On the social perception of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Chappell
Keyword(s):  
Social Perception ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Limited Ability ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Costa Rican Spanish ◽  
Gender Paradox ◽  
Linguistic Innovation ◽  
First Time

AbstractTo decipher for the first time what, if any, social meaning is indexed by nonstandard intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rica, such as [paza] for pasa ‘raisin’, the present study digitally manipulates 12 utterances from six Costa Rican speakers to vary only in intervocalic [s] versus [z]. Based on 106 listeners’ responses to these stimuli, I find that intervocalic [z] indexes a lower social status for all speakers but also yields higher ratings of confidence, niceness, localness, and masculinity for male speakers. Given female speakers’ limited ability to evoke positive social meanings associated with [z], I argue that accessibility to the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) conditions men's and women's differential treatment of variation. Offering a satisfying explanation for the gender paradox (Labov, 2001:261–293), this work concludes that women agentively eschew nonstandard variants that result in no positive social gains but lead linguistic innovation when their access to the indexical field is unobstructed.

scholarly journals Social inferences from the use of just as an exclusive particle

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 746
Author(s):  
William C. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Discourse Particle ◽  
Social Inferences

Recent work has begun to investigate the interaction between semantics and social meaning. This study contributes to that line of inquiry by investigating how particular social meanings that are popularly believed to arise from the English discourse particle just are related to the conventional semantic meaning of just. In addition to proposing an inferential process by which the social meanings associated with just arise, this paper reports the results of a social perception experiment designed to test whether those social inferences arise when just is used in particular speech acts and whether they depend on the speaker’s gender and level of authority relative to the addressee. The use of just was found to significantly increase the perceived insecurity of men but not of women. This suggests that listeners may more strongly perceive speaker qualities that stereotypes cause them not to expect.

Precision and speaker qualities. The social meaning of pragmatic detail

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Beltrama
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The World ◽  
Linguistic Cues ◽  
High Degree

AbstractThe present article focuses on two questions: (i) How do listeners infer the social identity of a speaker based on how they choose to describe the world? (ii) Are these inferences informed by similar principles to those motivating the social significance of linguistic phenomena in other domains of the grammar? We address this issue by exploring the social meaning of imprecision (Lasersohn 1999): speakers’ well-attested tendency to apply varying degrees of deviation from the truth when reporting facts (e.g., describing a car as going 70 MPH, instead of 69). Based on results from a social perception study, we found (i) that a high degree of precision is associated with a constellation of both favorable and unfavorable qualities; (ii) that different linguistic cues to signal precision differentially affect the social meaning of the utterance; (iii) and that most such qualities bear a striking resemblance to those associated to variation in other realms – e.g., the hyper/hypo-articulation of sounds. We take this as evidence that semantic variation can be socially meaningful across the specific lexical items in which it manifests itself, and that such social meanings can be linguistically motivated by similar principles across different domains of the grammar.

The Social Characterizations of Price: The Fool, the Faithful, the Frivolous, and the Frugal

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick F. Wherry
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Meaning Systems ◽  
Pricing System ◽  
Meaning Of Money

This article extends both Viviana Zelizer's discussion of the social meaning of money and Charles Smith's proposal that pricing is a definitional practice to the under-theorized realm of the social meanings generated in the pricing system. Individuals are attributed with calculating or not calculating whether an object or service is “worth” its price, but these attributions differ according to the individual's social location as being near to or far from a societal reference point rather than by the inherent qualities of the object or service purchased. Prices offer seemingly objective (quantitative) proof of the individual's “logic of appropriateness”—in other words, people like that pay prices such as those. This article sketches a preliminary but nonexhaustive typology of the social characterizations of individuals within the pricing system; these ideal types—the fool, the faithful, the frugal, and the frivolous—and their components offer a systematic approach to understanding prices as embedded in and constituents of social meaning systems.

scholarly journals Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity, and social practice

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 629-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Kirkham
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings

AbstractThis article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the happy vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ε̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the happy vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

scholarly journals Analyzing Social Meaning: How Words Matter in Social Contexts (Based on German Communicative Practice)

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 1556-1566
Author(s):  
Sergei T. Nefedov ◽  
◽  
Valeria E. Chernyavskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Linguistic Anthropology ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Linguistic Unit ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings

