ChapterLanguage,DialectsandVarieties.ppt

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics Lecture Presentor: Prof. Xu Zhisuo School of Foreign Languages Wuhan University of Technology Chapter 2 Language, Dialect, and Varieties Contents 2.1 Global and specific statements To the extent that different linguistic items have different relations to society (in terms of people and circumstances). Thus on the one hand there are statements about global categories, like whole languages, and on the other hand there are statements about individual linguistic items; and in each case the statement refers to speakers either as members of some community or as individuals. 2.1.1 Linguistic items What is a linguistic item? There are items of vocabulary (called ‘lexical items’ or ‘lexemes’).There are also sound-patterns within them and larger syntactic patterns in which they are used. We call them ‘lexical items’, ‘sound’ and ‘constructions’. Lexical items are listed (in a lexicon), but that sounds and constructions are defined (‘generated’) by general rules or principles. For example, the lexical items cat, dog and horse are simply listed, along with their meanings and their various other characteristics (word-class, pronunciation, etc.- just as in any dictionary); but there is no list which contains the pattern ‘word-final /r/ (as in car and daughter in accents of English where /r/ is pronounced) or the construction ‘bare relative clause’ (as in the book I bought, in contrast with a ‘wh-relative clause’ the book which I bought). If they are treated so differently in the grammar, why should they be similar sociolinguistically? And how do the social facts combine with the linguistic ones? It is reasonably easy to include social facts about lexical items along with the linguistic facts. Different linguistic items in ‘the same language’ can have quite different social distributions (in terms of speakers and circumstances). 2.1.2 What do we mean by Variety? Hudson (1996, p. 22) defines a