28.1461, Review: English; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Socioling: Pichler (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1461. Thu Mar 23 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.1461, Review: English; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Socioling: Pichler (2016)

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Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 13:45:04
From: Nicole Holliday [nicole.holliday at pomona.edu]
Subject: Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2466.html

EDITOR: Heike  Pichler
TITLE: Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English
SUBTITLE: New Methods and Insights
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Nicole Holliday, Pomona College

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

“Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English”, edited by Heike
Pichler, is an excellent overview of methods, new discoveries, and insights
related to the ways in which these types of variables may work in
sociolinguistic variation. In this volume, Pichler assembles a wide variety of
papers from linguists who work on several different varieties of English to
provide the reader with a more comprehensive view of the study of
discourse-pragmatic variables. The chapters deal with a number of these types
of variables, from utterance final tags in varieties of Canadian English to
intensifier usage in a number of Southeast Asian varieties. In particular, the
volume is especially thorough in its treatment of quotative variation across
spaces and groups, with data from Western Australia, New Zealand, and Ottawa.
The stated purposes of the volume, from Pichler’s introduction, are to
“introduce a range of contrasting yet complementary new methods specifically
tailored to the requirements of studying discourse-pragmatic variation and
change, and to provide new empirical and theoretical insights into the
sociolinguistic dimensions of discourse-pragmatic variation and change in
contemporary varieties of English” (2). Pichler and the contributors
successfully achieve these goals and provide the reader with background,
strategies, and future directions for the study of these types of variables.
In her introduction, Pichler praises the recent upsurge of studies on
discourse pragmatic features in variationist sociolinguistics as a result of
methodological improvements as well as a change in theoretical stances towards
these variables, and the chapters build on these recent studies as well as
earlier works.  The volume is divided into four parts, each of which contains
two to three papers and deals with a different topic related to the analysis
of discourse-pragmatic variation.  

Part 1 begins with two papers that address methodological strategies and
challenges related to the study of discourse-pragmatic variation. This section
provides a necessary introduction to how this type of variation can be studied
in ways that are both principled and systematic. In Chapter 1, “Using the
corpus-driven method to chart discourse-pragmatic change”, Gisle Andersen
addresses a major issue related to the use of corpora to study these features;
corpus-based methods may overlook variation that could be captured by
corpus-driven methods. She argues that corpus-based methods may be especially
limiting for researchers studying discourse-pragmatic variables due to the
fact that they require the researcher to have an a priori assumption about the
type of variation that exists in the corpus. In contrast, corpus-driven
methods allow the researcher to calculate the frequency of individual items
and combinations in the data, which may aid the researcher in identifying
innovations that they would have otherwise overlooked. In Andersen’s
conceptualization, combining corpus-based and corpus-driven methods is the
most effective way to capture nuanced variation. 

In Chapter 2, “Practical strategies for elucidating discourse-pragmatic
variation”, Cathleen Waters addresses ways of defining both the variable and
the envelope of variation. She provides a thorough review of previous studies
as well as challenges the ways in which earlier scholars determined what was a
discourse-pragmatic variable via semantic and/or pragmatic functions. Instead
of proposing a single unifying definition of the variables at hand, she argues
that the category of discourse-pragmatic variables is heterogenous in nature.
The chapter focuses specifically on the quantification of adverbs that can be
classified as having discourse-pragmatic functions and interpretations and
uses these variables as an illustration of how discourse-pragmatic variables
require data-specific analyses.

Part 2, entitled “Innovations” details new ways of analyzing
discourse-pragmatic variation, focusing on well-studied forms and novel ideas
related to the nature of these types of innovations. In Chapter 3, “Uncovering
discourse-pragmatic innovations: ‘innit’ in Multicultural London English”,
Heike Pichler (also the editor of the volume), examines variable use of the
form “innit” in Multicultural London English, and finds innovations related to
both the syntactic position and the function of the form in this variety.
Pichler argues that “innit” and related forms represent rapidly changing
innovations that have the function of eliciting listener involvement. Building
on the argument made by Waters in the previous chapter, Pichler also argues
for flexibility and feature-specific methods of analysis (54). In Chapter 4,
“Innovation, ‘right’? Change, ‘you know’? Utterance-final tags in Canadian
English”, Derek Denis and Sali Tagliamonte examine variation in the use of
utterance-final tags via a corpus based method. They find that “right” and
“you know” are by far the most common variants, but that rates of “right” are
increasing just as rates of “you know” are decreasing. By examining the use of
these variants from a longitudinal perspective as well as in different
discourse contexts, Denis and Tagliamonte conclude that “right” is replacing
“you know” as the most common utterance-final tag in the variety of interest.
They argue that their methods are also a useful tool in determining whether
these types of variants are undergoing lexical replacement as opposed to
grammaticalization. 

Part 3, “Change”, focuses on change in the use of discourse-pragmatic variants
over time. Chapter 5, “Antecedents of innovation: exploring general extenders
in conservative dialects”, by Sali Tagliamonte, examines variation in four
relic dialects of English in the northern U.K. to understand the use of
general extenders, such as “and stuff” and “something like that”. Tagliamonte
argues that these forms work not only as extenders but also serve important 
interpersonal and intertextual functions. Related to her work with Denis in
the previous chapter, Tagliamonte uses forms in these relic dialects to
address controversy related to grammaticalization of forms, and she argues
that the pattern of shorter general extenders in synchronic data is due to the
retention of conservative forms as opposed to grammaticalization in these
varieties. Chapter 6, “Quotatives across time: West Australian English then
and now”, by Celeste Rodriguez Louro, is the first of three chapters in the
volume that deals with quotative variation. Rodriguez Louro’s data comes from
spontaneous narratives of adults in Western Australia who were born over the
110-year period between 1870 and 1980, in order to address diachronic
variation in quotatives. Rodriguez Louro finds dramatic changes over time, and
especially observes a high degree of variation in the late 20th century, with
the formerly dominant quotative “say”, being replaced by zero, as well as
forms like “think”, and “go”. Finally, she also argues that the variation in
these quotative forms is related to an increase in internal thought encoding.
Rodriguez Louro’s argument that quotative variants are changing due to content
was also recently echoed by Labov in a talk at New Ways of Analyzing Variation
45 about quotatives in Philadelphia over time (2016).  Labov makes the same
internal thought encoding argument for “be like” that Rodiguez Louro applies
to “think” and “go” for her West Australian speakers, showing a
cross-dialectal longitudinal pattern related to quotative variation.

Chapter 7, “The role of children in the propagation of discourse-pragmatic
change: insights from the acquisition of quotative variation”, by Stephen
Levey, also addresses the role of quotatives, this time from an acquisition
perspective. Specifically, Levey examines how preadolescent youth acquire the
quotative form “be like” in a variety of Ottawa English and compares their
usage with a slightly older age cohort as well as recordings of adults from
both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Levey argues that preadolescent
youth not only participate in changes in the quotative system, but that they
also advance change. Levey does find differences between the eight-nine year
old cohort and the eleven-twelve year old cohort such that the younger group’s
usage is less adult-like than the older group’s, and he uses this data to
argue that acquisition of discourse-pragmatic variation may occur later than
the acquisition of phonological variation, building on earlier theories on the
acquisition of the sociolinguistic variation by Labov (2012) and others.
Levey’s contribution provides a smooth segue into Part 4, “Variation”, which
contains three chapters that address differences related to register, style,
and variable realization. In Chapter 8, “Register variation in intensifier
usage across Asian Englishes”, Robert Fuchs and Ulrike Gut use cluster
analysis as well as phenograms to look for patterns of variation in the use of
intensifiers across a number of varieties and registers. They find that
register and variety have notable effects on the use of intensifiers such that
several South Asian English varieties differ in terms of intensifier use and
distribution, but also that within varieties there are also substantial
differences related to register, and that the observed variation is linked
with different social and political contexts. Chapter 9, “The use of
referential general extenders across registers”, by Suzanne Evans Wagner,
Ashley Hesson, and Heidi M. Little compares both the frequencies and functions
of general extenders in corpora across data from two varieties of U.S. English
that they state are demographically similar but different in register.  The
authors find that the functionality of the general extenders of interest does
not appear to change by register and style. Their results also highlight
potential methodological issues with earlier studies on the use of general
extenders across registers related to differences in corpora construction and
analysis. In Chapter 10, “Constructing style: phonetic variation in quotative
and discourse particle ‘like’”, Katie Drager examines phonetic and discourse
variation in the two uses of “like” in the speech of adolescent girls in New
Zealand. Harkening back to similar ethnographic work by Bucholtz (1999),
Drager observes that the girls alter both the frequency and production of the
two “like”s by social group membership and stance, as well as topic. Drager
argues that a careful combination of variationist techniques and acoustic
analyses can be especially illuminating when studying discourse-pragmatic
variables, particularly in examining the construction of style and stance. In
her epilogue, “The future of discourse-pragmatic variation and change
research”, Jenny Cheshire responds to the papers in the volume with four
directions for further research. She proposes that future work address whether
different variants are involved in different types of linguistic change, how
the position of variants affects functionality of markers, the ways in which
these variables are acquired, and variation in the phonetic realization of
these forms especially as they relate to stance (11). In contrast with several
of the earlier papers, Cheshire argues that a traditional conceptualization of
the linguistic variable may not always be the most appropriate framework for
analyzing discourse-pragmatic variation. 

