When: Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PMWhere: Location TBC, Mile End Campus
An informal presentation by our academic staff member Dr Rhys Sandow.
Lexis-Oriented Sociolinguistics: Opportunities and Insights from Vocabulary Variation Studies
The primary goal of my research agenda is to develop a lexis-oriented branch of sociolinguistics, by building methodological, theoretical, and analytical tools to enable the integration of vocabulary into the variationist programme. In this LingLunch talk I discuss a range of case-studies from my research, drawing upon both production and perception research. In particular, I focus on the ways in which lexis can enable new empirical research questions to be explored and enable insights into old questions, such as the actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968).
While Labov (1973: 370) described the word as the ‘linguistic unit of greatest social significance’, it is a level of language variation that has been eschewed from the methodological and theoretical considerations of the variationist paradigm (Robinson 2012). In particular, as in recent years sociolinguists have focussed their attention to a greater extent on identity construction, by not fully engaging with lexis, we provide only an abridged account of language variation. The case-studies discussed in this presentation serve to develop our understanding of i) the processes and mechanisms of language variation and change and ii) the relationship between language and society.
References:
Labov, William. (1973). The boundaries of words and their meanings. In Charles-James N Bailey & Roget W. Shuy (eds.), New Ways of Analysing Variation in English, 340–373. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Robinson, Justyna A. (2012). A gay paper: Why should sociolinguistics bother with semantics?: Can sociolinguistic methods shed light on semantic variation and change in reference to the adjective gay. English Today, 28 (4), 38–54.
Weinreich, Uriel., Labov, William., & Herzog, Marvin. (1968). Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. Austin: University of Texas Press.