WINTER 2009 MEETING TIME AND LOCATION
South Hall 3519, TR 11:00-12:15
DESCRIPTION
Variationist sociolinguists have developed a rich range of theories and methods for analyzing linguistic forms--phonological, lexical, and grammatical--and their social meanings. Meanwhile, interactional researchers have created a vast toolkit for rigorously analyzing the unfolding of language within discourse. For the most part, however, these two fields have not entered into dialogue with each other. As a result, variationist sociolinguistic research focuses primarily on linguistic data extracted from its discourse context, while most conversation-analytic scholarship does not attend to the social semiotics of linguistic forms.
This course aims to redress this gap by drawing together sociolinguistic research on style, linguistic-anthropological theories of indexicality, and interactional methods of discourse analysis, as well as interdisciplinary work that spans these fields and others. The goal of the course is to establish clear empirical principles for discovering how linguistic forms are used to index interactional stances as well as social identities from moment to moment in discourse. The class provides a foundation in key theoretical concepts in various fields of sociocultural linguistics as well as hands-on experience in the close, contextualized analysis of linguistic data.
Linguistics 248 counts as a sociocultural linguistics course and can be taken for two quarters by those who need to fulfill the linguistics department's seminar requirement. It also counts toward the LISO (Language, Interaction, and Social Organization) interdisciplinary Ph.D. emphasis and the interdisciplinary Ph.D. emphasis in Applied Linguistics.
Prerequisite: Graduate standing in linguistics, education, sociology, communication, psychology, anthropology, modern languages, or a related field.