The paper discusses the notion of social meaning that has become a central one in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, metapragmatics. The study was informed by these research directions and the main outcomes. The term social meaning pinpoints what linguistic forms convey about the social identity of the users, about their personality, social features and ideologically, value-based orientations. We presume that this is a category of meaning that a linguistic unit (an utterance) obtains as a result of its usage in a certain context. Social meanings are fixed by social practice. It acts as an index to the context in which the linguistic unit is expected to be used and relevant. Indexical relations are open for re-evaluations that are mediated by speakers ideological views. The study is based on German socio-cultural practice and reveals how indexical relations arise between a linguistic unit and the socio-cultural environment, the social occasion of its usage. The analysis is conducted as corpus-assisted discourse analysis, based on the «Digital dictionary of the German language» / «Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache»

The meaning of Greta: a psychosocial exploration of Greta Thunberg

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Simon Western
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Time Magazine ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Social ◽  
Famous Person ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
New Social Movement ◽  
New Social Movement Theory

This article explores the social meaning of Greta Thunberg. Time magazine made her Person of the Year 2019, claiming she has become a social phenomenon, a "global sensation". This article utilises psychosocial theory and new social movement theory to explore the social meaning of "Greta". It asks what "Greta" evokes in our "social imaginary" (Taylor, 2009, p. 146). What conscious and unconscious identifications are projected onto "Greta" that have made her the unlikely famous person she is? These questions are not about exploring her individual psychological, leadership, or character traits, but focus on Greta (now eighteen years old) as a social object (Latour, 2005) with a vast social network following her, including over 4.2 million Twitter followers, a new documentary film about her, and mainstream media coverage across the globe. Part one of this article outlines the context and libidinal economies that Greta operates within, and the theoretical influences the article draws upon. Part two outlines five core messages that Greta transmits, and the meanings that emerge from observing social reactions to her. The article ends with a conclusion summarising the social meanings of Greta.

The social life of style1

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Essential Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Variationist Sociolinguistics ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Using Data

Variationist sociolinguistics has provided essential information about community-wide patterns of language variation and change. However, as the field has developed, the need to provide coherent explanations for observed correlations has highlighted problems with the conceptualization of style, social meaning and the linguistic variable. Using data from two case studies, this article illustrates how a more nuanced account of stylistic practice provides a richer understanding of the social and cognitive basis of language use. In particular, it is argued that the linguistic analysis of social groups should be driven by the specific social concerns of the groups studied, not by the search for variable ways to ‘say the same thing’. This approach not only enables a fuller account of the social meaning of language features, it demonstrates that social meanings may be encoded at the intersection of components of the grammar (phonology, morphosyntax and discourse), and in more complex ways than has previously been assumed.

Variable production and indexical social meaning: On the potential physiological origin of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Chappell ◽  
Christina García
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rican ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Costa Rican Spanish ◽  
Variable Production

AbstractIn several dialects of Spanish, men tend to exhibit more intervocalic /s/ voicing than women, e. g.,

‘Don’t even [θ/f/h]ink aboot it’

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Lexical Effects ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
Using Data

As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in the urban heartlands of Scotland. While attempts have been made to understand and model the influence of lexical effects, media effects and frequency effects, far less understood is the role of social identity. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, this article addresses this gap in the literature by considering how TH-fronting is patterned across three all-male, working-class, adolescent Communities of Practice, and how this innovative variant is integrated within a system of the more established variants [θ] and [h]. Drawing on recent work on linguistic variation and social meaning, the article also explores some of the social meanings of (θ), particularly those variants which previous research has reported as being associated with ‘toughness’, and suggests how these meanings are utilised in speakers’ construction of social identity.

Personae and phonetic detail in sociolinguistic signs

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette D'Onofrio
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Phonetic Feature ◽  
Categorization Task ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Phoneme Categorization ◽  
Linguistic Material

AbstractSocial meaning-based approaches to linguistic variation treat variation as a semiotic system, in which sociolinguistic signs—indexical links between linguistic forms and social meanings—serve as interactional resources that individuals use to project personae. This article explores the perceptual nature of the links between social personae and linguistic forms, examining how information about a speaker's persona can influence a listener's linguistic perceptions of a continuous phonetic feature. Using a phoneme categorization task, this study examines associations between gradient phonetic manifestations on a continuum from /æ/ to /ɑ/ and three social personae. Findings illustrate that the social persona made relevant for a listener influences the ways in which points on this phonetic continuum are categorized phonemically as eithertraporlot. Overall, this shows that the social constructs of personae influence phonetically detailed perceptions of linguistic material. (Sociolinguistic perception, personae, indexicality, sociophonetics, sociolinguistic signs)*

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