Nov 3: ====== To be discussed during Nov 3 session, based on the interview with Labov (Gordon:2006), additionally informed by Hay/Drager:2007: - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? Please send me your answers by email by Nov 2. ------ 1. How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? Labov mentions in the interview, that there are no individuals from a linguistic point of view, because the objective stays the same. It is mentioned, however, that not everyone agrees in this point. Personally I was wondering how this point of view can be set in perspective with aspects of individual differences within different linguistic fields? Is not every speaker an individuum with an individual voice and prosody that might be worth studying or at least considering in the theories surrounding the fields, especially in sociophonetics? Also later (on page 351) Labov talks about micro studies of individuals. Does this not contradict the point that there are no individuals in linguistics? 2. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. Context of an utterance, in form of other utterances or physical surrondings etc. (e.g. people perceive certain phonemes differently depending on weather or not a plush-kangaroo is in the room) Dialects and how they covary with e.g. the surroundings of the person, the social group etc. Covariation and cooccurence of certain aspects of a persons speech and e.g. their cultural background, their social group, etc. 3. Is there anything you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? As mentioned in my answer to 1, the standpoint towards individual speakers in linguistic seemed interesting, even though I am not sure I agree with it. I was also fascinated by the work of the "Atlas", and to hear about these wide ranges of speech within individual cities, but also this huge amount of things people of certain areas have in common. Also, that at least within northern America, there is such a difference of dialectial variety between the west and other regions. What surprised me the most, however, was that at some point, Labov mentioned that only 4 people were studied as representatives for an entire city. I see how this goes hand in hand with the "no individuals in linguistics" point of view, but it does still seemed a bit unreliable to me, to get such important data for such a big area from such a small amount of speakers. Additional Question: When finding a lot of things that appear to covary in certain social groups, was there any attempt to find the reason behind this covariation? ------- How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? In Labov’s words, the individual is not a „linguistic unit“, the community is. The individual is what gives access to the data, but has individual variations. To really (or better) understand the findings from individuals and how they express what social meaning, it is important to also understand the broader community or the „social worlds“ (Hay/Drager) of the individual in general. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics: . Equally concerns both production and perception . Strong link to ethnography: The understanding of fine social differences is important for understanding and interpreting phonetic variation . Multitudes of factors: The phonetic realization is influenced by multiple social factors, not just „big factors“ like the speech community but also many situational/physical/mental factors (the group setting, gender, class, expectations/believes about other speakers) Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? I was positively surprised by the notion of the „debt incurred of the scholar who gets information from the community“ and social justice concerns. Oftentimes in linguistics, including phonetics, there is an interest in many minority languages and dialects (AAVE for example), and I think it is important to be aware of ethical and societal issues of these speakers, not just the pure academic interest. -------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? --> A speech community shares certain linguistic features. By including these features in their speech, consciously or unconsciously, a speaker can be perceived as a part of the community. Speakers can also form their own speech group by establishing a new phonetic variant among themselves. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. --> The subject of sociophonetic research is variation in spontaneous speech, with respect to both production and perception. --> Sociophonetics is based on empiricism, providing data from which conclusions and theories can be drawn. --> Recent studies make use of ethnographic methods to discover social categories to work with. Methods that originate from dialect geography are used as well. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? --> I found the part about the interview questions very intriguing: What is the best way to get participants to speak naturally or in a certain style? The answer seems to be, make them forget they are being interviewed by asking the right kind of questions. But at least in field work, you can still never be sure to obtain the kind of data that you wanted. ------ - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? The community consists of individuals, but the individual can't be the only measure for the speech community. The community is therefore defined by the individuals and can be described (imperfectly) by recording individuals and getting a view of the community as a whole through many little pieces. Although there are apparently not a lot of individuals needed to describe a speech community (Labov mentions 4 individuals to describe a city) - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. 1. Studying individual speakers to form a view of the broader speech picture of the community as a whole 2. Using phonetic cues to differentiate yourself from other individuals or groups and form an identity 3. Looking at linguistics through a lens of socioeconomics to find areas of particular interest. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? It really hammered home to how young the field of linguistics as a science really is. As a science meaning trying to formulate disprovable hypothesis backed by actual real world data. Another question: Labov mentions a telephone study. Isn't the frequency of telephones cut of in a range that would be very bad for conducting a phonetic study? ------ - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? After reading the interview and understanding Labov’s point of view on the matter, I would say that, that the reality of speech lies within the speech community and that every individual relates to that with they’re own grasp of social facts and how the speech community expresses themselves. So the individual speakers relates to the speech community in the way, that the speech community in a whole acts as a structural basis for the variation of each individual interpreting the pattern of the respective speech. