Robin Queen, along with Andrei Markovits, gave an invited lecture on their work concerning the involvement of women in canine rescue organizations.  The lecture was presented to the Fellows of the Human-Animal Interaction Symposium.

Robin Queen gave a keynote address at the Indiana University Sociolinguistics Fest Workshop, entitled Language variation and social essentialism.  She explored the place of social and cognitive essentialism for understanding and explaining language variation, using data from a variety of sources, including the television sitcom, Ellen, and weblogs maintained in the voice of a family dog.

Carmel O’Shannessy gave a keynote address at the 16th annual Symposium about Language and Society - Austin, held at the University of Texas Austin,  April 11-13.

Abstract:

A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has emerged in a remote community in northern Australia. It is spoken by children and young adults in the multilingual community of Lajamanu and has developed within the last 30 years. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol (AE/Kriol), while most nominal morphology is from Lajamanu Warlpiri (the variety of Warlpiri spoken in Lajamanu community). Nouns are drawn from both types of source language. An innovative auxiliary system has developed which draws on, but is not the same as, the systems in the source languages. But the system for indicating grammatical functions draws directly on the two typologically different source languages. Lajamanu Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system while AE/Kriol uses word order (SVO) in a nominative-accusative system. In Light Warlpiri these two systems meet.

The language ecology in the community is complex, and code-switching between languages is very common. Children growing up in the community learn the new language, Light Warlpiri, as their primary language, and also learn Lajamanu Warlpiri in their early years. Their learning situation raises the question of how they deal with very mixed input - to what extent do they show adult-like variation and patterning in the grammatical systems of each language? The study uses production and comprehension data to examine the children’s use of word order and ergative case-marking in each language.

Chris Odato and Debby Keller-Cohen presented their paper, “Revisiting off-target verbosity: Discourse context and speaker identity” at the Cognitive Aging conference held in Atlanta April 10-13.

Abstract

The claim that some older adults talk at length on irrelevant topics has spawned research on what has become known as “off-target verbosity” (OTV). In prior research, OTV has been attributed to speaker characteristics—inhibition (Arbuckle, Pushkar and colleagues) or communicative strategies (James et al., 1998). Out study examined the potential of discourse context and speaker identity to influence perceptions of these speech characteristics.

Forty older adults (age 70+) and forty college students participated in an experiment testing the effects of Participant Age (older/younger), Speaker Age (older/younger), Speaker Gender and Discourse Context (interview/conversation). Participants evaluated transcripts on five measures: focus, talkativeness, clarity, interest and the extent to which the speaker was off-target. The content of the speech represented in the transcripts was held constant while the context in which it was produced and the age and gender of the speaker to whom it was attributed varied between participants.

Age proved to be important in several ways. Overall, older participants were more generous in their evaluations. Also, speech was rated as more interesting when attributed to older speakers. In addition, there were significant interactions between research participant age and discourse context: younger, but not older participants found the speech represented in the transcripts more focused in the conversation context. Gender too was found to enter into evaluations: speech was seen as more focused and clearer when attributed to a female speaker.

This study points to the importance of identifying what analytic categories raters/listeners bring to the task of evaluating others’ speech.

Robin Queen and Lauren Squires both presented papers at the 17th Sociolinguistics Symposium, which was held at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam.

Lauren’s paper:
Keeping it offline: the metadiscursive erasure of Standard English from the internet
The semiotic process of erasure has proven a useful tool in understanding how language ideologies emerge and are maintained in various sociolinguistic settings (Irvine and Gal 2000). Erasure is a process whereby some aspect of a linguistic situation - whether a social group, linguistic feature, or style/variety - is rendered invisible to speakers, creating the image of a situation that is consistent with speakers’ language ideologies. Typically, the practices or existence of subordinate groups have been those shown to be the objects of erasure. As Bucholtz (2001) has noted, we have not commonly seen in-depth discussion of dominant languages, linguistic features, or sociolinguistic groups made to seem absent or irrelevant. Such erasure may happen in different ways, or for different ideological reasons, than the erasure of non-dominant language aspects.

