scholarly journals 4. When third-wave sociolinguistics and prototype analysis meet: The social meaning of sibilant palatalization in a Flemish Urban Vernacular

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-156
Keyword(s):  
Social Meaning ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
The Social ◽  
Urban Vernacular

‘Ey, wait, wait, gully!’ Style, stance and the social meaning of attention signals in East London adolescent speech

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN ILBURY
Keyword(s):  
Distribution Function ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Youth Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociolinguistic Ethnography ◽  
Ingroup Outgroup

Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention of an individual – in just over 35 hours of self-recordings of 25 adolescents collected during a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography of an East London youth group. This leads me to identify an innovative attention signal – ey. Distributional analyses of this feature show that ey is associated with a particular Community of Practice, the self-defined and exclusively male ‘gully’. By examining the discourse junctures at which ey occurs, I argue that this attention signal is most frequently used by speakers to deploy a ‘dominant’ stance. For gully members, this feature is particularly useful as an interpersonal device, where it is used to manage ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Concluding, I link the use of ey and the gully identity to language, ethnicity and masculinity in East London.

scholarly journals Social meaning in the mirror of political correctness

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-399
Author(s):  
Valeria E. Chernyavskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Correctness ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Embeddedness ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Socially Disadvantaged ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The Usa

The article addresses two central notions, namely social meaning and political correctness. The concept of social meaning is well known in “third wave” sociolinguistics, which connects patterns of language variation with the wider social world, in metapragmatics after Michael Silverstein, language ideology research and discourse analysis. The analysis is in line with these research approaches and also reflects back the pragmatic interpretation of social meanings. It is presumed that the social meaning of a word or an utterance is indexical in its nature and conveys information about the social context of language use. Social meaning of an utterance reflects its social embeddedness. In this respect, the perspective of political correctness reflects the discursive process of social indexicality and social meaning making. The article examines modern cases of political correctness (PC) in the USA (2017–2020) to show the effects of discursive pressure on interpretation frames. PC is discussed as a controversial practice and it is aimed at avoiding expressions or actions that can be perceived to marginalize or insult socially disadvantaged and discriminated people. At the same time, it can overpoliticize issues and act as a struggle against implicit meanings and implicatures.

Citizen sociolinguists scaling back

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Betsy Rymes ◽  
Gareth Smail
Keyword(s):  
Social Meaning ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multilingual Communication ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Practices ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThis paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists’ use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists. Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or “things Welsh people say.” We ultimately argue that by calling practices “translanguaging” and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of “citizen sociolinguists” as they discuss their own communicative practices in context may have something unique and underexamined to offer us as researchers of communicative diversity.

scholarly journals Why Singles Prefer to Retire Later

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (10) ◽  
pp. 936-960 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Eismann ◽  
Kène Henkens ◽  
Matthijs Kalmijn
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Mediation Analysis ◽  
Older Workers ◽  
Relationship Status ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Meaning Of Work ◽  
Financial Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spousal Influence

This study goes beyond a purely financial perspective to explain why single older workers prefer to retire later than their partnered counterparts. We aim to show how the work (i.e., its social meaning) and home domain (i.e., spousal influence) contribute to differences in retirement preferences by relationship status. Analyses were based on multiactor data collected in 2015 among older workers in the Netherlands ( N = 6,357) and (where applicable) their spouses. Results revealed that the social meaning of work differed by relationship status but not always as expected. In a mediation analysis, we found that the social meaning of work partically explained differences in retirement preferences by relationship status. We also show that single workers preferred to retire later than workers with a “pulling” spouse, earlier than workers with a “pushing” spouse, and at about the same time as workers with a neutral spouse.

The Social Meaning of Money: "Special Monies"

1989 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviana A. Zelizer
Keyword(s):  
Social Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Meaning Of Money

‘It ain’t nothing like America with the Bloods and the Crips’: Gang narratives inside two English prisons

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Coretta Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Mutual Support ◽  
Narrative Interviews ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Male Prisoners

This article explores recent concerns about the emergence of gangs in prisons in England and Wales. Using narrative interviews with male prisoners as part of an ethnographic study of ethnicity and social relations, the social meaning of ‘the gang’ inside prison is interrogated. A formally organized gang presence was categorically denied by prisoners. However, the term ‘gang’ was sometimes elided with loose collectives of prisoners who find mutual support in prison based on a neighbourhood territorial identification. Gangs were also discussed as racialized groups, most often symbolized in the motif of the ‘Muslim gang’. This racializing discourse hinted at an envy of prisoner solidarity and cohesion which upsets the idea of a universal prisoner identity. The broader conceptual, empirical and political implications of these findings are considered.

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.

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