Department of LinguisticsUniversity of Pittsburgh
LING 2267: Sociolinguistics
Instructor: Dr. Scott Kiesling
Office: CL 2822
Phone: 624-5916
Email:
Web:
Blackboard:
Office hours: MF 2:30-4pm and by appointment
Meetings: Monday, Wednesday 1-2:15pm
WWPH 5P57
Objectives
We will investigate the social basis of language, and the linguistic basis of social life: what happens when languages come into contact, how dialects form, how and why language changes, and how and why different social groups (age, gender, ethnicity, class) speak differently. We will also consider how people manage to carry on fluent, competent conversations, and how they convey their social relationships with their interlocutors in those conversations.
Texts
Primary texts:
1. Downes, William. 1998. Language and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45663-0. Call No. P40 .D65 1998.
2. Articles as noted. These will be available in the department office for copying, and on reserve in Hillman for 2 hour loan.
Supplementary text:
1. Coupland, Nikolas and Adam Jaworski. 1997. Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook. New York: St. Martin's Press. P40 S5775 1997.
Requirements
Class participation and tutorials
Worth 40% of your grade. We will generally begin a week with a new background reading. This will be followed by a workshop or discussion of a particular article, the written component of which will be due on Friday. These written components will be part of a weekly participation grade; in other words, you will be graded as much on effort as on skill for the in-class assessments.
Written assignments
Worth 30% of your grade. These two assignments will ask you to apply the concepts learned by gathering and analyzing original data. The first assignment will be on discourse, the second on variation. Both have a data and analysis component; descriptions of the assignments will be distributed separately. The assignments are due 21 October and 25 November.
Final project
Worth 30% of your grade. For this project, you have some latitude in topic and approach, but in general I would like you to collect some original data, analyze it, and relate it to some of the larger issues we discuss throughout the semester. The data and to some extent the analysis portions can be done in groups. You are also welcome to expand one of your written assignments into a larger project. There are some topics for which secondary data will be appropriate, such as language planning projects. You should be thinking throughout the semester what your topic will be; at the very latest I would like to have a topic proposal from you by November 11.
Calendar
Readings in (parentheses) are optional; in italics are from Coupland and Jaworski
Mtg / Date / Topic / Reading/Assignment Due1 / 26 Aug / Goals and Principles of Sociolinguistic Analysis / Downes Ch. 1
2 / 28 Aug / Indexicality and address terms
3 / 2 Sep / NO CLASS
4 / 4 Sep / Indexicality and Address Terms / Duranti p. 204-213
5 / 9 Sep / Discourse Goals & Methods
6 / 11 Sep / Transcription / (Duranti 122-154)
7 / 16 Sep / Discourse Structures / Downes 275-287, 294-301,
368-384
8 / 18 Sep
9 / 23 Sep / Discourse and Context / Downes 301-308, 384-402
(Saville-Troike)
Assignment 1 DATA due
10 / 25 Sep
11 / 30 Sep
12 / 2 Oct / Discourse Strategies / Downes 288-294 (Brown & Levinson, Tannen, Herbert)
13 / 7 Oct
14 / 9 Oct
15 / 14 Oct / NO CLASS
16 / 16 Oct / NO CLASS
17 / 21 Oct / Language Choice / Assignment 1 due
18 / 23 Oct / Downes Ch. 2-3 (Gal)
19 / 28 Oct
20 / 30 Oct / Sociolinguistic Variation:
Goals & Methods / Downes Ch. 4 (Milroy, Wolfram and Fasold)
21 / 4 Nov / Variation Patterns / Downes Ch. 6 (all articles in Part III of Coupland and Jaworski)
22 / 6 Nov
23 / 11 Nov / Style shifting and code-switching / Assignment 2 DATA due
24 / 13 Nov / Kiesling & Schilling-Estes (Giles & Powesland, Bell)
25 / 18 Nov / Meaning and explanation in variation / Kiesling (Hewstone & Giles, Edwards)
26 / 20 Nov
27 / 25 Nov / Assignment 2 due
28 / 27 Nov / NO CLASS
29 / 2 Dec / Language, Identity, and Social Meaning / Downes Ch. 11
30 / 4 Dec
31 / 9 Dec / Final Papers Due
Bibliography:
Below are the full references for the readings in the calendar, with the exception of the two texts.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 55-84. P40.5 E75B76 1987
Duranti, Allessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 204-213, 122-154. P35 .D87 1997
Kiesling, Scott. Forthcoming. Intersections of norms and gender. In Handbook of Language and Gender, Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Photocopy on reserve.
Kiesling, Scott and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. Language style as identity construction: A Footing and framing approach. Poster presented at NWAVE-27. Photocopy on reserve.