Summaries: "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics" by Janet Holmes. Chapter 10.

Chapter 10

Style, Context and Register

Addressee as an influence on style:

People use more standard forms to the people whom they don’t know, while hey use more casual forms to the people whom they are familiar with. The speaker’s relationship with the addressee is important in determining the appropriate style of speaking.  Many social factors determine the relationship between the speakers:

A-   Age of addressee: we use different styles in talking to elderly people or children. When talking to a child, one would use simple and common vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Some of the words may also have a sing-song intonation and “baby talk” words.

B-    Social background of Addressee: Strong evidence to the fact that the social background affects style is when the newsreaders use different styles when addressing different people with different social backgrounds. The news and the reader are the same, but the only change is in audience. The newsreader would use a less formal style when reading the news to the audience of a mid-level radio station, while he/she would read the same news in a more formal style on higher radio stations. These responsive shifts are to accommodate with the audience. On the other hand, Peter Trudgill found out that he accommodated his speech to the people whom he interviewed. When he interviewed lower-class people, he used 100% of glottal stops, but used around 25% of glottal stops with the highest social group.  

What causes speech accommodation?

     Accommodation Theory:

Each person’s speech converges towards the speech of the person who is being talked to. This process called “speech accommodation”. It tends to happen when the speakers like one another. It is a polite speech strategy, and implies that the addressee’s speech is worth imitating. For example, in multilingual countries like Singapore or Zaire, people accommodate to others by using the code that is most comfortable for their addressees. In Montréal, French Canadian traders may converge to English when they identify English customers in order to improve chances of a good sell. 

Speech divergence:

Speech divergence is deliberately choosing a language not used by one’s addressee. When the Arab nations issued their oil statement in Arabic this served as apolitical message to the western world that meant rejection of cooperation. Also, some of Maori people insisted on using Maori, although they are fluent in English, in court, and demanded the existence of an interpreter. 

We can also see accent divergence: working class people respond to the educated students who join for the summer work by using more vernacular forms and more swearing. While those who have social aspirations will diverge from the low class and use more standard forms.

Divergence does not always have a negative attitude towards the addressee. A foreigner can get help from people when using an accent or vocabulary that reflect a good command of the language.

Accommodation problems:

Over convergent behavior may be perceived as the speaker is making fun of others. Listeners react differently to different types of convergence. If divergence is perceived as unavoidable, the reaction of the listeners would be tolerant. However, deliberate divergence is regarded as antagonistic. Someone who sues English to a French speaker, although he is fluent in French, would be considered as uncooperative.

Influence of style, context and class on speech style:

A-  context and social role:

The formality of the context as well as the roles and statuses of the speaker and the addressee in the context will affect and influence speech style. For example, a court (as a context) is a formal setting where the social roles of the participants determine the linguistic forms used by each person. A catholic priest would be called “father” even by his own father when the context is in a church. He is forced to call him “father” due to the social roles of each one of them.  

B- Different styles within an interview

A survey conducted by Labov devised ways in order to elicit information over a range of styles in one interview.

·      Labov made interviewees read lists of words, which included minimal pairs like (ten-tin) or (pen-pin), and a passage of a continuous speech. He found out that people paid higher attention to their pronunciation in reading minimal pairs rather than reading a passage of continuous speech. They used less vernacular forms in reading minimal pairs rather than reading a passage of a continuous speech.

·      To elicit a more casual style, Labov asked interviewees about experiences where they were emotionally involved. Therefore, people’s attention was shifted to a less careful speech style. Labov therefore defines “vernacular” as the style in which a minimum of attention is given to the monitoring of speech. in this sense, vernacular is the most basic style of the speaker. To capture this style, Labov used the “observer’s paradox”: observing the way people speak when they are not being observed. He also manipulated discussions with the interviewees by asking people about topics or stories in which they were emotionally involved. The result was that the interviewees did not pay attention to the tape recorder or the strange interviewer.

There are other strategies beside topic manipulation to elicit vernacular style like taping the speech of groups rather than individuals in a comfortable setting. Labov in a study collected data from African-American adolescents who were in groups in the street where they met.

The same happens when a person recounts a country story to his family members in a living room. He/she would use a very casual style to recount the story. This vernacular or colloquial style is distinguishable from the formal one. For example, we find speakers in Tasmanian informal narrative use personal pronouns with inanimate objects. For example, a speaker would refer to the tree as “he”.  This pattern of animating objects has been noted in the colloquial speech of New Zealand men.

