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Find out moreSee below for a selection of the latest books from Sociolinguistics category. Presented with a red border are the Sociolinguistics books that have been lovingly read and reviewed by the experts at Lovereading. With expert reading recommendations made by people with a passion for books and some unique features Lovereading will help you find great Sociolinguistics books and those from many more genres to read that will keep you inspired and entertained. And it's all free!
In Chronotopes and Migration: Language, Social Imagination, and Behavior, Farzad Karimzad and Lydia Catedral investigate migrants' polycentric identities, imaginations, ideologies, and orientations to home and host countries through the notion of chronotope. The book focuses on the authors' ethnographically situated research with two migrant populations --Iranians and Uzbeks in the United States -- to highlight the institutional constraints and individual subjectivities involved in transnational mobility. The authors provide a model for how the notion of cultural chronotope can be applied to the study of language and migration at multiple scales, and they showcase a coherent picture of the ways in which chronotopes organize various aspects of migrant life. This book is a critical contribution to the conversation surrounding sociocultural-linguistic uses of the chronotope, demonstrating not only its applicability to theorizing migration, but also to theorizing language and social life more broadly.
How exactly do linguistic landscapes communicate and what theoretical significance might follow from such an inquiry? This book addresses these questions by taking as its starting point the insight that the individual or organization that is responsible for the production of a sign may not be physically present at the landscape itself. The information to be conveyed is typically designed as a piece of signage to be emplaced at the site. Drawing on Goffman's (1974, 1981) notion of a production format, the book argues that the constructed piece of sign and its intended placement within the landscape combine to constitute an animator complex. This raises the possibility of a disruption to the sign and its placement in the landscape. The book describes various ways in which the integrity of the animator complex can be disrupted (e.g. the sign may be moved out of place through vandalism or acts of nature, or the organization that the sign represents may no longer be in business), identifies different types of animators, and expands on the implications for phenomena such as affect, multivocality, footing and the materiality of language. In doing so, the book also demonstrates the value of bringing in Bakhtin's (1981, 1984, 1986) work on heteroglossia and the dialogicity of communication, integrating the ideas of Bakhtin with those of Goffman.
Sociophonetics focuses on the relationship between phonetic or phonological form on the one hand, and social and regional factors on the other, working across fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences and psycholinguistics. Covering methodological, theoretical and computational approaches, this engaging introduction to sociophonetics brings new insights to age-old questions about language variation and change, and to the broader nature of language. It includes examples of important work on speech perception, focusing on vowels and sibilants throughout to provide detailed exemplification. The accompanying website provides a range of online resources, including audio files, data processing scripts and links. Written in an accessible style, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences and psycholinguistics.
Combining statistical modelling and archival study, English and Empire investigates how African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters have been voiced in British fiction and drama produced between 1768 and 1929. The analysis connects patterns of linguistic representation to changes in the imperial political economy, to evolving language ideologies that circulate in the Anglophone world, and to shifts in sociocultural anxieties that crosscut race and empire. In carrying out his investigation, David West Brown makes the case for a methodological approach that links the distant (quantitative) and close (qualitative) reading of diverse digital artefacts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a variety of scholars and students including sociolinguists interested in historical language variation, as well as literary scholars interested in postcolonial studies and the digital humanities.
Language standardization is the process by which conventional forms of a language are established and maintained. Bringing together internationally renowned experts, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of standardization, norms and standard languages. Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: models and theories of standardization, questions of authority and legitimacy, literacy and education, borders and boundaries, and standardization in Late Modernity. Each chapter addresses a specific issue in detail, illustrating it with linguistic case studies and taking into account the particular political, social and cultural context. Showcasing cutting-edge research, it offers fresh perspectives that go beyond traditional accounts of the standardization of national European languages, and affords new insights into minoritized, indigenous and stateless languages. Surveying a wide range of languages and approaches, this Handbook is an essential resource for all those interested in language standards and standard languages.
The study of language and law has seen explosive growth in the past twenty-five years. Research on police interrogations, trial examination, jury deliberation, plea bargains, same sex marriage, to name a few, has shown the central role of written and oral forms of language in the construction of legal meaning. However, there is another side of language that has rarely been analyzed in legal settings: the role of gesture and how it integrates with language in the law. This is the first book-length investigation of language and multimodal conduct in the law. Using audio-video tapes from a famous rape trial, Matoesian and Gilbert examine legal identity and impression management in the sociocultural performance of precedent, expert testimony, closing argument, exhibits, reported speech and trial examination. Drawing on insights from Jakobson and Silverstein, the authors show how the poetic function inheres not only in language but multimodal conduct generally. Their analysis opens up new empirical territory for both forensic linguistics and gesture studies.
