34.2243, Review: The Social Life of Words

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2243. Tue Jul 18 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2243, Review: The Social Life of Words

Moderators: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Daniel Swanson, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn, Natasha Singh, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 19-Jun-2023
From: Lelija Socanac [lelijasocanac at gmail.com]
Subject: Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Wright (2022) 


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.29

AUTHOR: Laura Wright
TITLE: The Social Life of Words
SUBTITLE: A Historical Approach
SERIES TITLE: Language in Society
PUBLISHER: Wiley
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Lelija Socanac

SUMMARY
This book is the first systematic attempt at applying sociolinguistic
approaches developed over the last fifty years to the lexicon. It
explores the circumstances in which a word came into being, how and
where it spread, who used it, and when and how those circumstances
changed. In her research, the author draws on a combination of methods
established by historians and geographers as well as linguists.
Historical lexical sociolinguistics borrows concepts and approaches
from semantics, cognitive semantics, pragmatics, lexicography,
dialectology, and stylistics, viewing them from a social angle. On the
one hand, lexical sociolinguistic investigation is the practice of
analyzing variables in a data set in order to discover their
affiliations of usage according to social parameters. On the other
hand, words can be transmitted over great spatial or time distances
via writing. They can emanate from genres such as song-lyrics,
playscripts, and advertisements as well as from spontaneous
conversation. They can be abandoned by one social group and picked up
by another, in a new social context with new social connotations.
Moreover, they can travel from language to language or from small
groups into large ones or vice versa as they retreat and become
dialectally or sociolinguistically restricted over time and space.
The book consists of ten chapters, nine of which deal with a different
theoretical, conceptual, or methodological approach, while the final
chapter considers future directions for lexical sociolinguistics. Each
chapter provides a definition and description of theory, concept,
method or approach, discusses relevant previous work in the field, the
application to the historical sociolinguistic development of specific
words, and a summary. The main variables treated are class, age, race,
region, gender, and religion. A research question is posed for every
chapter. Each chapter ends with a list of references.
Chapter 1: ‘Lexical Sociolinguistics and Social Networks’ begins by
introducing social networks as conduits for language change. As a
rule, weak-tie networks facilitate language change while strong-tie
networks facilitate language maintenance (Milroy 1992). The research
question is: In a historical social network, can multiplex strong-ties
be identified, causing language maintenance? The author examines the
strong-tie social network of Swiss waiters in London in the second
half of the nineteenth century causing multilingual, pidgin, and
non-standard ways of speech to be maintained over the generations, to
the extent that the term SWISS WAITER  came to function in literature
of the earlier twentieth century as shorthand for ‘funny foreigner
speaking funny English’. As a literary stock character, SWISS WAITER
became widely known by means of newspaper short stories and squibs. On
the other hand,  SWISS WAITER also appears in the writing of Virginia
Woolf (Woolf 1922), where  he is not a figure of fun any more.
Chapter 2: ‘Lexical Sociolinguistics and Communities of Practice’
introduces the concept of communities of practice (Eckert 2000, 2012),
which are constituted by people who engage in a common endeavor. They
may have no other social variables in common, and they may not
interact at all outside their common pursuit. Thus, if it can be
established that a historical word was associated with an identifiable
community of practice, it may turn out that the community of practice
had shared social qualities, so that the word became associated with
those qualities. The research question is: Can it be established that
a historic community of practice used a given word, and, if so, were
any social properties typical of it, so that these social properties
became transferred from the community of practice to the word?
Assembling a community of practice depends on the availability of
biographical information, but this approach can also be of help when
historical and linguistic evidence is scarce. Thus, the brand-name
ETNA, ‘a tea-making apparatus’ mostly owned by British people who went
on expeditions, became indicative of upper-class provenance. Matching
up twentieth-century usages of discourse-coda LAUGH! with its late
nineteenth-century music-hall community of practice shows that the
lower-class affiliation of the discourse-coda held steady over the
intervening century.
Chapter 3: ‘The Sociolinguistics of Polysemy’ discusses the changing
meanings of words. The research question is: Did the various meanings
of a polysemous word mean different things to different people and, if
so, what social characteristics did those people have in common? The
author examines the color term MAROON, originally meaning ‘chestnut
brown’, but now meaning ‘claret red’. The change of meaning occurred
in the Victorian period, although not in all registers and varieties.
The original meaning was retained in the context of police-force
bureau of identification, sometimes used exclusively to describe
people of sub-Saharan African descent. The relevant group is thus the
community of practice formed by police, reporters, and bureaucrats
concerned with classification of persons involved in judicial
proceedings. Another word under consideration is POPCORN, meaning both
‘type of plant’ and ‘type of snack’. The history of the word CORN and
the introduction of POPCORN into Britain is summarized. At some point
in the twentieth century the sociolinguistic variable age became
salient, with POPCORN continuing to have connotations of childhood and
festive decorations for older, rural speakers but not so for younger,
urban ones.
Chapter 4: ‘The Sociolinguistics of Onomasiology’ investigates whether
there were social differences in the use of hyponyms at a given point
in time. The research question is: Were members of an onomasiological
set used differently by different social groups? The analysis focuses
on DIRECTION and ADDRESS, which were both polysemous words overlapping
in the sense of ‘residential address/address on a letter’ between the
seventeenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Moreover,
the nineteenth-century perfume name KISS-ME-QUICK is examined. With
regard to the social variable ‘gender’, women who attended music halls
would have recognized the perfume KISS ME QUICK as a hit song, but
women who were prohibited from attending by virtue of belonging to the
higher social ranks were less likely to recognize the reference. The
value of drawing up onomasiological sets is comparative, revealing who
used which lexeme and who did not, or, in the case of advertisers,
which social group was targeted.
