Course materials for/by Peter L. Patrick. May contain copyright material used for
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For LG554, Univ of
The task
In
this assignment you will:
o Devise a simple variationist research question,
o Select a sociolinguistic
variable, and
o Design a sampling plan
for it.
(You
will not need to actually carry out this research – the exercise is
intended to give you practice in planning such work.)
Length: As with all our
assignments in LG554, you should write a report of 1500 words or more. I will
not penalise reports of up to 3000 words, but if you can express yourself
clearly in 1500, please do. Under-length (ie,
under-1500 words) reports may suffer from lack of content and be marked
accordingly.
The Research Question
You
must begin with a research question (RQ), and a sociolinguistic variable that
it focuses on. The RQ is always what drives sampling, but for this assignment
it is not the most important part. You may choose a standard RQ, adopted from
other sociolinguistic studies, to be studied now with new data that you are
proposing to collect. It is the sampling design that this assignment requires
you to focus on.
For
example, you might ask one (just one!) of the RQs below:
o What is the social
distribution of sociolinguistic variable X across the population of speech
community A?
o Is sociolinguistic
variable X undergoing a change in progress in speech community A?
o Is sociolinguistic
variable X used according to the same linguistic constraints in speech
communities A and B (or, groups A and B in a single speech community)?
Make
it a sensible RQ, but keep it short and simple. Your proposed study should be
of a size appropriate to an MA dissertation, or at the largest, a PhD thesis –
don't be too ambitious!
The Sociolinguistic
Variable
Since
your focus is on the sampling design, choose a simple, possibly well-known
sociolinguistic variable to study. It may be one you wish to study later in the
term, or in your own MA or PhD – that would be efficient and give some continuity
across your assignments, or in preparing and refining your MA/PhD proposal –
but it does not have to be.
(Macaulay
2009 gives many examples of classic sociolinguistic variables; if you wish to
use a British English phonological variable, Foulkes & Docherty give many
examples of current ones, with details.)
Again,
make this section short & simple. You will have the chance later this year
to investigate a sociolinguistic variable in detail, or to propose a new one
for study.
The Sampling Design
Devise a
sampling design for a variationist speech community
study to fit the RQ and sociolinguistic variable above.
You
need to sample both across different types of speakers (speaker variables), and
different types/styles/contexts of speech. You should take into account at
least the first 4 classic social (explanatory) variables below, whether or not
you ultimately propose to sample across all of them (probably not!). That is,
if you choose not to vary your sample by gender or ethnicity, your
discussion will explain the considerations involved in coming to your decision.
o Style
o Age
o Gender
o Social Class or Status
o Ethnicity
o Other relevant social
factors, e.g. rural/urban identity, religion, sexuality, native-speakerhood, multilingual repertoire, etc.
(Note on Social Networks:
As
we will see when we cover social networks, they are rarely empirically used by
sociolinguists as an explanatory variable in themselves, and more commonly as a
device in data collection and sampling, or invoked as an after-the-fact
explanatory device without actual measurement. It is possible to treat social
network as an explanatory aspect of social structure, but you will need a good
understanding of the topic in order to do so; at this stage of the term you may
not be ready.)
Details of Sampling
Design
This
is the longest section of your report, and should take up at least 2/3 to 3/4
of it. The Sampling Design should answer the questions:
o How many speakers do you
plan to collect data from?
o Which social or
sociolinguistic categories and factors do you plan to sample for, and why are
they important to your RQ?
o Which social or
sociolinguistic categories and factors do you NOT plan to sample for, and why
have you decided they could be excluded?
o Discuss briefly any key
points from the literature which bear on your decisions.
In
addition, please specify:
o What types of speech,
reading and/or written data do you plan to collect from speakers?
o How does each type of
data bear on your RQ, and how will you collect it?
o How much data of each
type will you need?:
o If interview or
naturally-occurring speech, in minutes or hours;
o If word-list, reading
passage, etc., describe length.
o How long do you think is
likely to be needed to collect a complete set of data from each person in your
sample? With that in mind,
o How many days' work is
the entire sampling process likely to take?
In
your discussion, keep in mind concerns of validity and reliability as these may
be interpreted in sociolinguistic survey work.
o Does your design measure
what you think, and claim, to be measuring? (=Validity)
o If someone else used the
same methods on a different group of speakers, or comparable methods next year
on the same group, would their results be highly similar to yours? (=Reliability)
Finally,
o
What
do you think might be some practical difficulties in completing this design?
What steps could you take to mitigate or overcome those?
NB:
You may find it challenging to cover all aspects in 1500-3000 words. Keep in
mind that research grant applications also give you only limited space for a
similar task. You'll probably want to write it out at length first, and then
edit and condense it into the final version. Not every question or decision
requires a paragraph of explanation or discussion – reserve it for those that
need it most, in your judgment.
Class References
relevant to
this assignment include:
§ General: Macaulay (2009,
chaps. 1, 3, 6); Milroy & Gordon (2003, chaps. 2 and 3); Schilling-Estes
(2007, SocVar Chap. 9); Llamas (2007, RCS
Chap. 2); Arksey & Knight (1999, Chaps. 1, opt.
4).
§ Age: Eckert 1997; Llamas
(2007, RCS Chap. 8).
§ Ethnicity: Wolfram
(2007, RCS Chap 9); Fought (2002, HLVC).
§ Gender:
§ Social Class/Status: Ash
(2002, HLVC); Kerswill (2007, RCS Chap. 6).
§ Style: Schilling-Estes
(2002, in HLVC); Bell (1997); Milroy
& Gordon (2003, chap. 8); Macaulay (2009, chap. 4).
Details of
Assessment for LG554
LG554 Sociolinguistic Methods page
Last
updated10 November 2011