C-   The interaction of social class and style

There is a relationship between social class, style and linguistic variation.  Each social class uses more vernacular forms than the one above it, and less than the one under it. A low frequency of vernacular pronunciation (in) or a higher frequency of vernacular pronunciation of (iŋ) indicates that the speaker belongs to a high social class, or speaking in a formal context. If a linguistic feature is found to occur in the speech of low class it will often be used in casual speech of different speakers. In this case, the same linguistic feature distinguishes a class from another (inter-speaker variation) is also used to distinguish between the speaker’s different styles varying from casual to formal. (Intra-speaker variation).

The speech of each social group remains in the same relationship to other groups whatever the style. It has been suggested that the stylistic variation derives from the variation between speakers of different social groups. So if one wants to shift style, one would imitate another speaker from another social group. So when they shift style, people often adopt the linguistic features of a different social group. The lower social groups shift their speech more as they move from one style to another than the higher social groups do.

Hyper-correction:

A study made by Labov on the post vocalic r variable showed that the more formal the style is the more post vocalic r is used, and the higher the social class one belongs to, the more post vocalic r one uses. When speakers of the Low Middle Class (LMC) pronounce post vocalic r more than the Upper Middle Class (UMC) this is a hyper corrected behavior.  This means that the LMC speakers go beyond the norms of the UMC speech. Their speech sound more correct or super standard.

Style in non-western societies:

In Japanese, there is a group of grammatical contrasts to express politeness and respect. Before choosing which style to choose, the Japanese speaker evaluates their status with the addressee (gender, age, family background, formality of the context). According to these factors, the speaker chooses the appropriate style.

Knowledge of the stylistic variation in Japanese foreshadows one’s education and social status. Therefore, the way the speaker chooses style gives clues about the social background and education.

In Tehran Persian, the status must be evaluated to choose the appropriate grammatical forms, vocabulary and pronunciation, meaning the appropriate style.

The choice between the vernacular and standard forms of sounds reflects the social context. The standard variants mark reading style not social membership. This is because there is a dramatic increase in the percentage of standard variants in reading and word lists style compared to people careful speech or casual speech. 

In Javanese, the choices facing a speaker of Javanese are two ranked social dialects, within each of which there are three stylistic levels. Selecting the appropriate level of Javanese involves evaluating the speaker’s relationship to the addressee in context as well as solidarity. So here, both social group membership and social context influence the style used by the speaker.

This section showed how linguistic features that signal social group membership can often signal contextual variation.

The following section shows how linguistic features can be markers of social context rather than particular groups.

  

      

Register

The term register describes the language of groups of people with common interest or jobs. Others use the term register in a narrow sense to describe the specific vocabulary associated with particular occupational groups.

The term register is also associated with particular groups of people or sometimes with particular situations of use: baby talk, journalese, legalese, sports announcer talk, and airline pilots.

The example taken to explain the term register is sports-announcer talk:

The talk of sports announcers is known by play-by-play description: it focuses on the action, and is characterized by telegraphic grammar which involves syntactic reduction and the inversion of normal word order in sentences. For example, the verb (be) and the subjects (he) or (it) are omitted. The omitted parts are predicted in the context so they do not affect the meaning. In syntactic inversion, the announcer focuses on the action. In such sentences the word order is not normal (Subject-Verb-Object) but rather the subject comes at the end of the sentence.  Routine and formulas is another interesting feature of sports announcer’s talk to reduce the memory burden on the speaker. Registers like hockey commentaries or need excessive oral formulas. The formulas are made up of small number of fixed syntactic patterns and a narrow range of lexical items. In this case information about the sports even is given or conveyed formulaically (in pre-determined formulas). So in horse races for example, we have a start formula, and a horse locator formula. These formulas indicate information about the start and the position of the horses. Pauses and hesitations are not acceptable in sports commentary. The commentator must sound fluent and fast. The use of formulas allows for giving information with the minimum demand on short term memory.

Sports commentators must also maintain the drama of the action. That is why they use volume and intonation.    

Glossary:

Speech accommodation

Speech divergence

Style  النمط

Contextالسياق

Deliberately : عن قصد

Antagonistic: معاد

Monitoring speech التحكم في الكلام

Observer’s paradox

Inter-speaker variation

Intra-speaker variation