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LG 554: Sociolinguistic Methods I

Prof. Peter L. Patrick

Dept. of Language & Linguistics

University of Essex

Books and Readings, Autumn 2011

More may be added during year

(New items will be in this color)

 

*NB*: For the 2011-12 year, I will teach in the first term only – the second term, which I used to also teach, will be taken by Dr. Vineeta Chand. Hence you may not be using ALL the materials below! (which I used to recommend for both terms). Don’t buy all the textbooks until we have had the first class…

 

o   Primary Sources

o   Secondary Sources

o   Other Works

(All books are available from Waterstone’s bookshop)

 

Textbooks

Primary:

q  Milroy, Lesley, & Matt Gordon. 2003. Sociolinguistics: Method and interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell. [P126.M5] (Available online)

q  Johnstone, Barbara. 2000. Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics. Sage Publications. [=QualMS]  [P126.J6]

q  Bayley, Robert & Ceil Lucas, eds. 2007. Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, methods and applications. [=SocVar] Cambridge University Press. [P 126.S6]

q  Macaulay, Ronald K.S. 2009. Quantitative Methods in Sociolinguistics. [=QuantMS]  Basingstoke: Palgrave.  [P 126.M2]

Secondary:

q  Tagliamonte, Sali. 2006. Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge UP. [=ASV]  [P126.T2]

q  Jackson, Bruce. 1987. Fieldwork. University of Illinois.  [HN 29.J2]

q  Wallgren, Anders, Britt Wallgren, Rolf Persson, Ulf Jorner, and Jan-Aage Haaland. 1996. Graphing statistics and data: Creating better charts. London: Sage Publications [HA 31] 

Comments: Milroy & Gordon (a thorough revision of Milroy’s 1987 Observing and Analyzing Natural Language) and Johnstone’s QMS are essential, the two leading textbooks in the field, with very different approaches. Bayley & Lucas is a new collection of original articles, some very valuable. Macaulay is new and similar to Milroy & Gordon but better in its frequent comparison to classic studies.

Tagliamonte is very practical, focused largely on using VarbRul – which will be taught in the second term. Jackson’s book is intended for folklorists, but is the best thing around on human aspects of fieldwork, recording, etc. (worth reading for the anecdotes alone). Wallgren et al. is brief, simple, full of common sense and good principles, inexpensive and illustrates its own recommendations.

 

Readers

q  JK Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes, eds. 2002. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change [=HLVC].  [P 122.H2]  (Available online)

q  Coupland, Nikolas & Adam Jaworski, eds. 2009. The New Sociolinguistics Reader [= C&J ]. Basingstoke: Palgrave. [P 126.S6]

q  Llamas, Carmen, Louise Mullany & Peter Stockwell. 2007. The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.  [=RCS] [P 126.R6] (Available online)

q  Paulston, Christina Bratt, & Richard Tucker, eds. 2003. Sociolinguistics: The Essential Readings [=P&T]. Oxford: Blackwell.  [P 126.S6]

Comments: HLVC is a compilation of state-of-the-art articles, and extremely useful – if you're not intimately familiar with it by the time you write your thesis, consider yourself out-of-date. RCS is a recent, useful single-volume reader with several key things we will use. The other two are readers of classic and some more recent articles – both very good indeed, and with little overlap. The Coupland & Jaworski replaces an earlier 1997 edition (which is still very useful if you find it cheaper). You really should know this material.

 

Articles and Books

I’ve aimed to provide you with a list of important and useful works, but it is not expected that you read them all this term! Some are essential, however, and these will be pointed out. Some readings are available for purchase in the bookstore; others on reserve in the main Sloman Library -- see also the library access menu and their subject resources in linguistics -- and some in the department’s Spicer Library.

 

Primary Sources. You’ll probably need to consult and become familiar with many of these.

Arksey, Hilary & Peter Knight. 1999. Interviewing for social scientists: An introductory resource with examples. London: Sage.  [HN 29.A7]

Ash, Sharon. 2007. Social class. JK Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes, eds. 2002. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. (Blackwell) [=HLVC]  (Available online)

Bailey, Guy, Tom Wikle and Jan Tillery. 1997. The effects of methods on results in dialectology. English World-Wide 18:35-63.

Bayley, Robert & Richard Young. Fc. VarbRul: A special case of logistic regression. To appear in D Preston & R Bayley, eds., Linguistic Data Computation, Chap. 4. [available from me]

Bell, Allan. 1997. Language style as audience design. In Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, eds. 1997, Sociolinguistics: A reader, 240-50.

