examining the behavior of adolescents in Detroit. Again, the focus is on both social setting (the local and wider communities and their values) and individual identity (the way the adolescents in her study present themselves to, and perceive, the world). She cites the need for studying not only the groups (regional, social, etc.) that can be delimited in some clear way but also the “borders” where groups come into contact and categories are more fluid. She challenges perspectives that emphasize homogeneity, and she argues strongly for a more integrative perspective on the sociolinguistic study of communities. The third part explores influences on adult speech, including variations in register and the acquisition of grammatical and other features after puberty. These chapters draw new connections between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, looking at the cognitive and developmental side of social variation. Many of the other sections of the book focus outward, suggesting more fruitful ways of exploring the larger

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INTRODUCTION

community connections that form the context for speech. The authors of these chapters direct their inquiries toward developments within individual speakers and explore how language variation in the individual emerges and changes against the social backdrop of community norms. Gillian Sankoff makes use of the longitudinal evidence contained in a series of British TV programs (the Seven Up film series) featuring a group of 7-year-olds (initially), who are reinterviewed at seven-year intervals. Using this real-time data on the development of speakers from very different backgrounds, she shows how the speech of individuals can change after the formative years, challenging to some degree the conventional assumption in the variationist tradition of uniformity over the lifespan. The relation of the life histories of the boys she studies to their use of locally relevant variables illuminates the value of focusing on the practices of individuals within the context of a particular community, and in some ways echoes the themes of Eckert’s chapter, in the second part of the volume. Dennis Preston outlines the basis for a psychologically plausible model of variationist grammar, providing evidence that separate grammars are more likely than a switching mechanism in a unified grammar. He emphasizes the parallels between a second language acquired as an adult and the later varieties acquired in one’s first language, through formal education or other means. In particular, his discussion of the acquisition of the postvernacular grammar dovetails with Sankoff’s work in highlighting the importance of looking at changes over the lifespan. Much work on sociolinguistic variation and identity has focused on adolescents, but this chapter demonstrates that following linguistic development farther into the age continuum improves our understanding of variation. The final part includes three chapters that focus on the crucial role of attitudes and ideologies in sociolinguistic research and theory. Though variationists have collected data on language attitudes from the beginning, these data have often been treated as secondary to the variation itself. The authors in this section give new weight to the attitudes and ideologies of communities, treating them as worthy of study in their own right and as intimately tied in with the processes of linguistic variation and change. Lesley Milroy emphasizes the need to integrate the study of attitudes toward language with the general investigation of variation. She discusses the particular role of the “standard” as a part of the linguistic repertoire of a community, as well as language ideology in general as an element of the social context. She begins with the perspective of ideology as a semiotic process, and she shows how different types of sociolinguistic variables reflect the effects of ideological construction. She also provides evidence that changes in a community’s ideologies may be directly reflected in linguistic variation. Ronald Macaulay examines the role of language in creating and maintaining a persistent sense of national identity in Scotland, particularly among working-class speakers. This chapter challenges the notion found in much previous work that working-class speakers of nonprestige varieties necessarily orient toward some idealized, “standard” way of speaking. Macaulay provides critical insights into some limitations of the traditional interviewing practices for collecting data on language variation, echoing the chapter by Bailey and Tillery. He also urges us to listen more

INTRODUCTION

7

carefully to the views on language variation of the speakers in the communities we study since their attitudes can be a crucial factor in the linguistic varieties they choose to use. Finally, John Rickford’s chapter examines changing views of the language of black America, from the positive attitudes found from the 1960s until the mid-1980s, to the very negative comments heard during the Ebonics controversy. He uses a wide variety of sources, from literature to online chat rooms, again emphasizing, as do many of the other chapters, the possibilities inherent in data collected from sources other than traditional interviews. From these data, he draws a picture of how schisms within and across communities have shaped our debates about language. All three of these chapters demonstrate the need for a better integration of research on attitudes into the variationist model. Taken together, the chapters in Sociolinguistic Variation are a kind of road map of the field: where we have been and where we hope to go. As mentioned in the preface, the conference from which these chapters emerged seemed to bring out the authors’ voices in an unusually intimate and direct way. They speak to issues in the field critically and contemplatively, looking back at the established practices of the variationist tradition and looking forward into how the future of this relatively young field may develop.

