31 January 2020

Today's recording failed (the microphone was turned off) so this is a summary of what happened in class today.

• Speech style

  • Labov's theory about style as distinguished by attention to form

  • Problems with collecting casual speech/vernacular--the observer's paradox

The vernacular. Not every style or point on the stylistic continuum is of equal interest to linguists. Some styles show irregular phonological and grammatical patterns, with a great deal of 'hypercorrection '. In other styles, we find more systematic speech, where the fundamental relations which determine the course of linguistic evolution can be seen most clearly. This is the 'vernacular' — the style in which the minimum attention is given to the monitoring of speech. Observation of the vernacular gives us the most systematic data for our analysis of linguistic structure.

Formality. Any systematic observation of a speaker defines a formal context in which more than the minimum attention is paid to speech. In the main body of an interview, where information is requested and supplied, we would not expect to find the vernacular used. No matter how casual or friendly the speaker may appear to us, we can always assume that he has a more casual speech, another style in which he jokes with his friends and argues with his wife.

Good data. No matter what other methods may be used to obtain samples of speech (group sessions, anonymous observation), the only way to obtain sufficient good data on the speech of any one person is through an individual, tape-recorded interview: that is through the most obvious kind of systematic observation.²

Observer's paradox. We are then left with the observer's paradox: the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation. The problem is of course not insoluble: we must either find ways of supplementing the formal inter­views with other data, or change the structure of the interview situation by one means or another

(W. Labov, 'The study of language in its social context', Studium Generale, vol. 23, 1970)

Why do we want to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed? Why isn't it enough to observe the speech of the 'knowing' speaker?

Speakers speak most regularly when they pay the least attention to their speech. A 'knowing' speaker is a self-conscious speaker--that speaker will be paying the most attention to his/her speech. Moreover, we want to collect speech across a range of speech styles --from least self-conscious to most self-conscious to see what speakers perceive as having social value. If all we collect is from the same speech style and that style is among the most self-conscious (i.e., formal) speech, our sample will be limited to the least regular form of the speakers' usage and to a single speech style.

Why should the speech of people conscious of being systematically observed be any different from any other kind of speech? (I mean, after all, the only time speakers speak without being observed at all is when they talk to themselves.) In other words, what's different about being observed and participating in an ordinary conversation?

The idea is that being observed is different from ordinary conversation because it focuses the participants attention largely on form, rather than largely or even exclusively on content. The more speakers attend to form, the less their speech reflects their unconscious rules and the more it is affected by a conscious overlay of "learned" forms. If we were interested in only a single style from speakers, the vernacular style is probably the one we would be most interested in -- it is speakers' most regular form. However, this form of data collection (overt and systematic observation) precludes getting that data by making the speakers self-conscious about their usage. Moreover, we are not interested in getting a single style and this form of data collection pushes speakers into a very narrow range of styles at the most formal end of their range.

• How can we elicit casual speech?

One way of overcoming the paradox is to break through the constraints of the interview situation by various devices which divert attention away from speech, and allow the vernacular to emerge. This can be done in various intervals and breaks which are so defined that the subject unconsciously assumes that he is not at that moment being interviewed (Labov, 1966). We can also involve the subject in questions and topics which recreate strong emotions he has felt in the past, or involve him in other contexts. One of the most successful questions of this type is one dealing with the 'danger of death': 'Have you ever been in a situation where you were in serious danger of being killed?' Narratives given in answer to this question almost always show a shift of style away from careful speech towards the vernacular. (Labov, 1970)

• Variables can be indicators (stratify just for social class) or markers (stratify for both social class and speech style).

  • • Norwich data from Trudgill, 1983 On Dialect

(ng) has two variants an alveolar nasal (like in thin) and a velar nasal (like in thing). The percentages of velar nasals are presented in this table.

Table 10-1 (ng) Index scores by class and style

WLS = word list style; RPS = reading passage style; FS = formal speech; CS = casual speech

MMC = middle middle class; LMC = lower middle class; UWC = upper working class; MWC = middle working class; LWC = lower working class

Same data represented graphically: