The Coherence of Linguistic Communities: Orderly Heterogeneity and Social Meaning

by Karen V. Beaman (Editor), Gregory R. Guy (Editor)

Overview

This innovative collection brings together a range of perspectives on the notions of "orderly heterogeneity" and "social meaning", shedding light on how structured variation and indexicalities of social meaning "cohere" within linguistic communities. This book fills a gap in research on language variation by critically considering the position articulated by Weinrich, Labov, and Herzog in 1968 that linguistic diversity is systematically organized in ways that reflect and construct social order.

The volume investigates such key themes as

• covariation and co-occurrence restrictions;
• indexicality, perception and social meaning;
• coherence and language change;
• and the structure and measurement of coherence at different levels of analysis.

This collection advances our understanding of the coherence of linguistic communities through empirical investigations of larger and more diverse sets of variables, language varieties, speech styles, and communities, as afforded by the development and advancement of new methods and models in sociolinguistic research.

This book is of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and formal linguistics, as well as those interested in developments on research methods in linguistics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000550177
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/04/2022
Series:	Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	346
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Karen V. Beaman is a Lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests concern language variation, coherence and change, with particular focus on how factors of identity, mobility, and social networks drive or inhibit change.

Gregory R. Guy is Professor at New York University, USA. His research focuses on social, geographic, and diachronic diversity in language, and the implications of linguistic variation for the construction of linguistic theory in varieties of English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Table of Contents

The coherence of linguistic communities: Orderly heterogeneity and social meaning

Karen V. Beaman and Gregory R. Guy

PART I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES IN THE STUDY OF COHERENCE

1. False oppositions in the study of coherence

Devyani Sharma

2. Coherence across social and temporal scales

Meredith Tamminga and Lacey Wade

3. Indexicality and coherence

Gregory R. Guy, Livia Oushiro, and Ronald Beline Mendes

PART II. METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES IN THE STUDY OF COHERENCE

4. What’s in a Lect? Coherence in Phonetic and Grammatical Variation

James A. Walker, Michol F. Hoffman, and Miriam Meyerhoff

5. Measuring change in lectal coherence across real- and apparent-time

Karen V. Beaman and Konstantin Sering

6. Looking for covariation in heritage Italian in Toronto

Naomi Nagy and Timothy Gadanidis

7. Measuring distance-based coherence

Benedikt Szmrecsanyi

PART III: SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF COHERENCE

8. How social salience can illuminate the outcomes of linguistic contact: Data from Spanish in Boston

Danny Erker

9. Mapping social and sociophonetic changes: Gender in Auckland English

Evan Hazenberg

10. Coherence and implicational hierarchies in the speech of the very old

Aria Adli

PART IV: PERCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF COHERENCE

11. Not anything goes: On implicational coherence and the penalty for being incoherent

Anne-Sophie Ghyselen and Stefan Grondelaers

12. Coherent patterns in nonstandard inflection in modern colloquial Standard Dutch?

Hans Bennis and Frans Hinskens

13. Coherence in a levelled variety: The case of Andalusian

Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Matilde Vida-Castro, and Álvaro Molina-García

PART V. EFFECTS OF STANDARD LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES ON COHERENCE

14. Identifying language varieties: Coexisting standards in spoken Italian

Massimo Cerruti and Alessandro Vietti

15. Language change in real-time: 40 years of lectal coherence in the Central Bavarian dialect-standard constellation of Austria

Philip C. Vergeiner, Dominik Wallner, and Lars Bülow

16. Coherence and language contact: Orderly heterogeneity and social meaning in Namibian German

Heike Wiese, Antje Sauermann, and Yannic Bracke

INDEX