社会语言学期末复习.doc

Key Terms 1. Sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics is concerned with investigating the relationships between language and society with the goal being a better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication. It is the study of language in relation to society. That is to say, in sociolinguistics, we study language and society in order to find out as much as we can about what kind of thing language is. Coulmas puts it that sociolinguistics investigates “how social structure influences the way people talk and how language varieties and patterns of use correlate with social attributes such as class, sex, and age.” In sociolinguistics, we study, for example, linguistic variation, dialects, language attitude and its effect etc. 2. Independent variable dependent variable An independent variable is an activity or characteristic believed to make a difference with respect to some behavior; a dependent variable is the change or difference in behavior that occurs as a result of the independent variable. For example, in Labov’s study of /r/, the social status of the people is an independent variable and the pronunciation of /r/ is the dependent variable as a result of the change of the social status. 3. Variety Variety refers to a set of linguistic items or human speech patterns (sounds, words, grammatical features), which can be uniquely associated with some external factor (e.g. a geographical area or a social group). For example, Black English is a variety of English related with the racial group and Beijing dialect is also a variety of Chinese Mandarin related with the geographical area. 4. Language and dialect Language refers either to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms while dialect refers to one of the norms. For example, in Britain, the British speak the English language and there are dialects such as Yorkshire dialect etc. 5. Style and register Style refers to differences in speech or writing in