Bell, Allan. 2007. Style in dialogue: Bakhtin and sociolinguistic theory. In R Bayley & C Lucas, eds. 2007. Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, methods and applications, 90-109. Cambridge University Press.  [SocVar]  [P 126.S6]

Briggs, Charles. 1986. Learning how to ask. Cambridge University Press. [short summary: C. Briggs, 1984, "Learning how to ask". Language in Society 13:1-28.]

Cameron, Deborah, Elizabeth Frazer, P Harvey, Ben Rampton & Kay Richardson. 1992. Researching language. London: Routledge. [Brief excerpt in Coupland and Jaworski, eds. 1997, Sociolinguistics: A reader, 145-162.]

Chambers, JK. 2002. Studying language variation: An informal epistemology. In Chambers, Trudgill & Schilling-Estes, eds. HLVC, 3-12.

Chambers, JK, P Trudgill & N Schilling-Estes, eds. 2002. Handbook of Language Variation and Change [=HLVC]. Blackwell. [P 122.H2] (Available online)

Chambers, JK. 2003. (2nd ed.) Sociolinguistic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Chambers, Jack and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology. Cambridge University Press.

Coulmas, Florian, ed. 1997. The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. [P 126.H2]  (Available online)

de Laine, Marlene. 2000. Fieldwork, participation and practice: Ethics and dilemmas in qualitative research. London: Sage.  [H 62.9.M6]  [Online book available thru library – author search on “Laine”, not “de Laine!]

Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of identity in Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell.  [P 126.5.C5]

Eckert, Penelope & John Rickford, eds. 2001. Style and sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, Jane. 1993. Principles and contrasting systems of discourse transcription. In J Edwards & M Lampert, eds. Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse research: 3-31. [P 134.6.D6]

Fasold, Ralph W & Dennis R Preston. 2007. The psycholinguistic unity of inherent variability: Old Occam whips out his razor. In R Bayley & C Lucas, eds. 2007. Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, methods and applications, 45-69. Cambridge University Press. [SocVar]

Feagin, Crawford. 2002. Entering the community: Fieldwork. In Chambers, Trudgill & Schilling-Estes, eds. HLVC, 20-39.

Goffman, Erving. 1967. The nature of deference and demeanor. In Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 47-76. Pantheon, NY.

Hazen, Kirk. 2007. The study of variation in historical perspective. In R Bayley & C Lucas, eds. 2007. Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, methods and applications, 70-89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [SocVar]

Heller, Monica, et al. 1999. Sociolinguistics and public debate. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:260-88.

Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. [PE 3101.N7, available as online book]  (The 2nd edition of this, 2006 from Cambridge University Press, has revisions and a useful reflective introduction.)

Labov, William. 1970. The study of language in its social context. Studium Generale 23: 30-87.

Labov, William. 1971. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1:97-120.

Labov, William. 1972. The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the inner city. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

Labov, William. 1982. Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: The case of the Black English trial in Ann Arbor. Language in Society 11:165-201.

Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the Project in Linguistic Change and Variation. In John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, eds., Language in use, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.  [XD 6086]

Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol I: Internal factors. Basil Blackwell.

Labov, William. 1996. When intuitions fail. In L. McNair, K. Singer, L. Dolbrin & M. Aucoin, eds., Papers from the Parasession on Theory and Data in Linguistics: April 11-13, 1996. (CLS-32). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society 32:77-106.  [P 21.C5]

Labov, William. 1997. Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative & Life History 7:395-415. [In library as: Bamberg, Michael G ed. Oral versions of personal experience: three decades of narrative analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [See http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/ , where Labov also has newer, interesting papers on narrative.]  [XD 6319]  [D 16.N2]

Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol II: Social factors. Basil Blackwell.

Le Page, Robert B. 1997. The evolution of a sociolinguistic theory of language. In F. Coulmas, ed., The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 15-32. Blackwell.

Milroy, James, & Lesley Milroy. 1997. Varieties and variation. In F. Coulmas, ed., The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 47-64. Blackwell.

Milroy, Lesley. 1987 (2nd ed.). Language and social networks. Basil Blackwell.

Milroy, Lesley. 1997. Field linguistics. In Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, eds., Sociolinguistics: A reader, 75-88. St. Martin's Press. [Excerpted from Milroy 1987]

Milroy, Lesley. 2002. Social networks. In Chambers, Trudgill & Schilling-Estes (eds.), HLVC, 549-572.

