Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage 163interest. Social psychology has interested itself in non-linguistic featuresthat may stimulate or influence evaluative reactions: matters of context,topic and salience, as well as degrees of emotionality, humor andabstraction, have figured in many studies. The closest approach, perhaps,to the investigation of linguistic elements is found in work on levels offormality/informality. It is also true that Giles and Ryan (1982: 210) madean argument for ‘more detailed linguistic and acoustic descriptions of thestimulus voices as well as examining the relative evaluative salience ofthese particulars for different types of listeners’, and Robinson (1985) alsoargued for improved collaboration between social psychology andlinguistics. A related, although not so pointed, observation was madeby Edwards (1982), in calling for fuller probing of the reasons behindjudges’ evaluative decisions. In general, though, social psychologistshave done little in the way of isolating ‘linguistic and acoustic’ variablesand relating them to evaluative judgments. This is hardly surprising, forsuch work is simply not their métier.Recent linguistic research has dealt with features that characterize anddifferentiate language varieties, and some has focused on those verysocial-class and ethnic varieties that are of particular interest and concernhere. Laver and Trudgill’s (1979) chapter on ‘social markers’ remains auseful reference, alerting us to such phenomena as:. the nasality habitually associated with some varieties of English(RP, for example);. the wide dialectal variations in consonant pronunciation: thus, RPspeakers pronounce lock and loch more or less identically, with afinal /k/, but (some) Scottish pronunciations involve final /x/. Togive another example, British English pronunciation of the postvocalic/r/ in words like cart and mar is inversely related to socialclassstatus, whereas in some varieties of American English (inNew York, for instance) a positive correlation exists between /r/-pronunciation and status;. grammatical variation (e.g. copula deletion in BEV: thus, standardEnglish they are going becomes they going);. lexical differences (e.g. some English speakers brew their tea, somemash it, some let it steep, some let it set, and so on).If, however, linguists have been the ones to describe such variation, theyhave either been relatively uninterested in its relation to differences insocial ratings or have simply assumed that the more obvious and salientlinguistic markers are the relevant triggers. Like social psychologists,linguists too have generally stuck to their lasts. (There are some notable