This paper argues for a focus on the social meaning of variation, based in a study of stylistic practice. It is common in the study of variation to interpret variables as reflections of speakers’ membership in social categories. Others have argued more recently that variables are associated not with the categories themselves, but with stances and characteristics that constitute those categories. The paper reviews some variation studies that showthatvariablesdonothavestaticmeanings,butrathergeneralmeanings that become more specific in the context of styles. Building on Michael Silverstein’s notion of indexical order, I argue that the meanings of variables are not precise or fixed but rather constitute a field of potential meanings ‐ an indexical field, or constellation of ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable. The field is fluid, and each new activation has the potential to change the field by building on ideological connections. Thus variation constitutes an indexical system that embeds ideology in language and that is in turn part and parcel of the construction of ideology.

/pdf/variation-and-the-indexical-field-1-485dmc1l2z.pdf

Variation and the indexical field 1

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is "no," then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is "yes" and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation.

/pdf/cultural-group-selection-plays-an-essential-role-in-10vgbcz6iq.pdf

Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence.

/pdf/the-other-tongue-english-across-cultures-2lww9ml1io.pdf

The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures

Speech perception consists of a set of computations that take continuously varying acoustic waveforms as input and generate discrete representations that make contact with the lexical representations stored in long-term memory as output. Because the perceptual objects that are recognized by the speech perception enter into subsequent linguistic computation, the format that is used for lexical representation and processing fundamentally constrains the speech perceptual processes. Consequently, theories of speech perception must, at some level, be tightly linked to theories of lexical representation. Minimally, speech perception must yield representations that smoothly and rapidly interface with stored lexical items. Adopting the perspective of Marr, we argue and provide neurobiological and psychophysical evidence for the following research programme. First, at the implementational level, speech perception is a multi-time resolution process, with perceptual analyses occurring concurrently on at least two time scales (approx. 20–80 ms, approx. 150–300 ms), commensurate with (sub)segmental and syllabic analyses, respectively. Second, at the algorithmic level, we suggest that perception proceeds on the basis of internal forward models, or uses an ‘analysis-by-synthesis’ approach. Third, at the computational level (in the sense of Marr), the theory of lexical representation that we adopt is principally informed by phonological research and assumes that words are represented in the mental lexicon in terms of sequences of discrete segments composed of distinctive features. One important goal of the research programme is to develop linking hypotheses between putative neurobiological primitives (e.g. temporal primitives) and those primitives derived from linguistic inquiry, to arrive ultimately at a biologically sensible and theoretically satisfying model of representation and computation in speech.

/pdf/speech-perception-at-the-interface-of-neurobiology-and-44gzlay6sp.pdf

Speech perception at the interface of neurobiology and linguistics

Vibrant online communities are in constant flux. As members join and depart, the interactional norms evolve, stimulating further changes to the membership and its social dynamics. Linguistic change --- in the sense of innovation that becomes accepted as the norm --- is essential to this dynamic process: it both facilitates individual expression and fosters the emergence of a collective identity. We propose a framework for tracking linguistic change as it happens and for understanding how specific users react to these evolving norms. By applying this framework to two large online communities we show that users follow a determined two-stage lifecycle with respect to their susceptibility to linguistic change: a linguistically innovative learning phase in which users adopt the language of the community followed by a conservative phase in which users stop changing and the evolving community norms pass them by. Building on this observation, we show how this framework can be used to detect, early in a user's career, how long she will stay active in the community. Thus, this work has practical significance for those who design and maintain online communities. It also yields new theoretical insights into the evolution of linguistic norms and the complex interplay between community-level and individual-level linguistic change.

/pdf/no-country-for-old-members-user-lifecycle-and-linguistic-49uytihax3.pdf

No country for old members: user lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities

Like clothing, hairstyles, and other culturally variable phenomena, language offers a wealth of resources on which people may draw to meet their sociosymbolic needs. As a result, linguistic features of all sorts may come to serve as markers of whatever social distinctions are seen as important to a society’s members. Among the distinctions marked in this way are those drawn in terms of broad categories such as gender, social class, and age, as well as others based on categories that may be relevant only in a given community. The research reported here examines the linguistic marking of distinctions constructed by ethnicity. The importance of ethnicity as a social factor shaping variation in American English is hard to deny. The sociolinguistic ramifications of ethnic divisions have been explored in numerous studies and have often been found to involve considerable linguistic differences. This is certainly the case with the best-known—and best-studied—ethnically defined variety in the United States: African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which has been shown to incorporate several linguistic features that distinguish it from vernacular varieties used by European Americans (see, e.g., Bailey and Thomas 1998). Of course, in many American communities, ethnic categorization goes well beyond black and white, and so too may the linguistic marking of these categories. There is value in considering the relationships among a range of ethnically defined varieties, as has been shown in studies conducted by Walt Wolfram and his research team in a North Carolina county populated by roughly equal numbers of speakers of European, African, and Native American descent (see, e.g., Wolfram 1996; Dannenberg and Wolfram 1998). A comparable ethnic complexity exists in the community discussed here, and the present study seeks to examine some of that complexity by sampling speakers representing different ethnic groups. The linguistic correlates of these ethnic categories are examined through a study of phonological variables. A variety of pronunciation

Phonological Correlates of Ethnic Identity: Evidence of Divergence?

Investigating Chain Shifts and Mergers

Two important general conclusions of sociolinguistics are that females tend to lead in linguistic changes and that vowel systems tend to rotate in fixed directions. We argue that these two results are linked in that females and males are attracted asymmetrically to different subjective poles of the vowel system, one being high front unrounded [i] and the other being somewhere in the back rounded area near {o o}. We therefore adapt Ohala's “frequency code” theory to the sociolinguistic study of phonetic variation. We argue that such a model is superior to one in which individual speakers are attracted to particular phonetic targets only by virtue of a logically prior attraction to a class or similar social category which happens to use the pronunciation in question. Our study is in line with more general efforts to construct causal models for correlations between variable aesthetic preferences and “hard” (nonsubjective) social categories such as sex. It is, however, an open question whether sex‐asymmetric ...

Sex, sound symbolism, and sociolinguistics

EJ: How did you become interested in linguistic studies? WL: I used to be a chemist and I worked in industry. I was attracted by an area where you could begin to develop something close to scientific principles in relation to language. My own view is that linguistics is not a science but that we're getting closer to it. Very few social sciences have solved the relationship between theory and practice. Most people feel that this is a one-way process. A group of theorists think up an idea and then someone else tries to put it into practice. In education, this can lead to theories that never work because the language they are based on is so far from the reality of the language that people actually use. An approach to linguistics is gaining momentum that takes a different approach, which begins with the language of everyday life, the language that children bring into the class-

Interview with William Labov

Despite the difficulty of delineating the rural from the urban according to economic or demographic criteria, this distinction has powerful cultural resonances, and language plays a key role in con...

Language Variation and Change in Rural Communities

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