Social markers and dimensions of meaning

Editorial to Research in Language (RiL) Vol.30, issue

“…present approach in sociopragmatics known as "Social Meaning" (cf., e.g., Eckert 2019, Eckert & Labov 2017, Salmon 2022, whose aim, with the active support of William Labov himself, is to reintegrate different strands of sociolinguistic research paths, including sociophonetics on the one hand and sociolinguistic studies focused on lexical innovation and convention, syntactic patterns, discourse patterns on the other. It is stressed that social meaning may be indexed on different levels of linguistic expression, but the linking thread through all relevant research is the researchers' interest in the pairing of form and function within the variation that they find, and their attempt to elucidate the impact of a specific linguistic feature on the image that the performer produces, as well as in the origin of such correspondence.…”