1. Wolfram & Schilling-Estes Chapter 9
Dialects and Style
Wolfram & Schilling-Estes
Chapter 9

2. Style Definition: variation in the speech of individual speakers
(Hymes: “ways of speaking”)
Labov: “There are no single-style speakers.”
literary style vs. speech style
Tannen 1984: conversational style
“style shifting” vs. “code switching” (typically used to refer to shifting between dialects of a language or between languages)

3. 9.1 Types of Style Shifting
Along the formality—informality continuum
Across dialects (“crossing”)
Problems: “Because it is not always easy to say whether a given style shift represents stylistic shifting within a given language variety or a shift to a different language variety, we do not make too much of this division in our discussion to follow.”

4. Types of Style Shifting (cont.)
Across registers (“a readily identifiable speech variety which individuals use in specific, well-defined speech situations”) Note: “genre” is also associated with situation of use but more highly ritualized and formulaic (e.g., sermon, science fiction)
Babytalk
Motherese
Legalese
Academic register
Sports announcer talk

5. Types of style-shifting (cont.)
When it is “style shifting” (across register/genre) and when is it “code switching” (from one dialect to another)?
Style shifts may involve features at all levels of language: phonological, morphosyntactic, intonational, lexical, pragmatic
Style shifts may be short-lived
Style shifts may involve different degrees of self-consciousness

6. Types of Style Shifting (cont.)
Shifting may occur frequently within the same discourse (see “Dialect-shifting in a Southern English Teacher’s Classroom Discourse”)
Relation of quantitative and qualitative approaches

7. Types of Style Shifting (cont.)
This text focuses on tradition of study associated with quantitative analysis
A given feature is available for stylistic purposes only if it carries some sort of social meaning in a given speech community.
Performance speech (Ocracoke)

8. Quantitative Approaches
Attention to Speech
Audience Design
Speaker Design

9. 9.2 Attention to Speech The “attention to speech” model
Determined by: type of speech activity, subject matter (danger of death story), paralinguistic channel cues…
Labov’s early work (1966):
Sociolinguistic interviews
Conversational speech
Casual style
Careful style
Reading
Reading style (of a passage)
Reading of minimal pair word lists
The more attention was paid to speech, the more formal the style

10. 9.2.1 Patterning of Stylistic Variation across Social Groups
Social class distinctions in the percentage use of stigmatized features tend to be preserved in each speech style.
Upper working class and lower middle class show “crossover pattern hypercorrection”
Statistical hypercorrection
Spelling pronunciations
Structural hypercorrection

11. Labov’s “vernacular principle”
“The style which is most regular in its structure and in its relation to the evolution of the language is the vernacular, in which the minimum attention is paid to speech” (1972b: 112)
Speakers’ vowel systems in casual speech seemed to give a truer picture of language change in progress than more careful speech styles
This principle led to a research focus on the “vernacular”

12. 9.2.2 Limitations of the Attention to Speech Approach
The “attention to speech” model
Determined by: type of speech activity, subject matter (danger of death story), paralinguistic channel cues…
Critiques:
As discussed earlier: relying on “objective” measures of social class; notions of prestige and stigma, standard and vernacular defy easy definition; these notions may also vary within a population; is style determined only by attention to speech?
Unreliability of channel cues as indicators
Difficulty of quantifying attention to speech
Unidimensionality
Some speech styles don’t fit along a formality dimension (“performance style” on Okracoke)
Can speaking and reading styles be compared?

13. 9.3 Audience Design
Rooted in Speech accommodation theory (Giles and Powesland 1975)
Psychological adjustment to the addressee (need for social approval or need to distance self)
Convergence
Divergence

14. Explanations for Style Shifting (cont.)
The “audience design” model (Bell 1984 originally)
See chart on page 281 in text

15. Audience Design Extends “attention to speech” in several ways:
Applies to a wider range of situations
Can be used for everyday conversation (and not just the sociolinguistic interview)
Attributes stylistic variation to interspeaker relations, rather than individual psychological matters such as attention to speech
Thus moves toward explaining the relation of individual stylistic choices to group styles
Begins to have an “initiative” component that allows for speaker agency

16. Limitations of “Audience Design”
Unidimensionality: focus on audience
Not clear which attributes of an audience are responded to
There are many ways to converge besides talking like somebody
Problems with “referee design” = convergence with non-present audience
Initiative design seems to be far more pervasive (latest version of model moving toward speaker design)

17. 9.4 “Speaker design” Approaches
Style shifts are viewed not merely as a means of responding to the attributes of audience members, but as a means of projecting one’s own identity
(Coupland 2001)
Incorporates aspects of other explanations
The notion that all speech is “performance” (Bakhtin 1981)

18. “Speaker Design”
Rooted in “social constructionist” approaches to language and society: language does not simply reflect social structures or social relations among speakers but also plays a crucial role in shaping society
Micro---Macro relationship

19. Additional factors for Speaker Design
audience
topic
setting
purpose
“key”
“frame”
All levels of dialect

20. 9.5 Further Considerations for the Investigation of Stylistic Variation
“What exactly is speech style?”
What combinations of features need to cluster together for speakers to perceive a way of speaking as a separate style?”
“What do people do with style?”
“What do speakers themselves perceive as ‘style’?”