EVALUATION

The volume is well-edited and organized, with smooth transitions and clear
links between adjacent chapters. The volume also does an excellent job of
laying out many of the challenges inherent in studying this type of variation,
and is clear about its suggestions for how to address them. As Pichler notes,
the very question of what constitutes a discourse-pragmatic variable can be
difficult to address, as these variables do not necessarily share the same
shapes or formal properties (3). Pichler addresses this ambiguity directly by
defining the scope of variation as those features that perform discourse
functions AND whose use is motivated by functionality. In this way, the reader
is able focus on pragmatic variation as well morphosyntactic and lexical
variation.

While the volume is strong in the breadth of issues that it addresses as well
as in the sheer number of varieties discussed, its primary weakness is the
fact that several of the authors rely too heavily on corpus data without
addressing the limitations of these methodologies. While corpus methods are
useful for studying discourse-pragmatic variables due to their relatively
infrequent occurrences, corpus methods also make it difficult for researchers
to have a clear picture of the social contexts in which the variation occurs.
The volume situates itself firmly within the strict variationist tradition,
but it should more thoroughly address the limitations of that framework for
studying variation in the 21st century. 

Relatedly, several of the papers neglect to mention the roles of social
variables other than region or age, ignoring potential variation by class and
especially by ethnicity. With the exception of the chapter by Fuchs and Gut,
ethnicity is largely ignored as a potential contributor to variation in the
papers presented in this volume. This is a serious weakness, as 21st century
sociolinguistics largely recognizes that intersectionality is an important
consideration for the thorough description of variation. This omission also
has the effect of weakening papers where there is an argument related to
regional variation, since there is no such thing as a unified “Canadian
English” or “U.S. English” devoid of variation by ethnicity as well as class
and gender. The oversight of ethnicity as a potential contributor to variation
also further serves to reinforce the problematic ideology that local white
dialects are the standard as well as the primary object of interest in
variationist studies. Fortunately, one way to address these challenges is
presented in the volume in the chapter by Drager, which uses ethnographic
methods of data collection to specifically examine variation within a
population of white adolescent girls, allowing for a fuller exploration of the
individual as well as community-specific constraints on variation. 

While this volume focuses on variation in English varieties and does a
thorough job of including a number of varieties that have often been
underrepresented in variationist studies, I would have also liked to have seen
more discussion about how the methods and analyses presented here may apply
cross-linguistically. It is clear that studies on English are overrepresented
in the sociolinguist literature, and even though English may be the language
of interest for this particular volume, explicitly laying out the ways in
which these methods and analyses may be of interest for a researcher working
on other languages would have been a positive step towards addressing that
challenge. 

Overall, however, the volume is a great resource for both students and
researchers interested in studying variables that lie at the intersection of
discourse and pragmatics. I anticipate that several of the papers contained in
the book will act as an excellent starting point for future discussions on how
to study discourse-pragmatic variation in a way that is both scientifically
accountable as well as informed by ongoing advances in the ways that we
approach both social and linguistic variation. 

REFERENCES

Bucholtz, M., 1999. “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a
community of nerd girls. Language in society, 28(2), pp.203-223.

Labov, W., 2012. Dialect diversity in America: The politics of language
change. University of Virginia Press.

Labov, William. “How did it happen? The new verb of quotation in
Philadelphia.” Lecture, New Ways of Analyzing Variation 45, Vancouver, BC
Canada, November 4, 2016.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Nicole Holliday is a Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in Linguistics and
Cognitive Science at Pomona College. She received her Ph.D. in
sociolinguistics in 2016 from New York University under the supervision of
Renee Blake. Her research interests include sociophonetics, intonational
variation, the intonation-pragmatics interface, African American Language, and
identity construction and performance. She is currently working on research
related to the ways in which young men with one black parent and one white
parent use intonational variation to construct their identity across a variety
of sociolinguistic contexts.





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