Murphy, E & R Dingwall. 2001. The ethics of ethnography. In P Atkinson, A Coffey, S Delamont, J Lofland & L Lofland, eds., Handbook of ethnography. London: Sage, 339-351.

Ochs, Elinor. 1979. Transcription as theory. In Elinor Ochs & Bamabi Schieffelin, eds. Developmental pragmatics: 42-72. NY: Academic Press. [BF 723.S5O3]

Patrick, Peter L. 2002. The speech community. In Chambers, Trudgill & Schilling-Estes (eds.), HLVC, 573-597. Oxford: Blackwell. [Also available online.]

Plichta, Bartolomiej. Fc. Best practices in the acquisition, processing and analysis of acoustic speech signals. To appear in D Preston & R Bayley, eds., Linguistic Data Computation, Chap 7.  [available from me]

Preston, D, & R Bayley, eds. Fc. Linguistic Data Computation: Methods for Quantitative and Acoustic Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [available from me]

Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2002. Investigating stylistic variation. In JK Chambers, P Trudgill & N Schilling-Estes, eds., Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 375-401. [P 122.H2] (Available online)

Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2007. Sociolinguistic fieldwork. In R Bayley & C Lucas, eds. 2007. Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, methods and applications, 165-189. Cambridge University Press.  [SocVar]  [P 126.S6]

Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2007. Quantitative analysis. In R Bayley & C Lucas, eds. 2007. Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, methods and applications, 190-214. Cambridge University Press.  [SocVar]

Wald, Benji. 1995. The problem of scholarly predisposition: G Bailey, N Maynor & P Cukor-Avila eds., The emergence of Black English: Text and commentary. Review article. Language in Society 24(2): 245-57.

Wolfram, Walt. 1993. Identifying and interpreting variables. In D. Preston, ed., American dialect research, 193-221. John Benjamins.

Wolfram, Walt. 1997. Dialect in society. In F. Coulmas, ed., The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 107-126. Blackwell.

Wolfram, Walt. 1998. Scrutinizing linguistic gratuity: issues from the field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2(2):271-279.

Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. American English: Dialects and variation. Chap. 8, 214-238: Dialects and Style. Chap. 9, 239-262: The patterning of dialect.

Wolfson, Nessa. 1976. Speech events and natural speech: Some implications for sociolinguistic methodology. Language in Society, 5, p. 189-209. [Also in Coupland and Jaworski, eds. 1997, Sociolinguistics: A reader, 116-25.]

 

Secondary sources. You will find these useful supplements to your other reading.

Ammon, Ulrich et al. 2004, 2nd ed. Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society.    [P 126.S6]  [Make sure it’s the 2nd edition of 2004 – not 1st of 1987-88!]  [See esp. articles by M Gordon, Schlobinski, D & G Sankoff, C Briggs]

Atkinson, Paul, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and Lynn Lofland, eds. 2001. Handbook of Ethnography. London: Sage. [See esp. the introduction, Chaps. 20, 23, 24, 25 and 26.]

Bailey, Guy and Margie Dyer. 1992. An approach to sampling in dialectology. American Speech 67(1): 3-20.

Baron, Dennis, ed. 1992. Legal and ethical issues in surreptitious recording. Publications of the American Dialect Society, #76.

Bernard, H. Russell. 1994. Research methods in anthropology. Sage Press.

Boberg, Charles. Fc. The acoustic measurement of English vowels. To appear in D Preston & R Bayley, eds., Linguistic Data Computation, Chap 8. [available from me]

Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Linguistic variation and social function. In Romaine ed. 1982, Sociolinguistic variation in speech communities, Ch. 10.

Cheshire, J. 2002. Sex and gender in variationist research. In JK Chambers, P Trudgill & N Schilling-Estes, eds., Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 423-443. [P 122.H2] (Available online)

Coates, Jennifer. 2007. Gender. In C Llamas, L Mullany & P Stockwell, eds. The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics [=RCS]. London: Routledge, 62-68. [P 126.R6]  (Available online)

Cowart, Wayne. 1997. Experimental syntax: Applying objective methods to sentence judgments. London: Sage.

Eckert, Penelope. 1997. Age as a sociolinguistic variable. In Florian Coulmas, ed., The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 151-167. [P 126.H2] (Available online)

Fischer, John. 1958. Social influences on the choice of a linguistic variant. Word 14: 47-56.

