Language Style as Audience Design

Bell, Allan

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-25582-5_20

Cited by 362 publications

(508 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…In their study, Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) found that two radically different data sets with quantitative and qualitative disparities at multiple levels of the grammar were elicited from the same African-American participant in two separate controlledtopic interviews, with the crucial difference being that one interview was conducted by a Euro-American researcher and the other by an African-American researcher. As might be predicted from prior research in the frameworks of speech accommodation (Giles 1980), audience design (Bell 1984), and acts of identity (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985), the African-American participant used African-American English variables more frequently when speaking to the African-American interviewer. The mutual co-construction of participants' and researchers' identities has profound implications, as variationist scholars widely accept the notion of replicability and re-study, and routinely compare data gathered by different interviewers to build on prior results and to investigate issues of performance that could be strongly affected by differences in the interviewers.…”

Section: Identities As Multivalentmentioning

confidence: 66%

Language and Identity

Mendoza‐Denton¹

2004

The Handbook of Language Variation and Change

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This chapter will sketch some current findings, questions, and trends in approaches to the study of language variation and identity. The term "identity" functions outside of linguistics to cover a variety of concepts; for our purposes, we will understand identity to mean the active negotiation of an individual's relationship with larger social constructs, in so far as this negotiation is signaled through language and other semiotic means. Identity, then, is neither attribute nor possession, but an individual and collective-level process of semiosis. We shall be concerned with its emblematic sites, its codes and its channels (Silverstein 1998), and, crucially for variation theory, with its richly patterned, multivariate nature. The scope of this particular review will be limited to works that are broadly representative of or that stand in dialogue with the Labovian quantitative sociolinguistic tradition, and will of necessity exclude significant qualitative research on linguistic identity that falls under the rubric of sociology of language and discourse analysis. (For a review of the literature within this field, see Tabouret-Keller 1998.) Though much-debated in identity theory, psychological processes internal to the individual, such as (Freudian prelinguistic) identification, sublimation, fantasy and desire, and their role in identity formation (Zizek 1993, Salecl 1994, Lacan 1977 are, to say the least, difficult to study under the standard empiricist lens of variationist inquiry unless they are overtly signaled in interaction (but see Kulick 2000 for an exhortation to undertake exactly such studies in the area of language and sexuality).Although this review will incorporate selected developments in anthropology, psychology, social theory, and literary theory, for more in-depth analysis in these areas I refer the reader to other works dealing with field-specific perspectives on identity and identity politics (

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Section: Identities As Multivalentmentioning

confidence: 66%

Language and Identity

Mendoza‐Denton¹

2004

The Handbook of Language Variation and Change

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“…Finegan and Biber (1994), unlike Bell (1984), hold that stylistic variation can prevail over social variation. They contend that the sociolinguistic methodology through which Bell examines the conditioning of linguistic variation prevents the discovery of the weight of stylistic effects.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…300 Sylvie Dubois and David Sankoff NOTES 1 For example, several researchers (Labov 1972(Labov , 1978Linde and Labov 1974;Labov and Fanshel 1977;Labov and Waletsky 1967;Sacks et al 1974;Tannen 1984Tannen , 1989Bell 1984;Schiffrin 1994;Horvath 1997;Horvath and Eggins 1987;Dubois 1994Dubois , 1995Dubois , 1997Dubois and Horvath 1992;Dubois 1996, 1997;Dubois et al 1995;Sankoff 1994, 1997) have paid attention to the description of a number of high-level discourse structures (argumentative, informative, and narrative structures as well as reported speech, interruption, overlap, repetition, etc.) and their particularities.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These last effects run counter also to the prediction of Bell's (1984) model. He contends that certain linguistic processes are subject to social and stylistic effects, others only to social effects, but none is influenced solely by stylistic effects.…”

Section: Four Recurrent Observations and The Case Of Enumerationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Variationist Approach 285 model of Bell (1984) and the communication accommodation model of Coupland and Giles (1988). Rickford and McNair-Knox also note that the quantitative study of style in sociolinguistics adds an important perspective.…”

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confidence: 99%

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