![]() ![]() ![]() Sociolinguistics manifests a different kind of comparative orientation. There is a strong comparative dimension to these arenas of investigation. The ethnography of speaking and ethnolinguistics, like the anthropological practices from which they take their names, focus on the diversity of available linguistic resources and the uses to which those resources are put in individual speech communities and in human society at large, respectively. In contrast, another handful of specialties focuses on the social dimensions of language/talk as interactional resource, a component of individual and group identity, and a social object. Whalen (1991) notes that CA "examines talk as an object in its own right, as a fundamental type of social action, rather than primarily as a resource for documenting other social processes." None of the five activities listed above deals with language primarily as social resource. Conversation analysis/ethnomethodology (CA), an approach that views talk in muchthe same way formal linguists view language: as a system that is syntactically organized and has structure that can be discerned independently of the social attributes of participants in particular talk.ĬA has identified devices such as "preinvitations" and "preclosings" as well as ways of constructing accusations without accusing anyone explicitly (Atkinson and Drew 1979) workers in the field are interested in how these devices are used in the course of the immediate talk, not in how they might be directed to more complex goals of conversational participants.Social psychology of language (from psychological social psychology), wide-ranging specialty that includes research on message characteristics and influence, self-disclosure, relationships between personality and speech, and relationships among body movements, speech, and "meaning.".Psycholinguistics, which covers a wide range of topics, including the acoustics of perception, cognitive constraints on the complexity of clausal embedding, theories of innateness and learning in language acquisition, and the physical location of language functions in the brain.Anthropological linguistics devoted to a "description" (writing of grammars and dictionaries and audio and phonemic recording of phonological systems) of languages in specific, usually nonmodern societies.This activity often is referred to as "autonomous linguistics" and occasionally as "nonhyphenated linguistics." Formal linguistics that focuses on languages as autonomous systems and investigates how those systems work independently of human and/or social agency. ![]() Among those specialties, there are at least five whose practitioners do not consider themselves sociolinguists or sociologists of language and whose research seldom is incorporated directly into sociolinguistics/sociology of language (SL/SOL) investigations: SOME ACTIVITIES AND SOME LABELSĪt least a dozen specialties investigate some aspect of language: its origins, structure, invariant and variant features, acquisition, use in social contexts, change, spread, and death, and so on. Interest in more macro dimensions of the sociology of language-for instance, language conflict, language maintenance, and language spread and decline-also has grown, though much more slowly. In the three decades since that time, interest in language in use (micro sociolinguistics) has continued to grow exponentially while that interest still is not seen as part of mainstream sociology, it is moving in that direction (Lemert 1979). That review commented on about fifty new titles only a few sociologists (particularly Basil Bernstein and Joshua Fishman, each with several volumes) were represented. A two-part survey of sociolinguistics written in 1973 (Grimshaw 1973b, 1974a) noted that more had been published on sociolinguistic topics in the early 1970s than in all previous years. When Brown and Gilman published their classic work on pronouns of power and solidarity (1960 see also 1989), no one characterized that paper as a major contribution to "sociolinguistics." When Gumperz and Hymes published their updated Directions in Sociolinguistics in 1986 (the 1972 edition was based on a 1966 publication of the American Anthropological Association), they were providing a paradigmatic definition of recognizable enterprise that book included contributions by many of the founders. ![]()
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