While other books focus on special internet registers, like tweets or texting, no previous study describes the full range of everyday registers found on the searchable web. These are the documents that readers encounter every time they do a Google search, from registers like news reports, product reviews, travel blogs, discussion forums, FAQs, etc. Based on analysis of a large, near-random corpus of web documents, this monograph provides comprehensive situational, lexical, and grammatical descriptions of those registers. Beginning with a coding of each document in the corpus, the description identifies the registers that are especially common on the searchable web versus those that are less commonly found. Multi-dimensional analysis is used to describe the overall patterns of linguistic variation among web registers, while the second half of the book provides an in-depth description of each individual register, including analyses of situational contexts and communicative purposes, together with the typical lexical and grammatical characteristics associated with those contexts.
Sociophonetics focuses on the relationship between phonetic or phonological form on the one hand, and social and regional factors on the other, working across fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences and psycholinguistics. Covering methodological, theoretical and computational approaches, this engaging introduction to sociophonetics brings new insights to age-old questions about language variation and change, and to the broader nature of language. It includes examples of important work on speech perception, focusing on vowels and sibilants throughout to provide detailed exemplification. The accompanying website provides a range of online resources, including audio files, data processing scripts and links. Written in an accessible style, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences and psycholinguistics.
By the award-winning former president of the Linguistic Society of America, this collection of some of John Russell Rickford's pioneering works shows how linguists in sociolinguistics and creole studies can benefit from utilizing data, theories and methods from each other, as they more frequently did in the 1960s and 1970s, when both subfields, in their modern forms at least, were getting started. The volume addresses fundamental sociolinguistic topics such as social class, style, fieldwork, speech community, sociolinguistic competence and language attitudes with data from Guyanese and other Caribbean creoles. Recurrent concepts are also considered including language versatility, variation and change, vernacular use, school success and criminal justice in African America and the Caribbean, using models, case studies and methodologies from sociolinguistics. Theoretical and applied scholars, students apprehensive about sociolinguistic fieldwork, and those considering dynamic methods like implicational scaling about which little is written in linguistics textbooks, will find this volume invaluable. Includes a Foreword by Gillian Sankoff.
This is the first textbook on the linguistic relativity hypothesis, presenting it in user-friendly language, yet analyzing all its premises in systematic ways. The hypothesis claims that there is an intrinsic interconnection between thought, language, and society. All technical terms are explained and a glossary at the back is provided. The book looks at the history and versions of the hypothesis, including the research paradigms and critiques that this notion has generated. It describes work on testing its validity in various domains, from grammar to discourse and artificial languages. It also extends the notion to other forms of relativity, from semiotic relativity to discursive relativity. Overall, it presents a comprehensive overview of the hypothesis, with pedagogical activities in each chapter, including questions for discussion and practical exercises on various notions. The book also examines the hypothesis as a foundational notion for the establishment of linguistic anthropology. This essential course text inspires creative, informed dialogue and debate for students of anthropology, linguistics, cultural studies, cognitive science, and psychology.
This is the first textbook on the linguistic relativity hypothesis, presenting it in user-friendly language, yet analyzing all its premises in systematic ways. The hypothesis claims that there is an intrinsic interconnection between thought, language, and society. All technical terms are explained and a glossary at the back is provided. The book looks at the history and versions of the hypothesis, including the research paradigms and critiques that this notion has generated. It describes work on testing its validity in various domains, from grammar to discourse and artificial languages. It also extends the notion to other forms of relativity, from semiotic relativity to discursive relativity. Overall, it presents a comprehensive overview of the hypothesis, with pedagogical activities in each chapter, including questions for discussion and practical exercises on various notions. The book also examines the hypothesis as a foundational notion for the establishment of linguistic anthropology. This essential course text inspires creative, informed dialogue and debate for students of anthropology, linguistics, cultural studies, cognitive science, and psychology.
To do ethnography, a researcher must have rapport with research subjects. But what is rapport? Ethnography and ethnographic methods have increasingly become a feature of social inquiry in general and sociolinguistics in particular, and rapport is generally considered a prerequisite for fieldwork. And yet, unlike related terms such as communication and phatic communion, this concept has remained largely unexamined. Reimagining Rapport turns a critical eye to the use of the term rapport across disciplines. The collection analyzes the very idea of rapport, both exploring how it has been shaped by historical forces and actors within sociocultural anthropology, and questioning its usefulness. Rather than viewing the term as simply denoting a type of positive social relationship that needs to be formed between researcher and consultant before research can begin, this book invites us to reimagine rapport theoretically, methodologically, and meta-methodologically. Zane Goebel and other leading sociolinguists challenge readers to think about how rapport has been constructed within these disciplines, and ultimately to see rapport as an emergent, co-constructed social relationship that is actively built during situated multimodal encounters. The contributors collectively examine the role of ideology and mediation in the construction of rapport, and argue that reconceptualizing research-subject relationships is essential for establishing more sophisticated ways of understanding, interpreting, and representing research context. A valuable resource for scholars and students of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology-as well as for others engaged in ethnographic fieldwork-Reimagining Rapport is the first collection to provide an in-depth investigation of this critically important but previously unexamined concept.
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