Towards a Critical Sociolinguistics (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)
Language: English
Pages: 354
ISBN: 1556195796
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This collection of twelve essays, some of which have been written specifically for this volume by well-known European and North-American sociolinguists, reflects an increasing recognition within the field that sociological and theoretical innocence can no longer be underwritten by it, and offers a multi-pronged and multi-methodological way to move towards a critical, reflexive, and theoretically responsible socio-linguistics. It explores, with courage and sensitivity, some very important areas in the enormous space between Bloomfieldian 'idiolect' and Chomskyan 'UG' in order to situate the human linguistic enterprise, and offers valuable insights into human linguisticality and sociality. These explorations expose the limits of correlationism, determinism, and positivistic reificationism, and offer new ways of doing sociolinguistics. Intended for both practicing and future sociolinguists, it is an ideal text-book for the times, particularly for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.
Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Hindi and Urdu to become two different languages despite remarkable synchronic isomorphism and common ancestry (cf. Rai 1986) or for native speakers of Icelandic not to comprehend Faroese. It may well be that the static, positivist, structuralist metaphors we call grammars are misguided or that something other than grammar is at play. But we need to answer such questions. Hence sociolinguistics. 2 critical sociolinguistics Language, like labour, is as much a social and, therefore, a joyful
and stylistically differentiated variation with one another. The problem is how to quantify this variation when it also involves structural differentiation of the sort we encounter when we compare the StE and basic he verb-phrases. In some areas of the grammar a shift from vernacular to standard usage entails not merely formal differences but functional differences as well. In such cases, as I have already pointed out, it would be misguided to subsume apparently alternating standard and nonstandard
change proceeds initially through the modification of low-level rules (e.g. Halle 1962; King 1969). After an accumulation of such changes a grammar may undergo a restructuring of underlying representations. The intervention of restructuring means that a given language at time t1 does not share an underlying identity with its daughter language at t2. But of course not all dialects of a single language undergo such changes simultaneously. This time-lag factor has the syntactic variation and
which is innate and invariant. Chomsky does not recognize a supra-individual or external existence of language as being of relevance to linguistic theory. He (1980: 116) says that from the fact that ‘‘an individual has an internalised grammar, it does not follow that there exists a shared language’’. Labov’s methodology, on the other hand, relies on speakers only to the extent that they produce the utterances or tokens of linguistic variables, i.e. the physical realizations of 102 critical
1981). There is an effort among Native Americans, stimulated by Deni Leonard and others, to gain recognition for the language rights of Native American communities as a basis for their increased political and cultural autonomy. Such mobilization and national action precedes knowledge rather than drawing upon it. The mobilization around language goes on with little systematic information on which it may draw or in terms of which it may be assessed. Laymen, social scientists, and linguists alike