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PART I

SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS

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1 GUY BAILEY AND JAN TILLERY

Some Sources of Divergent Data in Sociolinguistics

1. Introduction Quantitative sociolinguistics emerged more than thirty years ago with a flurry of interest in methodology. In fact, the work of William Labov and of other firstgeneration variationists such as Walt Wolfram, Ralph Fasold, Peter Trudgill, and Ronald Macaulay is largely responsible for introducing the serious consideration of issues of reliability and validity to the study of dialect.1 During the first decade of its existence, ameliorating the observer’s paradox, choosing representative samples of informants, and developing analytical approaches that accounted for linguistic variability all became major foci of quantitative sociolinguistics. Over the last twenty years, however, the concern for methodological rigor has lessened considerably. Unfortunately, the diminished focus on methodological issues seems to have had a detrimental effect on the discipline. As Wolfram (this volume) points out, a basic goal of sociolinguists is to produce results that can be generalized to the behavior of a larger population. Generalizability implies both reliability (i.e., that the same results would be obtained in repeated observations of the same phenomenon) and intersubjectivity (i.e., that two different researchers observing the same phenomenon would have obtained the same results). Over the last two decades, however, it has become clear that both reliability and intersubjectivity (and hence generalizability) are sometimes problematic in quantitative sociolinguistics. In fact, researchers have reported some remarkably divergent data from observations of what is purported to be the same phenomenon. For example, figure 1.1 summarizes the distribution of zero third-person singular in ten studies of African-American 11

12

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

87 77

86

83

83 73

73

73

77

M I

C A

M D

D C

N C

TX TX -U TX rba n -H ou st on

M S

52

G A

Percentage of Zero Third Singular

SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS

 1.1. Zero Third-Person Singular in Ten Sources of African-American Vernacular English

Vernacular English (AAVE); table 1.1 provides information on each source. Although the results from nine of the ten studies are relatively close for the most part, ranging from 73% to 87%, the results from the North Carolina study are quite different. The 52% rate of occurrence for zero third singular in North Carolina is some 21 percentage points less than the next lowest rate. At least in regard to verbal –s, AAVE in North Carolina is either very different from AAVE in other parts of the country, including other parts of the South, or there is a problem with intersubjectivity. This chapter explores some of the reasons for this kind of divergent data in quantitative sociolinguistics and argues that methodological differences account for most of the divergent evidence. In particular, it examines the effects of different interview-

 1.1 Sources for Figure 1 Location Georgia Mississippi Texas-Rural Texas-Urban TX-Houston North Carolina Maryland Washington, D.C. California Michigan

Author/PI Sommer (1986) Wolfram (1971) Bailey (1993) Bailey (1993) Cukor-Avila (1997) Butters & Nix (1986) Whiteman (1981) Fasold (1972) Rickford (1992) Wolfram (1969)

Community

Age

Atlanta Meadville Brazos Valley Bryan Houston Wilmington ? — East Palo Alto Detroit

Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Teenagers Adolescents

Social Class Lower Lower working Lower Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working

SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS

13

ers, of differences in sample populations, and of differences in analytical strategies in creating divergent data. In addition, we argue that the generalizability of results is a direct function of the methods employed to generate them and that, without a body of research that examines the effects of methods on results, neither intersubjectivity nor reliability is possible in quantitative sociolinguistics; as a consequence, our results are probably not generalizable.

2. Interviewer effects 2.1. The effect of interviewer characteristics In his pioneering work in New York City, Labov (1966) identified the observer’s paradox (i.e., the skewing of linguistic behavior toward norms of correctness as a result of the mere presence of a fieldworker) as a major impediment to research in sociolinguistics. The observer’s paradox, however, is simply one manifestation of a more general phenomenon—the effects that fieldworkers and interviewers have on the data they elicit. Although everyone who has been part of a large-scale survey is aware that some fieldworkers obtain better results than others, there is little research on the effects of interviewer characteristics or of different interviewers on linguistic data. Recent work by Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994), however, makes a promising beginning by exploring the effects of one interviewer characteristic, race of the interviewer, on data from sociolinguistic fieldwork. Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) examine the effects of the interviewer’s race by having the same African-American informant (Foxy Boston) interviewed by an African-American and a white fieldworker. Both fieldworkers are women. Because the topics discussed in a linguistic interview can sometimes have an effect on the type of data that occurs (see Bell 1984), Rickford and McNair-Knox had the white fieldworker audit the interview conducted by the African American and structure her interview around the same topics. They then compared the occurrence of five well-known AAVE features (verbal –s, possessive –s, plural –s, copula is/are absence, and habitual be) in the two interviews and found that in every case the frequency of occurrence of these features was greater in the interview conducted by the African-American fieldworker; in three instances the differences are statistically significant (see table 1.2).2 These results, Rickford and McNair 1.2 The Effects of the Race of the Interviewer Feature Possessive –s absence Plural –s absence Third singular present absence Copula is/are absence Invariant habitual be a=

African-American Interviewer 67% (6/9) 01% (4/282) 73% (83/114) 70% (197/283) 385 (=241 per hour)

significant at