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. Studies of variation and change regarding and being based on acoustic, dialectological and conversational perspectives - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? I found the way, in which the interview gives a very informative and easy to understand overview, about the topic on sociophonetic studies, most impressive. I easily could understand, where it came from, what the basis is and the important questions that are and where asked. The interview touched a lot of interesting and important topics easily, like: the empirical/materialist approach, sociolinguistic interviews and studies, the correlation between sociolinguistics and phonetics regarding general grammar, individuality and even ethics. So that one who read the interview gets an easy and very interesting overview about some topics in sociophonetics and linguistics, that start the interest to look into it more. --------- How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? Within the speech community there is a social pattern, a framework, which is taken up by the individual and implemented independently. Thus, there exist a general pattern at the level of the community, but individual variations in the execution of each speaker. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. Various social characteristics such as social context, addressee, gender, age, ethnicity of a speaker, etc. may have an impact on the phonetic realization of certain words and thus cause differences in pronunciation between different speakers. Furthermore, individual speakers also vary their language depending on the environment or context. Traditionally, sociophonetic data are collected through interviews. They are usually analyzed auditorily, with the variables classified into binary categories, as this does not require as much special equipment as acoustic analysis. Acoustic analyses have been more common for the study of vowels. ----- i. How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? In contrast to Labov, I don't think the speech community should be considered separately from the individual speaker. I can understand his train of thought and I agree that an individual is not “a linguistic unit”. However, he also agrees that individuals give the data to describe the community. And I think this is the most important part. The data or rules that are being made for speech purposes are based on every individual. They consist of the way of how most of the individuals speak, and although some ways of speaking don't fit the rules or the majority, they shouldn't be seen as unimportant but rather as variations of certain speech communities. ii. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. I was not sure how to answer question 2. Therefore I collected some possible answers I thought were fields of sociophonetics. 1. Social: a) social variation b) social categories (age, ethnicity*, gender, social class) c) *ethnography (phonetic analysis, experimental methodologies) 2. Phonetics: a) speech production/ perception b) articulation (articulatory explanations, acoustic measurements, acoustic analysis) c) speaker style Labov also talked about dialectology and linguistic anthropology, but if I am not mistaken, these are separate "fields" and not fields of sociophonetics. iii. Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? Actually, the whole interview was pretty interesting. Although some parts were hard to comprehend, I think all in all the whole interview gave a good insight about sociophonetics. However, the feedback principle caught my attention because I could relate to the situation that Labov described there!i. How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? ------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? The speech community shares a common language. Each individual speaker interprets this common language slightly differently. Therefore, the community forms the individual's speech and individuals can be representative of a whole group of speakers. On the other hand, individual speakers introduce variation into a community through their respective interpretation of the common language. These minor changes can be propagated and lead to general changes in the common language. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. 1. Big focus on fieldwork, especially in the form of interviews. 2. Empirical, i.e. describing today's languages and changes. 3. Interested in the broad picture, rather than the individual speaker. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? How relatively young the field of sociophonetics (or at least its popularity in the research community) seems to be. And of course, that most of it seems to stem from the work of one researcher who more or less founded the field. The argument that the American West is too young to have formed stable structures and communities with their own linguistic processes. This should make the American West a particularly interesting object of research. ------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? I found it interesting how WL (?) talked about the two sides you can take on this. Some linguists say that 'reality lies in the individual'. WL takes the side that language belongs to the community. The reason for this argument is that language cannot exist outside of some abstract concept if there is only one person that speaks it. Language is a means of communicating to the community around you. To me, the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker is as WL suggests - the pattern of language (of speech) is given by the speech community, and the individual speaker can acquire this means of communication by picking up on the patterns around him. The individual, however, can give(project) information about themselves by speaking in a way that is 'characteristic to himself', perhaps a slightly different dialect or accent (signaling Herkunft/coming from a different community), different choice of words (slang, humor). Or, they may change the way they come across to others (how you talk to your best friends vs how you talk during a job interview). - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. - interdiscplinary (many other linguistics fields are related/intertwine) - multimethod (in that people make findings through many different types of experiments) - multidirectional? (direction that complicates phonetics, direction that complicates the social) I hope I understood this question correctly, I didn't know exactly what you wanted from us so I just wrote