Within the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics, social constructivist approaches to style-shifting are characterized by research that suggests that people make stylistic choices aimed at conveying (and achieving) a particular social categorisation or sociolinguistic meaning, or to project a specific position in society. This volume offers much needed insights into elements of social situations that influence speech variation in public settings. In presenting new formulations of stylistic variation, the authors call for adopting flexible, multidimensional, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary approaches to speaker agency that take into consideration not only reactive but also proactive motivations for stylistic variation.
The book begins with an introduction that provides a fuller account of stylistic variation. As a basis for discussion, Ch. 1 introduces, defines, and explains style-shifting in public venues. It also offers a quantitative and qualitative approach to design practice in political discourse that reinforces the idea that speakers' motivations are often multilayered and must be analysed carefully. Ch. 2 details the pronunciation of the second vowel of “Iraq(i)” as a potential resource for the expression of political identity based on the speaker's choice of variant. Ch. 3 presents the sociophonetic construction of identity by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in public speaking engagements, where Rice's use of some features of African American English and Superstandard English enable her to maintain ties to multiple identities. Ch. 4 applies an interaction-oriented speaker-design perspective on the use of linguistic styles to the analysis of data from an Austrian political discussion TV show. Ch. 5 explores how recency and resonance play key roles in the linguistic and discursive structuring of phonological styles.
Ch. 6 deals with one question that is often overlooked in stylistic variation: How do we know that the features linguists analyse are the ones that are significant to speakers' interactional stylistic displays and that are perceived as salient by their interlocutors? Using data from semi-professional New Zealand singers, Ch. 7 shows that pronunciation norms in popular music are highly constrained, and that singing accents represent a kind of referee design. Ch. 8 contributes to uncovering and interpreting the connections between language and social meaning in performative contexts of language use. By considering recent examples of nonstandard dialect use in the media alongside the speakers' own perceptions of their motivations for and success with using their native dialect in public, Ch. 9 is concerned with the complexities of linguistic style and strategy. Finally, Ch. 10 examines the linguistic practice of two hosts of a television shopping programme and extends the investigation of linguistic innovation to include phonological, lexical, and grammatical features.
Each chapter is meant to stand on its own, as evident in the way the introduction organises the contributions within the volume, which represents an important advance in research on style-shifting. This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the areas of sociolinguistics, dialectology, social psychology, anthropology, and sociology, especially those working in political discourse and media studies.