Fought, Carmen. 2002. Ethnicity. In JK Chambers, P Trudgill & N Schilling-Estes, eds., Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 444-472. [P 122.H2] (Available online)

Gmelch, George, & Zenner, Walter P., eds. 1980. Urban life: Readings in urban anthropology. Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, IL. [See esp. Part 1: Intro, Milgram, Merry; Part 2: Intro, Foster/van Kemper, & Rollwagen]

Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 1991. Retellings, pretellings and hypothetical stories.  Research on Language and Social Interaction 24: 263-276.

Henry, Alison. 2004. Non-standard dialects and linguistic data. Lingua 115 (11): 1599-1617.

Holmes, Janet. 1998. Narrative structure: Some contrasts between Maori and Pakeha storytelling. Multilingua 17(1): 25-57. [Reprinted in Paulston & Tucker 2003, 114-138.]

Ives, Ed. 1980. The tape-recorded interview. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.

Johnson, Jeffrey. 1994. Anthropological contributions to the study of social networks: A review. In S Wasserman & J Galaskiewicz, eds., Advances in social network analysis. London: Sage 113-151.

Kerswill, Paul. 2007. Social class. In C Llamas, L Mullany & P Stockwell, eds. The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics [=RCS]. London: Routledge, 51-61. [P 126.R6]  (Available online)

Labov, William. 1990. The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2: 205-254.  [P 1.L3]

Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an accent. London: Routledge. Ch. 1, 7-40: "The linguistic facts of life."

Lodge, K. R. 1984. Testing native speaker predictions of variant forms of English. UEA Papers in Linguistics vol 20, July 1984. [P 1.E2 – search under journal name – request in advance online]

McCafferty, Kevin. 2001. Ethnicity and language change: English in (London)Derry, Northern Ireland. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Miller, Jim & Regina Weinert. 1998. Spontaneous Spoken Language. Oxford: Clarendon (read pp403-406).  [P 291.M5]

Milroy, Lesley. 1985. What a performance!: Some problems with the competence-performance distinction. Australian Journal of Linguistics 5(1) 1-17.  [XD 1491]

Milroy, Lesley, & James Milroy. 1992. Social network and social class. Language in Society 21: 1-26.

Mishler, Elliott. 1986. Research interviewing: Context and narrative. Harvard.

Murray, Stephen O. 1993. Network determination of linguistic variables. American Speech 68: 161-177.

I Newman, C Ridenour, C Newman & G DeMarco. 2003. Typology of research purposes & its relationship to mixed methods. In A Tashakkori & C Teddlie, eds, Handbook of Mixed Methods in social and behavioural research, 167-188.London: Sage. [H62.9.M5]

Paolillo, John. Fc. Log-linear modelling and Logistic Regression. To appear in D Preston & R Bayley, eds., Linguistic Data Computation, Chap. 3. [available from me]

Patrick, Peter L. & Samuel W. Buell. Competing Creole transcripts on trial. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 32: 103-132.  [P1 .E46]  [Available online]

Patrick, Peter L., and Melanie Metzger. 1996. Sociolinguistic factors in signed language research. In J. Arnold, R. Blake, B. Davidson, S. Schwenter and J. Solomon, eds., Sociolinguistic Variation: Data, theory and analysis. Selected papers from NWAV-23 at Stanford: 229-242. Stanford CA: CSLI.

Polanyi, Livia. 1989. Telling the American Story: A structural and cultural analysis of conversational storytelling. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Preston, Dennis. 2000. Mowr and mowr bayud spellin’: Confessions of a sociolinguist. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(4): 614-621.

Rickford, John R. 1991. Representativeness and reliability of the Ex-Slave materials, with special reference to Wallace Quarterman’s recording and transcript. In G Bailey, N Maynor & P Cukor-Avila, eds., The Emergence of Black English: Text and commentary. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 191-212.

Saville-Troike, Muriel. 1989, 2nd ed. The ethnography of communication. Oxford : B. Blackwell. [P 90.S2]

Saville-Troike, Muriel. 1989. The ethnographic analysis of communicative events. In Coupland and Jaworski, eds. 1997, Sociolinguistics: A reader, 126-144. St. Martin's Press. [Also in Saville-Troike 1989: 107-38.]