my impression from what I read - Is there anything you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? I was totally impressed by the degree of detail they go into when talking about phoneme shifts. I'm totally new to phonetics, sociolinguistics and of course sociophonetics (I've only taken your introductory phonetics course) and the amount of thought put into these things very much impressed me. ------ - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? According to Labov, language is a property of the community, not the individual. It has an existing “pattern” that individual speakers may understand differently, which is where variation may come from, but they still exist as parts of a speech community, and not as individual units for themselves. Which is why he says that individual speakers are studied only as part of their speech communities, so that the latter can be understood. (Gordon:2006 p. 341/342) - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. I am admittedly not completely sure what exactly the question asks for, though two properties that are mentioned to be of importance are both an ethnographic approach, as well as acoustic analysis. Experimental work (in combination with ethnography) is also mentioned. (Hay/Drager:2007 p.94/95) - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? One thing I found impressive is the creation of “The Atlas of North American English”. Clearly a lot of work went into it, and I think it is also nice to have one source that covers a large area consistently, instead of, for example, having different sources that gathered data differently and might not be as consistent when comparing them to each other. ---- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? I agree with what William Labov mentions on page 341 that the person is not a linguistic unit—rather they are part of the community that can be assessed and studied. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. 1) It’s a materialist study compared to many linguistics, 2) Most of the fieldwork for the field is interviews with communities. a. I bring this up because many other sub-fields don’t do nearly as much fieldwork as this one. 3) Chain shifting of dialects plays a big role in sociophonetics (or at least that’s what it seems like). - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? I thought these topics were interesting when they were brought up but were fairly short in the interview. Page 334: Optimality Theory (top of page, first paragraph) Page 334: Dialect Geography (top of page, second line) Page 339: Materialist studies (near bottom of page, before MG) Page 342: The person is not a unit, they just provide data on the community (near bottom, second WL, second paragraph)" ----- How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? The source of a speaker’s language lies in the speech community. This means that the environment in which a person grows up determines the language of this person and not the other way round. However, the given language of a speech community may slightly vary among speakers since all speakers have their individual way of acquiring language. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. -Interdisciplinary -Practice-oriented -Dynamic Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? For me it was particularly impressive to learn about the large variety of aspects included in the field of sociophonetics. On the one hand, William Labov mentions several matters concerning phonetics, on the other hand, he also talks about anthropology and in how far those two fields are related to each other. ------- How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? As written in the interview: - language is property of community - slippage at individual level - individual is not a linguistic unit - but we study individuals to get data to describe the community In my own words: Whereas many sociolinguists locate the "reality" of language in the individual speaker, Labov has the opposite point of view. We gain knowledge of speech communities via the individual. He emphases that it's important not to fixate on differences between individuals, since there will always be some individual varieties, and doesn't view the individual speaker as a linguistic unit. Rather the goal is to gain an insight into the speech community and to research the patterns/frameworks those speech communities are based on. - Properties Methodology: A popular method to gain data in the field of sociophonetics is by doing interviews. It's interesting that the interviewer doesn't bluntly asks questions, but rather has to have a good grasp of social skills. The progressiveness of the field: While sociophonetics may not have invented quantitative methods and the principles of accountability, it was one of the first fields in linguistics to make use of those methods. Even now some sociophonetics argue that it's better to use scales with character traits instead of scales of femininity/masculinity. What makes a community: Sometimes it's rather obvious to which community one belongs to, e.g. if the income is lower or higher than a given range, or whether someone was born and raised in a country. The research of - and the search for - speech communities connotes to look outside of those borders. - Impressiv: I found the part "What makes a community" very impressive and it also makes me happy. While I am not a researcher or an expert, I found myself a bit surprised when many studies stayed on a level of "men vs women", "low income vs high income", "first language vs second". Of course those studies are interesting and play an important role in research. It's just that sometimes I wondered "what makes someone perceive someone as ", or "why are you surprised that I am a foreigner". I found some patterns in my environment on how linguistic and phonetics shape one's expectations and they way they are perceived - or even predict if someone wants to say something by observing their breath. Now that I get in contact with sociophonetics, I feel like many of my impressions are not just stupid ideas, but a possible research question. --- 1. How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? Speech community is used to describe a group of people who share the same language and speech characteristics. Individual speakers can through speech community introduce themselves and distinguish others. On the one hand, different individual speakers pronounce differently from one another, this depends on the social characteristics of the speaker, those phonetic variants may be influenced by certain social activities and speaker’s social group. On the other hand, individual speakers can use phonetic information to judge the social information of speakers. Individual speakers give also the data to describe the speech community 2. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. 1). The acquisition, transmission, production, and perception of phonetic variation vary with social conditions. Phonetic information should affect social judgements and social judgements should affect phonetic information. 2). Phonetics variation changed with its discourse context, for example, voiceless stops in English (/p/, /t/, and /k/) are generally characterized as displaying free variation word-finally, and they may or may not be aspirated. 3). Progressing sociophonetics is based on laboratory anthropology. 3. Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? Sociolinguistics is a very large area. When I am reading the interview, I found that the thinking about language and the practice of linguistics are particularly impressive. This not only requires constant exploration of language change but also requires combiningdifferent social conditions. Because of the rapidity of sound change, we should understand what’s important to people, what their interests are, and what creates the flow of speech. ---- How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? The speech community is composed of individual speakers who share commonalities in the way they produce and perceive speech. Individual speakers can vary widely in their personal speech patterns, even changing the way they speak when talking to different people. But the speech community represents the larger pattern of phonetic variation among the group of people with similar cultural/societal/geographic backgrounds. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. Three properties that seem to be characteristic of sociophonetics seem to be phonetic variation, ethnographic analysis, and speech perception. Sociophonetic studies are always concerned with phonetic change, and how factors like social and geographic context affect this phonetic change, so it's important to both deal with acoustic phonetic analysis, as well as ethnographic analysis, to determine what sorts of social changes might correlate with the phonetic variation we see. And speech perception deals with the more cognitive side of sociophonetics, asking how these speech varieties we observe actually affect the speech community and what sorts of ties individuals might make between social and phonetic information. Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? I was really impressed with the discussion of the Atlas and how they were able to use such small sample sizes to describe speech communities. Labov mentions only needing four people from a city to get a representative sample of the framework for social variation in that area. He mentions that this work focuses on the invariant, rather than the wide range of variation across a social group (which requires the larger sample), yet it's still hard to conceptualize how such a small sample can give us enough phonetic information to make any generalizations about the area. ------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? A: In order to get to the individual speaker itself, you’d first have to approach their community and beliefs. The behavior and language of the individual is based on the social influences and forces that he/she experiences in their daily life. The individual is not seen as a linguistic unit, but rather as the way of getting the data to describe a community. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. A: 1. Change interferes with communication. 2. Do not ask questions as an outsider but try to ask questions in terms that are meaningful to the people you are talking to. 3. The study of change is very valuable for language understanding. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? A: - Regarding the same city as a center of multilingual activity. • The art which involves asking questions: The ability to move people by formulating what worries them in the terms they use themselves. • Finding out how language satisfies the need for communication in everyday life and also distinguishes people by bringing out their differences rather than their similarities. • To understand something, you have to understand how it came to be. • Focus rather on the way that people talk when they are not being observed. • Personal experience is the essential formative influence. ------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? As Labov said "there are no individuals from a linguistic point of view" or the interviewer "language is the property of the community". Language is an instrument for communicating, thus it is always shared with somebody. If one moves from one speech community to another, it can be another city or country, the way one speaks will be adapted each time. The mixture of languages from diverse speech communities may lead to individual speakers. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. 1.Fine-grained acoustic phonetic analysis to clarify e.g. how are voice qualities and intonation related to social meanings? 2.Ethnographic methodologies help to investigate phonetic patterns observed in social groups but free from traditional social categories. 3.Experimental techniques to explore patterns in speech perception how is particular phonetic information associated with social judgments. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? "So you feed back what people tell you to ask about things that they’re concerned with. "(Labov) Because human beings are inherently social we try to become a part of the society. So we make an effort to adjust as well as the way we speak. Otherwise we will be an outsider. ------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? In an interview with William Labov, it is stated that the relations between the speech community and the individual speaker are not straightforward: we can observe some phonetic variations at the individual level, while this phonetic pattern will remain regular at the community level. In approach of William Labov, the speech of an individual speaker is considered as a material for "building a whole picture" of community speech. However, he does not consider the individual a linguistic unit, since "language is the property of the community". - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. I did not quite understand what should be understood by properties characteristic, so I highlighted the following features of this area that seemed important to me: sociophonetics as a study of language variation and change; method of sociolinguictic interview; principles of chain shifting; learning by entering the community. