here - Linguistic Society of America

Thursday, 3 JanuarySymposiumAwareness and Control in Sociolinguistic ResearchClarendon/Berkeley4:00 – 7:00 PMOrganizer:Participants:Anna Babel (The Ohio State University)Anna Babel (The Ohio State University)Katie Carmichael (The Ohio State University)Kevin B. McGowan (Rice University)Jen Nycz (Georgetown University)John Rickford (Stanford University)Lauren Squires (The Ohio State University)This session explores the relationship between awareness of linguistic features as social indices and control of socially meaningfulpatterns of speech. The papers in this session use a variety of methods to address this connection between awareness andcontrol—the production and perception of socially meaningful features. Crucially, these papers examine the space betweenconscious metapragmatic awareness of linguistic features—Labov’s stereotypes— and the aspects of production in which there isno awareness of linguistic difference—Labov’s indicators (Labov 1972). The nebulous zone of sociolinguistic markers is a grayarea in terms of consciousness; it also encompasses the point at which the production of linguistic features interfaces withperception of features as salient markers of social categories, figures, and/or stances.A central concern of this panel is making connections between the methods used to assess sociolinguistic awareness (perception)and those used to assess control over the same linguistic features (production). Work on perception from the cultural side ofsociolinguistics has, perhaps by necessity, focused on stereotypes—features that are metapragmatically available to speakers.Silverstein (1981) argues that metapragmatic awareness is based on cognitive-semiotic characteristics of language. Some yearslater, Preston (1996) suggests that “control” is one aspect of awareness (perhaps one of the most basic aspects). More recently,Johnstone & Kiesling (2008) caution against the assumption that variants mean the same thing to different groups or evenindividuals, emphasizing the importance of lived experience in interpreting indexical relationships (Campbell-Kibler 2010; Eckert2008; Podesva 2011).In sociophonetics, on the other hand, recent work has explored aspects of perception below the level of consciousness. Drager(2009) and Hall-Lew, Starr, and Coppock (2010) demonstrate the link between speaker attitudes and the production andperception of fine-grained sociophonetic markers. However, individuals' conscious ability to manipulate and perceive finegrainedphonetic details as markers of identity may also be affected by social stereotypes in opposition with observed linguisticpatterns (Niedzielski 1999, Munson 2007). Thus the connections between levels of consciousness about speech and theproduction and interpretation of linguistic variables remain blurry.These papers in this panel represent methodologically diverse approaches to the study of awareness and control in the productionand recognition of sociolinguistic variables. A common theme is the effort to link these two aspects of linguistic competence inorder to understand how individuals work in, through, and as part of a system of social representation.References:Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2010. The sociolinguistic variant as a carrier of social meaning. Language Variation and Change22.423-41.Drager, Katie. 2009. A Sociophonetic Ethnography of Selwyn Girls’ High: University of Canterbury.Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12.453-76.Hall-Lew, Lauren, Elizabeth Coppock & Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Indexing Political Persuasion: Variation in the Iraq vowels.American Speech 85.91-102.Johnstone, Barbara & Scott F. Kiesling. 2008. Indexicality and experience: Exploring the meanings of /aw/-monophthongizationin Pittsburgh. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12.5-33.Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Munson, Ben. 2007. The acoustic correlates of perceived sexual orientation, perceived masculinity, and perceived femininity.Language and Speech 50.125-42.Niedzielski, Nancy. 1999. The Effect of Social Information on the Perception of Sociolinguistic Variables. Journal of Languageand Social Psychology 18.62-85.Podesva, Robert J. 2011. The California Vowel Shift and Gay Identity. American Speech 86.32-51.90