This project addresses this kind of erasure through an analysis of metadiscourse about language and the internet. I examine a pair of public comment threads from the internet, both representing readers’ responses to a published college newspaper column about the internet’s negative effects on the English language. Examining the metadiscursive construction of “Netspeak” (Crystal 2001) as a language variety, I focus on how Netspeak is conceived by speakers as related to English, written English, and Standard (in folk terms, “correct” or “good”) English. My paper will home in on two main aspects of the discourse in the data. First, Netspeak is framed as a distinct variety that is used online, which is also negatively valued in juxtaposition to Standard English (echoing Thurlow’s [2006] findings about mass media reports on computer-mediated communication). Second, while Netspeak is generally looked down upon, commenters often claim that it is acceptable so long as it is contained in the online sphere and does not leak into other domains of linguistic practice, including formal writing or spoken language.

I argue that such discourse erases any association of the internet with Standard English, and I suggest that what enables this erasure is the very existence of “Netspeak” as a linguistic artifact (after Preston 1996). The concept of “Netspeak” equates the variety strictly with online discourse: Netspeak happens online, and conversely, Standard English happens offline. The dominant ideology that values Standard English (see Milroy 2001) is reinforced by Standard English’s erasure from a specific field of discourse, protecting “good English” from the internet. I discuss the intersection of two sets of relevant ideologies: ideologies about language, wherein Standard English is to be valued and change is seen as socially threatening, and ideologies about the internet, which is considered a frightening or anomalous social space (Paradis 2005). This intersection is locatable in metadiscourse, a crucial mechanism in processes of erasure and ideological production.

Robin’s paper

“Why are hoomans so stupit?”: Written linguistic variation and blogging as the family dog
Despite significant interest in how written linguistic variation provides insights into various kinds of sociolinguistic processes (Preston 1985; Jaffe and Walton 2000; Preston 2000; Johnstone 2004; Nguyen 2005; Androutsopoulos 2000; Baron 2004; Herring and Paolillo 2006), the assumption has generally been that written variation represents writers’ ideologies concerning spoken variation and its associations with particular social characteristics. However, it is also possible to use written variation to denote social relations that have no clear antecedent in the spoken language. For instance, written variation has been used since at least the 19th century to represent beings who do not normally use language, such as family pets (Grier 2006). Unsurprisingly, there has been little previous attention paid to this kind of variation; however, focusing on the ways people construct the voice of a non-human animal opens a potentially important window into how social meaning generally becomes connected to, and manipulated by, linguistic variation. This is particularly true in the case of family dogs since dogs constitute an undeniable social “other” while at the same time constituting an intimate social interactant often considered to be a “member of the family.”

In this paper, I focus on data from weblogs written in the voice of the family dog, relying on a corpus of 20 blogs (422 posts; 88771 words) randomly selected from the Dogs with Blogs index (http://www.dogswithblogs.com.au). Specifically, I show that the use of phonetic respellings and other non-standard orthographic and grammatical elements represents a complex set of meanings tied to the representation of social difference on the one hand and social affiliation on the other. The linguistic elements include colloquial respellings (e.g. gonna); phonetic respellings (e.g. wuz), prosodic respellings (e.g. SOOOOO), graphic substitutions (e.g. 4 for “for”), non-standard grammar (e.g. it’s hards), novel pronouns (e.g. anydog) and kinship terminology (e.g. my human brother). I show that the dog’s voice depends on creatively using written variation to represent the social affiliation that humans typically have with their companion animals (e.g. Mom gave me her chicken skin jus cuz she luvs me) while simultaneously representing the unquestionable social (and essential) differences between dogs and humans (e.g. my peepol are always doing the wierdest stuff. i will never unnerstand them.) Because a focus on voicing non-human animals forces the examination of linguistic variation independently of human social configurations, such as gender, ethnicity or social class, it necessarily turns attention to a more generalized model of the relationship between linguistic variation and social meaning based more broadly on social differentiation and affiliation. By examining a practice such as dog blogging, this study provides new insights into exactly these meanings and heeds a recent call by Kohn (2007) to explore the semiotic processes that emerge out of human entanglements with other living beings, especially companion animals.

Chris Odato’s QRP, “Revisiting off-target verbosity:  The effect of discourse context and speaker identity,” has been accepted by his readers and he is now advanced to Doctoral candidacy.

Brook Hefright’s Qualifying Research Paper, “The People in the Gayborhood:  Metapragmatics in Language Crossing and Identity Construction,” has been accepted by his readers, and he is now advanced to Doctoral candidacy. 

Katherine Chen successfully defended her dissertation, “Linguistic Practices and Ideologies of Cantonese-English Bilinguals in Hong Kong” on Dec. 18, 2007.

The dissertation was co-chaired by Sally Thomason (Linguistics) and Judith Irvine (Anthropology).

Katherine will be leaving at the end of December to begin her new position as tenure-track faculty at the University of Hong Kong.