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? I found the method of sociolinguictic interview, proposed by William Labov, quite interesting. It allows, on the one hand, to record the speech more freely and fluently, but on the other hand, "to control what people say". What also seemed interesting to me was the fieldwork at an all girls' high school in Christchurch, Drager (2006b), in which the relationship between having lunch in the common room and monophthongization of the vowel in quotative "like" was established . --------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? Based on my current understanding of sociophonetics and from both readings, I believe the quote from Labov, "language exists in the community exterior to the individual" captures the relationship between the speech community and the individual speaker. It seems to me that an individual speaker will produce the same sound with a variety of realizations. A determining factor of how a phoneme will be produced at a given point in time is the speech community the speaker wishes to convey that they identify with and belong to. An individual speaker will belong to multiple speech communities and will not necessarily conform to all characteristics typical of a specific speech community. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. 1. A desire to analyze language with a focus on studying speech and phonetics as a means to understand how social meaning is conveyed through phonetic details. It is interdisciplinary, and draws from other socially driven fields of study, such as anthropology. 2. A historic focus on auditory analysis and evaluation of variables as categorical, and largely binary. 3. Increasing prevalence of ethnographic approaches that allow researchers to identify phonetic variation in groups within the context of the language community being studied, rather than defined groups such as age, gender, and economic class. It also provides the ability to study phonetic realizations in conjunction with other linguistic and non-linguistic features. Ethnographic methods are used in addition to experimental methods, though Hay and Drager argue that ethnographic and experimental approaches have not yet been employed in combination to their fullest potential. - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? I found it impressive that Labov, in the Atlas, was able to accurately describe for example the sociolinguistic patterns of Charleston by only studying four people. His statement that he isn't studying social variation but rather the structural basis for it is an idea I am not sure that I fully comprehend. With regard to Labov himself, I found impressive the amount of time he has been a major figure in sociolinguistics, and how far reaching his impact on the field has been. ---- How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? In Labov's approach individuals do not exist as a unit, and they are more seen as a means to describe the language of the community which the individuals are a part of. I personally am not so sure of this - The community consists of individuals, they influence each other and it feels wrong to separate them. Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. It is materialist - concerned with what actually happens in the real world - and it is based on empirical data. Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? The story about outsider-questions made really clear how hard it is to conduct such interviews properly. -------- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? Following the viewpoint of W.Labov, an individual speaker “doesn’t exists as a unit” in their framework of research. Individuals only serve as a data source of the general, “external” language that we can try to grasp in an individual subject. No doubt that individual variations may be striking even within one speech community, however, it is the constant principles within that community that shapes the language variant that counts, so rather than talking about speaker-to-speaker (or even within-speaker) variations, the researcher talks about invariance. This view is consistent with quantitative tradition in the research, since some general patterns are only visible when looking at a bigger picture. What strikes me as odd is that the picture he talks about is not as big as we now would call representative of the population. 4 speakers from a large city seems a bit too sparse to draw conclusions from. - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. 1. Fieldwork is a must – quantitative research. 2. The object of research is a highly dynamic matter, though one has to wait a while before changes will take force and become observable. 3. No method to study a population in a controlled manner (sociolinguistic interview is based on the concept of a language flow which by definition is hard to control). - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? Labov mentions a case in which 2 participants were asked a provocative question about astrology that caused a quarrel between them. He adds that such art of finding a sensitive topic of discussion is what defines a good sociolinguistic interview. I’m wondering what are the ethical limits of provocations of that sort would be. Especially impressive for me was the example of reversibility of mergers in South Carolina English. This example stressed once again the importance of quantitative approach as opposed to purely theoretical work. ----- - How would you describe the relation between the speech community and the individual speaker? -> individual speakers follow patterns of the speech in their community, but each represent separate instantiations of this general pattern -> there is variation between individuals and the speech of the community can be seen as something like an average of all its members -> individuals and speech community should be jointly analysed because they are like two sides of a coin, both building a dynamic construct - Name 3 properties characteristic of the field of sociophonetics. -> the method to collect data is essential to the quality of results, for example the choice of questions in the "interview"-method, as this could determine if the subject produces speech representative of their natural speech or a version determined by the experimental setting -> at the center of sociophonetics is the analysis of variation in spoken language, in the light of phonetic measurements and the influence of social factors -> it is a field that heavily benefits from experimental data over simple theory, as it is concerned with natural speech spoken by people in specific moments - Is there anything that you found particularly impressive when reading the interview? -> I found the mentioning of the interplay of language as a universal tool versus its use by individuals to be very interesting. Research in linguistics, generally, can only be done by collecting data by individuals and then forming conclusions about general principles.