Language style as audience design

Bell, Allan

doi:10.1017/s004740450001037x

Cited by 1,808 publications

(324 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

213

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…1 Another dimension of proposals for prosodic segmentation -audience-design vs. speaker-internal constraints -is not investigated in the current study. The results are generally consistent with either kind of proposal: one where speakers segment their utterances in order to be maximally comprehensible to their listeners (Bell, 1984;Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), or one where speakers segment their utterances because of speaker-internal constraints (e.g., Gee & Grosjean, 1983;Ferreira, 1993;Ferreira, 2007).…”

supporting

confidence: 65%

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

Breen

Watson

Gibson

2011

Language and Cognitive Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson & Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries at evenly spaced intervals. In order to evaluate these proposals, we elicited naïve speakers' productions of sentences systematically varying in the length of three post-verbal constituents: a direct object, an indirect object (a prepositional phrase), and a verb phrase modifier, as in the sentence, The teacher assigned the chapter (on local history) to the students (of social science) yesterday / before the first midterm exam.

show abstract

supporting

confidence: 65%

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

Breen

Watson

Gibson

2011

Language and Cognitive Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In general, it seems that l'on has more stylistic than social significance, and in this sense the alternation with on may be described as a 'hyperstyle' variable, alongside the nous ∼ on variable and others. (The concept of 'hyperstyle' variables was first suggested by Bell, 1984). But is the l'on ∼ on variable a phonological or grammatical phenomenon?…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The alternation between l'on and on in spoken French

Coveney

2004

French Language Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ab st rac tAlthough frequent reference is made to l'on as an alternative to on in standard grammars, judgements vary as to whether or not l'on is used at all in spoken French. This question is investigated here by treating l'on ∼ on as a sociolinguistic variable. A review of the historical, dialectal and cross-linguistic background is followed by an examination of the traditional 'rules' for the use of l'on, as described by Vaugelas and reconsidered by Goosse for written French. The frequency of l'on in speech, and the contexts in which it is used, are then examined in a corpus of informal interviews, and some comparisons are made with a corpus of TV news reports. (The total N of on + l'on in the two corpora is 3,549.) In general, l'on can be viewed as a 'long form', marking formality and comparable in some respect to l'un(e), cela, ce sont and nous -ons. But there are some individuals who use l'on even when speaking informally, especially in relative clauses opening with que.

show abstract

“…The speakers were recorded twice: first with a community 'insider' using classic sociolinguistic interview techniques (Labov 1984) and second with a community 'outsider' to assess the effects of addressee styleshifting (e.g. Bell 1984). This design will enable us to examine in detail questions surrounding the role of situational context in governing use of glottal replacement (see section 4.5).…”

Section: The Samplementioning

confidence: 99%

The unstoppable glottal: tracking rapid change in an iconic British variable

Smith¹,

Holmes-Elliott²

2017

English Language and Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents a sociolinguistic investigation of a rapidly expanding innovation in the UK, glottal replacement, in a variety spoken in northeast Scotland. Quantitative analysis of the form shows a dramatic change in apparent time: from a minority variant in the older generation to a full 90 per cent use in the younger generation. Further analysis of the constraints on use provide a detailed snapshot of how this variant moves through social and linguistic space. Males use higher rates of the non-standard form in the older generations but this constraint is neutralised in the younger generations as the form increases. Styleshifting according to interlocutor also neutralises through time. While these results across the social constraints are in line with previous analyses, the linguistic constraints differ in this variety. In contrast to most other varieties, intervocalic contexts such as bottle show high rates of glottal replacement. Moreover, word-internal foot-initial contexts (e.g. sometimes) also frequently allow the non-standard variant, despite this being rare in other dialects. Although glottal replacement is largely considered to be a 'torchbearer' of geographical diffusion, this in-depth analysis suggests that different varieties may have different pathways of change in the rapid transition from [t] to [ʔ] throughout the UK.

show abstract

Language style as audience design

Cited by 1,808 publications

References 22 publications

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

The alternation between l'on and on in spoken French

The unstoppable glottal: tracking rapid change in an iconic British variable

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About