Style shifting, codeswitching

Abstract The correlation between external factors such as age, gender, ethnic group membership and language variation is one of the stalwarts of sociolinguistic theory. The repertoire of individual members of speaker groups, vis-à-vis community-wide variation, represents a somewhat slippery ground for developing and testing models of variation and change and has been researched with reference to accommodation (Bell 1984), style shifting (Rickford, John R. & MacKenzie Price. 2013. Girlz II women: Age-grading, language change and stylistic variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17. 143–179) and language change generally (Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell). This paper presents and assesses some first quantitative evidence that non-mobile older speakers from Tristan da Cunha, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean, who grew up in an utterly isolated speech community, vary and shift according to external interview parameters (interviewer, topic, place of interview). However, while they respond to the formality of the context, they display variation (both regarding speakers and variables) that is not in line with the constraints attested elsewhere. These findings are assessed with focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in third-age speakers (particularly style-shifting, Labov, William. 1964. Stages in the acquisition of Standard English. In Roger Shuy, Alva Davis & Robert Hogan (eds.), Social Dialects and Language Learning, 77–104. Champaign: National Council of Teachers of English) and across the life-span generally.

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Investigating “self-conscious” speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404500019722 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 53-83 ◽

Cited By ~ 86

Author(s):

Natalie Schilling-Estes

Keyword(s):

North Carolina ◽

Social Context ◽

Stylistic Variation ◽

Frequent Contact ◽

The Past ◽

Island Community ◽

Style Shifting ◽

New Residents ◽

Insight Into ◽

Regular Patterning

ABSTRACTThis article examines PERFORMANCE SPEECH in the historically isolated island community of Ocracoke, North Carolina. Over the past several decades islanders have come into increasingly frequent contact with tourists and new residents, who often comment on the island's “quaint” relic dialect. In response, some Ocracokers have developed performance phrases that highlight island features, particularly the pronunciation of/ay/ with a raised/backed nucleus, i.e. [Λ-1]. The analysis of/ay/ in the performance and non-performance speech of a representative Ocracoke speaker yields several important insights for the study of language in its social context. First, performance speech may display more regular patterning than has traditionally been assumed. Second, it lends insight into speaker perception of language features. Finally, the incorporation of performance speech into the variationist-based study of style-shifting offers support for the growing belief that style-shifting may be primarily proactive rather than reactive. (Keywords: Ocracoke, performance speech, style-shifting, stylistic variation, register, self-conscious speech.)

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Style-shifting in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

Language and Literature ◽

10.1177/0963-9470-20011001-04 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 61-77 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David Herman

Keyword(s):

Constitutive Relationship ◽

Narrative Fiction ◽

Men And Women ◽

Feminine Gender ◽

Speech Representation ◽

Style Shifting ◽

Role Relationships ◽

The House Of Mirth

Using Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth as a case study, this article revisits the issue of speech representation in narrative fiction by drawing on recent socio-linguistic and discourse-analytic research on style. Wharton's novel features a broad range of social styles, with style-shifts both indexing and helping to precipitate conflicts pertaining to class as well as gender. Wharton's speech representations thus reveal a mutually constitutive relationship between style and identity, patterns of usage and contexts of use, undermining the commonsensical idea that one selects from among various available styles to communicate who and what one is. Rather, her text suggests that it is by communicating, by stylizing, that interlocutors take on a role as selves, or centres of subjectivity. In particular, Wharton's novel shows that discordant communicative norms, far from being secondary conflicts that are parasitic on some primary, prelinguistic division between those already equipped with a masculine or a feminine gender, do much to account for the antagonistic role relationships lived out by men and women from day to day.

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