English Linguistics 5: Language in Society
Summary on Assigned Articles
Studying Language Variation: An Informal Epistemology
1. Sociolinguistics as a Discipline
Languages cannot exist without societies. Labov’s sociolinguistic framework introduced
three innovations into the prevailing linguistic culture:
- Correlating linguistic variants with class, age, sex, and other social attributes
- Incorporating style as an independent variable
- Apprehending the progress of linguistic changes in apparent time
Dialectology and sociolinguistics are in the broadest sense dialectologies (studies of language
variations). Traditional dialectology embraced the strictures of structural linguistics,
concentrating on regional speech patterns of mainly rural, old-fashioned speakers elicited one
item at a time. Sociolinguistics can be viewed as refocusing of traditional dialectology in
response to cataclysmic technological and social changes that required freer data-gathering
methods using larger and more representative population samples. A branch of sociolinguistic
dialectology in which region is one independent variable among the other social and stylistic
variables. It is more beholden to sociolinguistics than dialectology.
Traditional dialect studies with genuine sociolinguistic bearings are rare. Louis Gauchat
became aware of social stratification in the local dialect. This variability ran counter to the
prevailing wisdom, which held that the dialect of an isolated village with a virtually immobile
population should be homogeneous. Gauchat is the patriarch of variationist linguistics. He
correlated linguistic variants with sex, age, and social class, recognised style as an
independent variable, and apprehended changes in progress with apparent-time comparisons.
2. Language as a Social Phenomenon
The classic Greeks (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) didn’t notice linguistic variation of any kind, and
their overwhelming influence on Western thought undoubtedly contributed to the antisocial
bias of Western linguistic tradition. The only classical scholar who seems to have been aware
of the social side of language is the Roman Varro, who not only recognised linguistic
variation (anomalia) but also linked it to vernacular language use (consuetudo). Varro
observed the arbitrary nature of linguistic judgements: ‘’The usage of speech is always
shifting its position.’’ The speech community is the most important kind of social group. You
learn your languages in stages as conditions of gradual incorporation into your social
organisation.
,3. Linguistics and Sociolinguistics
Saussure made a distinction between langue (language) and parole (a single utterance).
Saussure dismissed a possible science of parole. Humboldt made a similar distinction
between a formless ergon and a well-formed energeia. Ergon (parole) was divided up into an
infinity as the sole language in one and the same nation. Energeia (langue) was language in
the abstract sense, with ‘’these many variants united into one language having a definite
character.’’ Chomsky made a similar distinction between competence, ‘’the speaker-hearer’s
knowledge of his language,’’ and performance, ‘’the actual use of language in concrete
situations.’’ Humboldt, Saussure and Chomsky were right in pointing out that speech, parole,
is heterogeneous, but they have been proven wrong in dismissing heterogeneity as a viable
object of study.
4. Communicative Competence and the Language Faculty
Studying language as langue (or energeia or competence), as distinct from parole (or ergon or
performance), requires abstracting linguistic data from the real-world variability in which it
naturally occurs. The axiom of categoricity: hypothetical filter on natural language data to
make it invariant, discrete, and qualitative. Sociolinguistics attempt to grasp language as it is
used in social situations, which is to say as variant, continuous, and quantitative. The
distinction between langue and parole are used to define the different objects of inquiry of
theoretical linguistics and sociolinguistics.
Theoretical linguists who adopt the axiom of categoricity are interested in discovering the
properties of one of those systems of the language faculty, called grammar: also known as I-
language, ‘I’ for internal and individual. The internal grammar is a person’s language organ,
the system. The system is made up of computational rules and representations. The
grammatical processor is structure-dependent rather than strictly linear and language-specific,
not reducible to other, independently motivated, non-language-processing cognitive
components. The grammar is the module in the language faculty that accounts for the
uniquely human attributes of creativity in language production and comprehension,
and for the rapidity of language acquisition in infancy.
Linguistic production and comprehension require real-world orientation to express meanings,
and the acquisition device requires the stimulus of social interaction to activate learning.