Chapter 5: ‘The Sociolinguistics of Stereotypes’ briefly outlines
prototype theory. From a word historian’s point of view, the
usefulness of the theory is that it approaches the meaning of a word
together with its social usage. The research question is: Can a
socially stereotypical meaning be identified over and above a word’s
historical prototypical meanings? The author examines the word GOSS,
the brand name of a specific kind of small souvenir which was
evocative of British home interiors that were neither especially rich
nor especially poor, and so it became imbued with class associations.
In the mid-twentieth century, GOSS carried stereotypical social
connotations of ordinariness. To take another example, in the
sixteenth century, GOODWILL had the meaning of a contract to
prostitution amongst people who negotiated such things, with
stereotypical connotations of criminality. Between the eighteenth
century and 1950, PORRIDGE also developed a meaning with the
stereotypical connotation of criminality: ‘prison sentence’. In the
domain of dogs’ names such as FIDO and ROVER, what the adult citizen
at the time knew about prototypical eighteenth-century dog names was
that they overlapped with slave names, expressing a similar
owner/owned relationship.
Chapter 6: ‘Language Regard and Lexical Influencers’ presents the
language regard approach (Preston 2011), which provides an explanation
as to why speakers choose what they perceive to be superior words at
the cost of their local variants. The consequence of the language
regard process is that speakers abandon their previous variants,
causing a reduction in an onomasiological set. If it can be shown that
an onomasiological set once had many lexical variants which at a later
point became greatly reduced, this may be a language-regard scenario
where the reduction of variants was caused by an influencer-effect.
The research question is: Where an onomasiological set underwent
reduction, can an influencer be identified? The rise of CAFÉ and
RESTAURANT, and loss of other variants such as coffee-shop,
eating-house, chop-house, refreshment-house, and dining-house, was due
to the influential effect of the group of nineteenth-century French
cafés and restaurants in the Haymarket. It was also discovered that
poorer people showed a time-lag in adopting the above words.
Chapter 7: ‘Lexical Sociolinguistics, Indexicality and Enregisterment’
introduces the concepts of indexicality and enregisterment, which
provide a means of tracking the social associations that can become
attached to, or detached from, words over a period of time. In the
case of the word DRAGE meaning ‘cheap furniture’, this was provided by
newspaper advertising and early radio broadcasting, so that the word
became enregistered of middle-class people who were perceived as being
of lowbrow taste. In the case of PICKLED SALMON, it was related to the
public means of sale, as it was sold by street vendors in poor
districts. The word RATHER meaning ‘I should think so, very much so,
absolutely’ has been indexical of both ends of the social spectrum
over its lifespan.
Chapter 8: ‘Lexical Sociolinguistics and Spatial Spread’ introduces
geolinguistics as the study of language in geographical and social
context. According to Britain (2002, 2010) there are three kinds of
space: physical, social and perceived, and they lead to routine sets
of behaviors – always speaking to the same people in one setting,
never speaking to anyone in another. They may also lead to authority
constraints whereby physically proximate social groups do not
interact. Concepts of space can also be seen from a different
perspective: representations of space, representational space, and
spatial practices. Representations of space is the discourse of the
powerful, such as planners and theorists. Representational space is
appropriation by the powerless – how people actually use spaces
regardless of the planner’s intent. Spatial practices are concerned
with movement in and around a space. These concepts are exemplified by
the words MONKEY PARADE and DEBUTANTES’ BALL, which were semantic
synonyms meaning ‘social gathering of young people for the purpose of
meeting a future spouse’ but social antonyms since they referred to
practices of different social groups. The spread of the house name
SUNNYSIDE was due to the networks of Quakers. Thus, homes named
SUNNYSIDE on both sides of the North Atlantic were indexical of the
religious Nonconformist community of practice of their owners. Space
is a crucial consideration in analyzing language change as all
linguistic exchanges take place in it.
Chapter 9: ‘Lexical Appropriation’ involves a process whereby adult
speakers take linguistic features from other social groups and
introduce them into their own, bringing the social connotations of the
original group over along with the feature, which could be a new word,
a new pronunciation, a new phrase or construction. While language
regard results in a loss of variants leading to just a few words for a
single concept, linguistic appropriation increases variants by
borrowing words which are semantically, but not sociolinguistically
synonymous with already existing ones. When the sociolect that the
feature is borrowed from is lower down the social scale than that of
the borrower’s own, it has been called ‘linguistic slumming’.
Politicians sometimes use words and grammar of social classes lower
than their own, pretending that they speak like the voters in order to
insinuate that they are just like them and win votes. Linguistic
appropriation may not necessarily imply any particular attitude
towards the original user, and it may be temporary. When first
appropriated, a new feature may sound incongruous or out of character
as its social affiliations do not match with those of the speaker, but
if the new linguistic item passes into general use, the original
social connotations get forgotten. The research question for this
chapter is: Can lexical appropriation be identified in historical
texts and, if so, what was its purpose? The words considered include
INTO meaning ‘interested or involved in; knowledgeable about’
inherited by American hippies from the previous generation of
hipsters, BAGGONET, an earlier form of bayonet, evoking connotations
to do with rank and file soldiers, and BURGOO, a variant pronunciation
of bulgar/bulgur, meaning ‘a thick oatmeal gruel or porridge used
chiefly by seamen’. Other meanings developed over time and with the
spread of the word from England to North America. One should bear in
mind that words with no particular social affiliations in one period
may have had them in another. All words, however, may have been imbued
with social values at some points in space and time.
Chapter 10: ‘Future Directions’ suggests some practical ways of
identifying words that are potentially amenable to tracking in
databases of historical texts such as newspapers, court cases, and
literature. Potential sources include the work of other linguists,
especially doctoral theses and articles on synchronic dialects, and
studies on heritage languages. Meronyms (the component parts of a
whole) and kinship terms are rich fields of sociolinguistic
exploration. A recurrent theme is the historical relationship between
words, socioeconomics, commerce, and industry. A massive expansion of
commercial vocabulary over recent centuries is awaiting
sociolinguistic investigation.