Lauren Squires (second-year PhD student) presented a paper last weekend at the first Interdisciplinary Conference on Culture, Language, and Social Practice, held at the University of Colorado-Boulder.  The conference brought together scholars from many different fields working within sociocultural linguistics, broadly defined.  Lauren’s talk, People who type ”lyk dis all da time”: exploring language ideologies and linguistic artifacts through meta-Netspeak, addressed metadiscourse about language and the internet.

Abstract 
Linguistic variation in computer-mediated discourse (CMD) has received the recent attention of scholars seeking more adequate sociolinguistic approaches to studying the internet (e.g. Paolillo 2001; Raclaw & Squires 2006). This research has worked with impoverished knowledge about speakers’ linguistic orientations to the internet and to text-based variation in general. The internet’s effects on language seem to be of great concern to English speakers around the world, as is well-documented in Thurlow’s (2006) analysis of media reportage about CMD. Yet despite documentation of linguistic variation in online practice (Baron 2005; Raclaw 2006; Squires 2007), there is little analysis of internet users’ own understandings of such variation.

This project explores folk perceptions of CMD, taking folk metalanguage as a fruitful site of language ideologies (see Blommaert & Verschueren 1998; Niedzielski & Preston 2003; Coupland & Jaworski 2004). My point of departure is an interrogation of the concept represented by terms like “Netspeak”: a distinctive variety of language used in CMD (Crystal 2001). I analyze two English-language comment threads formed in response to a published college newspaper column about the internet’s negative effects on English. The threads’ topic is explicitly language used online, hence they represent a fertile source of focused, naturalistic metadiscourse. I first discuss the profile of Netspeak that emerges from the comments: what features does it consist of, and who speaks it? I find that features such as acronyms (< LOL > for < laugh out loud >) and rebus-like letter replacements (< u > for < you >) are highly salient and often subsumed under evaluative categories like “bad grammar,” and that speakers often attribute Netspeak to teenage girls and lazy people. I next discuss language-ideological underpinnings of the comments, namely that “good English” exists and is in danger, though the internet is just one factor contributing to its demise.

Situating this speaker-produced metadiscourse within a larger context of institutionally-driven public discourse about the internet and English, I suggest that these differently-sited metadiscourses echo one another to construct Netspeak as a linguistic artifact (after Preston 1996). In the construction of Netspeak, variation is ignored; of particular interest is the erasure of standard English practiced online, since “Netspeak” effectively equates internet discourse with nonstandard language. The dominant ideology of standard English is reinforced by erasure of the ideologically dominant variety (itself an artifact) from a specific field of discourse, protecting “good English” from the perceived dangers of the internet–a feared social space (see Paradis 2005). I hope to illustrate that language ideologies set sociolinguistic parameters for licensing variation in practice, but that both discourse (linguistic practice) and metadiscourse (talk about practice) are also active mechanisms of ideological production. In explicitly relating ideologies, discourse, and metadiscourse in this way, we are compelled to attend to the dialogue between metadiscourse from different layers of social interaction.

Lauren will be presenting a related paper next week at the 8th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, held in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Her paper will be part of a themed panel she organized, called Mediating Play: Perspectives on Playful Language in Online Discourse.

CLASP-goers take a break from talking about sociocultural linguistics: Madeleine Adkins (UCSB), Lauren Squires (UMich), Bryan Gordon (UMinnesota), Lal Zimman (CU-Boulder), Mary Bucholtz (UCSB), Norma Mendoza-Denton (UArizona), and Lauren Hall-Lew (Stanford). [photo by Jenny Davis]

Queen, Robin. 2007. Sociolinguistic Horizons: Language and Sexuality. Language and Linguistics Compass. Vol. 1, June 2007

Note: Language and Linguistics Compass is a new on-line journal from Blackwell. The first issue is available free through Sept. 30, 2007.

Abstract
In this essay, I examine the current state of research on the connections between language and sexuality and argue that the time has arrived for such research to adopt a more vigorous use of the scientific method, which will allow for testing the predictions made by the various theoretical interventions that have been proposed since the 1990s. I begin by outlining the major theoretical debate within the field, namely, the question of the place of social identity within a theory of language and sexuality and then detail several areas and trends in the research, including research focused on lexical and grammatical variation, language and sexual identity, language and heterosexuality, language and eroticism, and finally experimental approaches to language and sexuality. I conclude with a call for more integration of deductive and inductive approaches within the field.