PLIN X210 Sociolinguistics 2004
UCL
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics
Taught by Dick Hudson.
last changed 10 June 2010
Topics and reading for the ten weekly
units
|
Society
|
Language
|
Reading
|
Lecture file |
|
1. Networks
in society
|
Networks in language
|
chapter 1; 5.2.4
|
1 |
|
2. Everyday knowledge
|
Meanings, I-language
|
3
|
2 |
|
3. Social prototypes:
people, situations
|
Language, dialect, standard
|
2
|
3 |
|
4. Interaction: Face
|
Politeness
|
4.1
|
4 |
|
5. Interaction: Power,
solidarity
|
Interaction signals
|
4.2-5
|
5 |
|
6. Accommodation
|
Sociolinguistic variables
|
5.1-3
|
6 |
|
7. Social identity
|
Acts of identity
|
5.4
|
7 |
|
8. Social inequality
|
Linguistic inequality
|
6, 7
|
8 |
Administration
1.
Aims
·
To survey the data traditionally covered by
sociolinguistics.
·
To survey the standard methods for collecting and
analysing data.
·
To introduce a general theory (Word Grammar) that
tries to explain the findings.
·
To help you to apply these ideas to your own
`sociolinguistic competence'.
2.
Teaching
- One lecture per week (Monday 3-4).
- One weekly tutorial per student in groups
of about 10; times to be arranged.
3.
Reading
·
R Hudson. 1996. Sociolinguistics (2nd edition),
Cambridge University Press. (£16.95)
- A large amount of freely accessible
material which you can find on the web via the web site.
4.
Web site and contacting me
- http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/soc/socio.htm
(i.e. this site)
- Please tell me about any faults or things
that could be improved.
- My email address is: dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk.
Feel free to make contact whenever you want.
5.
Assessment
The following arrangement applies to BA
students. MA students should negotiate directly with me about their
assessment arrangements.
When? By 5 pm on
Monday May 10th. (NB This deadline is final, and late work will not
be accepted.)
What? an essay of about 2,000 words
What about? one or more of the
following topics:
-
Networks in language and society
-
Face.
- Politeness.
- Power and solidarity.
- Acts of identity and speech accommodation.
- Linguistic inequality.
- Quantitative sociolinguistics.
- Languages, dialects and registers in E-language and in
I-language.
- Language and thought.
The more of these topics you can include in
your essay, the better; but you mustn't simply mention them - they are
all related in a complex network, and I want to see that you understand
how they are related to one another.
Who about? It should be about you
and your 'sociolinguistic competence' - i.e. it should relate
the general ideas in the list of topics to your particular case.
Consequently it should include examples and/or data from your own
speech. The following kinds of example or data are acceptable:
- Examples of words or expressions that you
know, with careful analysis of their sociolinguistic constraints (e.g.
who uses them, when they are used, who they refer to).
- Transcribed portions of a tape in which
you are talking, with the relevant item(s) highlighted and explained.
- Analysis of one or more sociolinguistic
variable in a recorded conversation in which you are one of the
speakers.
The data may be in any language, but if it
is in a language which I probably won't understand, please supply a
translation as well!
How to write a better essay
Supporting
material
Background to sociolinguistics
1. Networks in society and language
2. Knowledge of life, meaning and language
- Full-length: An accessible and interesting tutorial on
kinship for anthropologists.
- Full-length: A classic from Artificial Intelligence: 'A
Framework for Representing Knowledge', by Marvin Minsky. About the
structure of everyday knowledge.
- Brief: A clear, accessible, interesting and well-informed
summary of research on whether
language influences thought by the leading researcher, Dan Slobin.
- Brief: An excellent summary of the research on language and thought,
by the world's main research group in Nijmegen, Holland
- Brief: How societies vary in the way they think and talk
about space
(i.e. where things are), by the leading expert, Stephen Levinson.
- Medium: A very clear summary for MIT students of recent work, including the author's own research on the effects of grammatical gender on conceptualisation in Spanish and German.
- Full-length: A clear tutorial on kinship
terminology (i.e. semantics) distinguishing the six attested
semantic systems.
- Full-length: A Word Grammar paper about the meanings of words
such as BICYCLE and RIDE.
3. Classification of people and language
- Brief: A handout about various theories
of categorization (i.e. how we classify things), including the
theory of prototypes.
- Brief: An encyclopedia paragraph by me about default
inheritance.
- Very brief: A list of terms from sociology,
including reference group and social class.
- Brief: Why language
boundaries are hard to find - the opening paragraphs of an
introduction to the definitive list of world languages.
- Brief: Multilingualism
- how widespread and how it works.
- For browsing: An English-Tok Pisin
(Papua-New Guinea Pidgin) dictionary.
- Brief: The supposed 'main
dialect areas' of the USA and England, with maps.
- Rich: John Wells's page about Estuary English.
- Full-length: A paper by Paul Kerswill about recent dialect levelling
in Britain.
- Full-length: Three papers about standard
English - what it is, what it isn't, how it developed and how it
stands in education.
- Medium: 193 non-standard
grammatical patterns found in a school-based survey
- Rich: how occupations
develop special varieties of language (produced for A-level English
Language).
4. Face
- V. brief: An introduction to face
theory, with links to cross-cultural comparisons.
- V. brief: Another introduction to face
theory, with definitions of terms such as 'face work'.
- Brief: A one-page summary of politeness
theory, which builds on face theory.
- Brief: Another summary (for Year 12-13 students) of politeness
theory, within a larger summary of pragmatics.
- Brief: A brief review of the issues in politeness
research and relevant literature.
5. Power and solidarity
- V. brief: Diglossia
explained in terms of power and solidarity
- Brief: history of English you
and thou
- Medium: A review of ideas about the function of vocatives
as markers of power and solidarity.
- Full-length: An interesting discussion of why markers
of power are also used for solidarity.
- Full-length: A research report on how English speakers
working in Japan and Japanese speakers choose names
according to power and solidarity.
6. Accommodation and quantitative
method
7. Acts of identity (and dialects)
8. Inequality
|