Chomsky isolates the two as follows: A fuller account of knowledge of language will
consider the interactions of grammar and other systems, specifically the system of conceptual
structures and pragmatic competence. The social stimulus has its source in the pragmatic
competence (communicative competence). Conceptual system: system of the object-
reference and also such relations as ‘agent’, ‘goal’, ‘instrument’ (thematic relations), also
involves real-world orientation and reveals human properties most easily discerned in
acquisition. Object-reference includes vocabulary items, the massive inventory of form-to-
meaning mappings which are the most obvious intermediaries between grammar and the
world, e.g. a child knows the difference between the verbs follow and chase.
Pragmatic competence: knowledge of conditions and manner of appropriate use, in
conformity with various purposes. Places language in the institutional setting of its use,
,relating intentions and purposes to the linguistic means at hand. Hymes describes it as
sociolinguistic competence (communicative competence): The social matrix in which a
child acquires a system of grammar and, correspondingly, a system of its use, regarding
persons, places, purposes, other modes of communication, etc. – components of
communicative events, together with attitudes and beliefs regarding them. This competence is
acquired independently of the grammatical one.
5. Interdependence of Language and Communication
Communication is the externalisation by the sensory-motor system and it appears to be a
secondary property of language. In Chomsky’s view, language use seems to be no more
important in communication than are gestures, facial expressions and eye-gaze cues and none
of these affects the unalterable language faculty. However, evolution of grammatical
competence devoid of communicative competence is inconceivable. Primate-like sensory-
motor systems pre-dated language, but their human adaptation to accommodate speech must
have occurred simultaneously with the development of the language faculty. Languages are
created and filtered by brains that are biologically endowed with communicative intelligence.
Communicative intelligence: type of intelligence to encode and decode the communicative
intentions behind any type of potentially communicative behaviour, linguistic, nonverbal or
otherwise. It is rooted in socialisation and is the common cognitive inheritance of all human
beings. Together with the vocal/auditory apparatus, this cognitive adaptation
(communicative intelligence) for communication makes possible the cultural evolution
of spoken languages. Without such specialised structures, the speed and flexibility with
which language is used, learned and changed, even within one generation, would not be
possible.
The Sociolinguistic Enterprise
No linguistic principle can explain the social evaluation attached to any of the variants we
choose. There is also no linguistic principle behind their distribution in the speech of different
social groups in the community, or the relative frequency of their use from one generation to
the next. These aspects make up the mystery of language change, which is irrepressible and
inexorable, even though it is both dysfunctional (it impedes communication in the long run)
and otiose (the changes neither improve nor degrade the language as a communicative
medium). The root causes seem to be nothing more profound than social convention.
, Sociolinguistics as Language Variation and Change
Sociolinguistics
The idea that variation is an inherent part of language is the foundational maxim of the LVC
(Language Variation and Change) approach. The harder part is to find the order, or the
system, in the variation chaos. LVC undertakes this by a ‘linguistic variable’. A linguistic
variable is the alternation of forms, or ‘layering’ of forms, in language. It is two or more
ways of saying the same thing. Linguistic variables should be structural and integrated into a
larger system of functioning units.
The Linguistic Variable
Synonyms are different lexemes with the same referential meaning. A restrictive definition of
synonymy would require that two synonyms are completely interchangeable in every possible
context. Linguistic variables must also be alternatives (options) within the same grammatical
system which have the same referential value (meaning) in discourse. The choice of one
variant or the other must vary in a systematic way – this is structured heterogeneity.
Linguistic variable:
- Two different ways of saying the same thing;
- An abstraction;
- Made up of variants;
- Comprising a linguistically defined set of some type:
o A phoneme
o A lexical item
o A structural category
o A natural class of units
o A syntactic relationship
o The permutation or placement of items
- The variants of the variable must have a structurally defined relationship in the
grammar;
- They must also co-vary, correlating with patterns of social and/or linguistic
phenomena.
Tip: Look for the words that occur most frequently in data in order to find a linguistic
variable. Are there other ways of saying the same thing?
Linguistic variables involve variants that have social meaning. Sociolinguistic variables:
correlated with some non-linguistic variable of the social context: speaker, addressee,
audience, setting, etc. The patterns of a linguistic variable in the speech community tell the
story of how the speech community evaluates the variants of the variable and reveals how
society is organised and structured.
The empirical task of Variationist Sociolinguistics is to correlate linguistic variation as the
dependent variant with independent variables. The dependent variables are the features of the
