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1 results

  • Part III - Interaction and intersubjectivity

  • Edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, Yale University, Connecticut, Jack Sidnell, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
    Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    11 September 2014, pp 343-480

  • Summary

    The view of language as encoding predefined and enduring messages is what truly separated sociolinguistics in the early years from linguistic anthropology. A sociolinguistic variable is a set of competing linguistic forms (variants), whose patterns of occurrence are socially determined and potentially socially meaningful. The study of patterns calls for quantification and a focus on meaning raises interesting questions in a basically probabilistic enterprise. In stylistic practice, speakers make social-semiotic moves, reinterpreting variants, and combining and recombining them in a continual process of bricolage as highly idiosyncratic resources may combine with more widespread ones to construct a nuanced persona. Stylistic practice is a continual reinvention of meaning as speakers individually and severally move through situations and through time and across the life span. Stylistic practice can also be an important force in social change.