Language attitudes in interaction¹

Abstract

This paper discusses the observation of language attitudes in interaction and argues that these approaches provide invaluable insights for the study of language attitudes. In the first half of the paper, the three different kinds of discourse-based methods of analysis that scholars have used to analyse language attitudes (content-based approaches, turn-internal semantic and pragmatic approaches, and interactional approaches) are discussed. In the second half, then, the third of these approaches is used to illustrate such an analysis with four stretches of conversation in different contexts. In the end, the argument is put forward that discourse-based approaches in general and interactional approaches in particular should be viewed as at least as fundamental to language attitude research as more commonly used quantitative methods of analysis, since the former can provide the researcher with insights that the latter do not. KEYWORDS:Language attitudes, interaction, ideology, sociolinguistic methods • the difficulty in applying these findings to real-life situations; • the suppression of variability in the findings; • the separation of the attitude from the language and its speakers; • the pressure on participants to respond along a scale that has been worked out by researchers; and finally • the fact that different participants may well mean different things by, for example, checking off a point along a semantic-differential scale.

From attitudes to social representations in endangered language research: towards an interactional framework

“…In this light, searching for an idealised 'true' attitude is simply not possible. In approaches departing from traditional attitude studies, researchers have opted to study different theoretical concepts, rather than attitudes, including 'evaluative practices' (Hyrkstedt and Kalaja 1998;Potter and Wetherell 1987), 'evaluative activities' (Soukup 2012), 'attitudes as constructions' (Schwarz and Bohner 2001), 'attitudes-in-interaction' (Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain 2009) and 'language ideologies' or 'linguistic ideologies' (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998). These researchers all generally reject positivistic theories and methods to attitude research, but they do not adopt precisely the same theoretical framework.…”

University students’ context-dependent conscious attitudes towards the official South African languages

“…Their findings also imply that language attitudes can best be viewed in a holistic manner and that overtly held attitudes are context dependent. The context dependency of language attitudes have also been attested in previous sociolinguistic work, recently by Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain (2009) who find that the expression of language attitudes relies on at least two factors: the singular interactional situation that informants finds themselves in, as well as the actual geographical location of informants in relation to the language of interest. The specific context that overtly held language attitudes are investigated in could affect both how, and to which degree, language attitudes are expressed (Liebscher & Dailey-O'Cain, 2009).…”

Exploring language attitudes in ELF research: Contrasting approaches in conversation

“…However, this body of work has been criticised from a social psychological perspective because of an apparent disregard of an individual's dispositional concepts on which his/her mental processing may be based (e.g., Hyrkstedt and Kalaja 1998;Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain 2009;Schwarz 2012) or an unbalanced focus on processing itself (e.g., Cargile et al 1994;Conrey and Smith 2007;Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2011).…”