EVALUATION
The book explores how English words take on the social properties of
their users. It provides an engaging and amusing new look at many
familiar words, inviting students to explore the sociolinguistic
properties of words over time for themselves. The words analyzed
exemplify some of the ways that meanings can change over time.
The book matches theory with social history and biography to find
which kind of people used what kind of word, where, and when. It
introduces sociolinguistic theories in a concise and accessible way
and shows how they can be applied to the lexicon. Most importantly, it
demonstrates how readers can apply sociolinguistic theory to their own
analyses of words in English and other languages
The book is clearly written and well organized, providing a short
introduction to the relevant sociolinguistic concepts, detailed
analysis of selected examples, and a summary and list of references
for each chapter.
It is an essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students,
graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and anyone interested in
historical sociolinguistics, lexical semantics, English lexicology,
and the history and development of modern English.
Overall, this is an excellently researched book which will certainly
inspire future research. It is an important contribution to historical
sociolinguistics.

REFERENCES
Britain, D. (2002). ‘Space and spatial diffusion’. In: The Handbook of
Language Variation and Change (ed. J.K.Chambers, P. Trudgill and N.
Schilling-Estes), 603-637. Oxford: Blackwell.
Britain, D. (2010). ‘English in England’. In: Areal Features of the
Anglophone World (ed. R. Hickey), 23-52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Eckert, P. (2012). ‘Three waves of variation study: the emergence of
meaning in the study of variation’. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:
87-100.
Milroy, J. (1992). Linguistic variation and Change: on the Historical
Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Preston, D.R. (2011). ‘The power of language regard: discrimination,
classification, comprehension and production’. Dialectologia Special
Issue II: 9-33.
Woolf, V. (1922). ‘Jacob’s Room’. London: Hogarth Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Prof.Dr. Lelija Socanac is a retired professor at the University of
Zagreb,Croatia. She was the head of the Center for Language and Law at
the Faculty of Law, Zagreb. Her research interests include legal
linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, language policy and
planning, (critical)discourse analysis, contact linguistics and
multilingualism.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please consider donating to the Linguist List https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/I320011968.html


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

American Dialect Society/Duke University Press http://dukeupress.edu

Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group) http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Brill http://www.brill.com

Cambridge Scholars Publishing http://www.cambridgescholars.com/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Dictionary Society of North America http://dictionarysociety.com/

Edinburgh University Press www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

Georgetown University Press http://www.press.georgetown.edu

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Linguistic Association of Finland http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications

Springer Nature http://www.springer.com

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2243
----------------------------------------------------------