Schegloff, Emmanuel. 1997. “Narrative analysis” thirty years later. Journal of Narrative & Life History 7: 1-4. [In library as: Bamberg, Michael G ed. Oral versions of personal experience: three decades of narrative analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. D 16.N2] [Reprinted in Paulston & Tucker 2003, 105-113.]

Schiffrin, Deborah. 1981. Tense variation in narrative. Language 57(1): 45-62.

Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2002. Investigating stylistic variation. In Chambers, Trudgill & Schilling-Estes (eds.), HLVC, 375-401.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2002. Investigating variation and change in written documents. In Chambers, Trudgill & Schilling-Estes (eds.), HLVC, 67-96.

Straw, Michelle & Peter L Patrick. 2007. Dialect acquisition of glottal variation in /t/: Barbadians in Ipswich. 2007. Language Sciences 29(2-3): 385-407.  [Available online]

Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge University Press.

Trudgill, Peter. 1982. On the limits of passive competence: Sociolinguistics and the polylectal grammar controversy. In David Crystal, ed., Linguistic Controversies. London: Arnold.  [P 122.L5]

Trudgill, Peter. 1999. Dedialectalisation and Norfolk dialect orthography. In I. Taavatsainen, G. Melchers & P. Pahta, eds., Writing in nonstandard English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 323-329.

Tufte, Edward R. 1983. The visual display of quantitative information. Cheshire, CN: Graphics Press. [HA 31]

Tufte, Edward R. 1990. Envisioning information. Cheshire, CN: Graphics Press. [HA 31]

Tufte, Edward R. 1997. Visual explanations: Images and quantities, evidence and narrative. Cheshire, CN: Graphics Press. [HA 31]

Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov & Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W Lehmann & Y Malkiel (eds.) Directions for Historical Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press p95-189.

Wiles, Rose, Sue Heath, Graham Crow & Vikki Charles. 2005. Informed consent in social research: A literature review. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods: NCRM Methods Review Papers NCRM/001. http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/85/1/MethodsReviewPaperNCRM-001.pdf

Wilson, J. & Alison Henry. 1998. Parameter setting within a socially realistic linguistics. Language in Society 27(1): 1-21.

Wolfram, Walt. 2007. Ethnic varieties. In C Llamas, L Mullany & P Stockwell, eds. The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics [=RCS]. London: Routledge, 77-83. [P 126.R6]  (Available online)

Wolfram, Walt, and Ralph Fasold. 1974. Field methods in the study of social dialects. In Coupland and Jaworski, eds. 1997, Sociolinguistics: A reader, 89-115. St. Martin's Press. [Also in Wolfram & Fasold, The study of social dialects in American English, 36-72.]

 

Other Works. Not all of these are in the library, but all of them are worth reading.

Agar, Michael H. 1980. The professional stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography. Academic Press Inc., San Diego.

Brady, John. 1976. The craft of interviewing. Vintage Books, NY.

Chambers, J. K. 1998. Inferring dialect from a postal questionnaire. Journal of English Linguistics 26:3, 222-246.

Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 1990. He-said-she-said. Indiana UP. Chapters 1-3.

Houston, Ann. 1991. A grammatical continuum for (Ing). In P. Trudgill & J.K. Chambers, eds., Dialects of English: Studies in grammatical variation, 241-257. London: Longman.

Lummis, Trevor. 1987. Listening to history. Hutchinson Education, London.

Nisbett, Alec. 1974. The use of microphones. Focal Press, London.

Poplack, Shana. 1993. Variation theory and language contact: Concepts, methods, and data. In D. Preston, ed., American dialect research 251-286.

Romaine, Suzanne. 1980. A critical overview of the methodology of urban British sociolinguistics. English World-Wide 1:163-198.

Scott, John. 2000 (2nd ed.) Social network analysis: A handbook. London: Sage Publications. [HA 33.1]

Shopen, Timothy, and Benji Wald. 1981. A research guide to (-ING). In T. Shopen and J. Williams, eds., Style and variables in English.

Shuy, Roger. 1986. Ethical issues in analyzing FBI surreptitious tapes. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 62:119-128.

Spradley, James, and McCurdy. 1972. The cultural experience.

Wasserman, Stanley, & Katherine Faust. 1994. Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [HM 131.W2]

Wax, Rosalie. 1971. Doing fieldwork: Warnings and advice. Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press.

Whyte, William Foote. 1981, 3rd ed. Street corner society: The social structure of an Italian slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

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