Naomi Nagy

A Small Study of Sociolinguistic Variation

In this assignment, working individually or in groups of up to 3, you will study the use of a sociolinguistic variable. You may collect data by means of participant observation (i.e. by noting relevant examples of the feature you are studying whenever they are used in your (virtual) presence) or use existing data as specified below. You may NOT conduct an experiment. That is, you may not interview people, ask people to read a passage or answer specific questions. You may choose any one of the suggested topics to work on, or suggest a variable of your own in consultation with the professor. You may use any relevant observations that you collected in HW_A3 as a starting point.

Step 1: Develop a testable hypothesis about a sociolinguistic variable. Choose a variable that you will easily be able to observe via one of the three Data Collection options listed next. (Remind yourself about sociolinguistic variables at this link, from Week 2 lecture notes, or in Bell Chapter 7).

Option 1	Option 2	Option 3
Collect your own data	Analyze the Prime Minister's speech	Analyze data from the Heritage Language Corpus

Step 2. Data Collection

Option 1: Collect your own data (in any language you can work with)

Option 2: Check out Canada's Prime Minister

Option 3: Use existing Heritage Language data

If you/your group is able to work with spoken recordings of one of the languages in the (Heritage Language Variation and Change project), select a minimum of three speakers that have been recorded and transcribed. Find at least 25 tokens (occurrences) of the dependent variable in each recording. A good practice is to create additional tiers in the ELAN .eaf file and mark and code the tokens there. In one tier, note which variant they used. In additional daughter tiers, note the other relevant information about the situation (see list in Option 1), the independent variable(s)). The tokens and tiers can then be exported to a spreadsheet for easy analysis.

• HLVC Project Information
• Instructions for various stages of the HLVC Project
• HLVC Data [ask the professor for access]

Step 3. Data analysis (for Option 1, 2 or 3)

Summarize your results in the form of tables, showing what proportion of tokens of each variant you encountered (e.g., formal vs. informal greetings, -ing vs. -in’) were uttered by males as opposed to females, addressed to people with whom the speaker was familiar vs. unfamiliar, were spoken over the telephone vs. face-to-face, etc. Consider carefully how your different variants might best be grouped together. (e.g., Are some of the greetings more formal and others more familiar? Are some taboo words extremely taboo and others only mildly so?) If you identify groupings like this in the data, use them in your tables. Wherever possible, express your results as percentages, calculating proportions within each category. For example, what proportion of familiar greetings were used by men vs. by women?

Write a short sociolinguistics research paper (4-5 pages) or a 1-page abstract describing your study (your choice). The paper or abstract should include an informative title and the following short sections in order. Refer to course resources and papers [some tips] about what should appear in each section, and appropriate style.

If you choose to write a Paper, read on here. If you choose to write an Abstract, click here, then come back.

i) Introduction

State the variable, what the variants were and why this was interesting or what general issues it related to (i.e., your goals and hypotheses).

ii) Methodology

Describe how you collected, coded and analyzed the data.

iii) Results

Organize your research findings into tables broken down by social categories (gender, familiarity, etc.).

iv) Discussion

Discuss your results and their implications. Think about questions that have been addressed in the class. Make explicit reference to at least two of the assigned articles, as well as relevant concepts from the textbook. Address questions such as the following: Do men and women show different preferences for the various greetings or leavetakings, or pronunciations of -ing? Do men use more strong taboo words than women? Do women use more information-seeking tags than men do? Do speakers use different greetings or leavetakings over the telephone than in person? Do people code-switch more often with people they know well as opposed to those they have limited acquaintance with? Does pronunciation of -ing vary with the formality or familiarity of the situation?

v) Conclusion

Try to draw general conclusions about your results. Why did the results come out the way they did? Why do (or don’t) women and men differ in the use of these features? Why do speakers use different forms in different interactions? Where possible, try to identify future areas for possible research.

vi) Bibliography

List all published references, including websites, that you consulted. Cite them appropriately within your paper. There are resources in the Quercus portal for help on citation and reference practices.

See this link for a more detailed view of the typical contents of a sociolinguistics research paper.

Greetings and/or Leavetakings

When people encounter one another after a period of not being in each other's presence, they normally use some kind of greeting (e.g. hi, hello, good morning); similarly, when people terminate an encounter and expect not to be in each other's presence for some time, they ordinarily mark this with a leavetaking (e.g. goodbye, see you). Greetings and leavetakings mark different social relationships between speaker and hearer. Make note of all greetings and/or leavetakings addressed to you or to others in your presence and try to characterize the social significance of each (i.e. which ones are more or less formal, express solidarity or familiarity, etc.). You may want to divide your greetings/leavetakings into two variants: ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. Try to characterize any preferences that different speakers or groups of speakers tend to have (e.g. Do men use informal greetings more than women?) and whether usage is affected by the channel of communication (telephone vs. face-to-face).

Taboo Words

Taboo words (commonly referred to as "swear words", "curse words" or "dirty words") are subject to strong social conventions about their usage. Note all instances of such words that are used in your presence. You may want to divide the different taboo words into two variants: ‘mild’ and ‘strong’.  Try to characterize whether men and women use taboo words differently and whether people are more or less likely to use them in the presence of people they know well as opposed to those they are less familiar with, or in the presence of women as opposed to men.

Tag Questions

Robin Lakoff (1975) has suggested that women use tag questions more than men because tags signify a desire for confirmation or approval and therefore relative powerlessness or lack of self-confidence (e.g. It’s a nice day, isn’t it? is supposedly less assertive than It's a nice day.). Collect observations of male and female speakers using tag questions. You may want to divide the tag questions into two variants: ‘polite/deferential’ and ‘seeking confirmation’. Note especially when the tags are used differently from the way you would use them. In your analysis, discuss whether your data confirm Lakoff’s hypothesis or not; i.e. do men and women use these forms with different frequency or different significance?

-in/ing

The -ing suffix in English (e.g. building, running, opening) is sometimes pronounced as 'ing' and sometimes as 'in' (known as "dropping the 'g'"). Since the social evaluation of each pronunciation is different, speakers often vary their usage according to formality, and speakers of different social backgrounds may show different overall rates of usage. Data collection for this feature requires close attention to phonetic detail: practice listening to the pronunciation of -ing words in conversation before you begin collecting data. (When you begin writing down your observations, they will probably occur so frequently that you will be able to collect enough data to work with in a day!) Therefore, try to observe people from a range of social backgrounds.

In addition to social variation, this variable is also subject to an interesting linguistic constraint. To examine this, you should classify each example you observe as to whether it was used as a noun (e.g. the building across the street, running is fun) or a verb (e.g. we're building a house, he's running to work).

Your analysis should address the following questions: Is there a sex difference in the usage of the two pronunciations? Do speakers shift towards increased use of one of the pronunciations in more formal situations (e.g. lectures) as opposed to informal ones (e.g. casual conversation)? Is there any such shifting depending on the sex of the addressee or the channel of communication?

In the Heritage Language (HLVC) Corpus

You could examine things like:

• Code (r), the variation between the trill /R/ and the approximant /ɹ/ in FAE, ITA, RUS, UKR, PRT, HUN or TAG
• Intensifier strategies, as in ITA -issimo, or CAN hou2 and taai3 or hedges or boosters (see HW_A1)
• If you speak one of these languages, you probably have more exciting ideas. Come talk to me about investigating one!

 Return to syllabus || Updated 16 December 2022