Penelope Eckert

• PhD
• Professor at Stanford University

The study of iconic properties of language has been marginalized in linguistics, with the assumption that iconicity, linked with expressivity, is external to the grammar. Yet iconicity plays an essential role in sociolinguistic variation. At a basic level, repetition and phonetic intensification can intensify the indexicality of variables. Iconicit...

I present the extreme proposal that change spreads by virtue of its role in a system of social meaning. And since individuals cannot construct meaning on their own, they can play no elemental role in sound change. Based on ethnographic-variationist studies of sound change among preadolescents and adolescents, I challenge two common assumptions in t...

Cambridge Core - Sociolinguistics - Meaning and Linguistic Variation - by Penelope Eckert

Cambridge Core - Research Methods in Linguistics - edited by Robert J. Podesva

Research Methods in Linguistics - edited by Robert J. Podesva January 2014

The tradition of large-scale survey methodology in the study of variation has left a gap between the linguistic data and the social practice that yields these data. Since sociolinguistic surveys bring away little information about the communities that produce their linguistic data, correlations of linguistic variants with survey categories have bee...

Linguistic variation has consistently been found to have social meaning in its association with the status and stance of speakers in the context of interaction. This indexical function of variation can contribute to the advancement of ongoing linguistic change. Style shifting in individual sociolinguistic interviews is an indirect indication of soc...

en As the study of embodiment and multimodality in interaction grows in importance, there is a need for novel methodological approaches to understand how multimodal variables pattern together along social and contextual lines, and how they systematically coalesce in communicative meanings. In this work, we propose to adopt computational tools to ge...

Sociolinguistics is a dynamic field of research that explains the role and function of language in social life. This book offers the most substantial account available of the core contemporary ideas and arguments in sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on innovation and change. Bringing together original writing by more than twenty of the field's mos...

This paper examines social influences on the realization of voiced stops in inland California. We analyzed sociolinguistic interviews with 62 white residents from Redding, Merced, and Bakersfield (which mark the northern, middle, and southern points of California’s Central Valley), balanced for sex, class, age, and whether a speaker earns their liv...

This article traces the development of the most recent approach to the study of sociolinguistic variation and considers the theoretical issues it raises. This field has moved through three waves of analytic practice. The first focused on the spread of linguistic change, finding robust correlations between linguistic variables and macrosocial catego...

Gender has emerged as the primary social constraint in variation, but the complexities of correlations with a gender binary make it clear that gender must be examined as it interacts with other social constraints (e.g. class). Recent interest in sexuality as a social variable has emerged similarly to that found in studies of gender, with a problema...

Adolescence is of particular interest to sociolinguistics because it is the time when people are working to move beyond the family to construct identities based in the larger social order. Variation plays an important indexical role in this process and, as a result, adolescents lead in linguistic change. Systematic gender differences in variation b...

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 call...

Language and Gender is an introduction to the study of the relation between gender and language use, written by two leading experts in the field. This new edition, thoroughly updated and restructured, brings out more strongly an emphasis on practice and change, while retaining the broad scope of its predecessor and its accessible introductions whic...

The treatment of social meaning in sociolinguistic variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macrosociological categories of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore t...

This article locates variation in the social practice of a preadolescent cohort as it establishes an integrated status system in the move toward adolescence. Based in an emerging heterosexual market, the status system links gender with heterosexuality and power. It is argued that the emergence of the common female lead in sound change is located in...

I will show how two preadolescent girls use the quality of /o/ and of the nucleus of /ay/ to index affect. Most particularly, how they use backed and raised occurrences to express what one might generally (and inadequately) call negative affect, and fronted occurrences to express what one might call sweetness and light, or a kind of childhood innoc...

This paper argues for a focus on the social meaning of variation, based in a study of stylistic practice. It is common in the study of variation to interpret variables as reflections of speakers' membership in social categories. Others have argued more recently that variables are associated not with the categories themselves, but with stances and c...

The paper discusses the complex role of ethnicity in the construction of a peer-based social order in preadolescence, and argues that the indexical value of "ethnic" variables is constructed among, rather than simply within, ethnic groups, and hence incorporates concerns that span ethnic boundaries. In Northern California, white Anglo speech is sho...

Adolescence is of particular interest to sociolinguistics because it is the time when people are working to move beyond the family to construct identities based in the larger social order. Variation plays an important indexical role in this process and, as a result, adolescents lead in linguistic change. Systematic gender differences in variation b...

The study of language, gender, and sexuality has enthusiastically embraced the concept community of practice. Now the field needs to take the concept further in two directions: (1) The comparative direction examines different but similar kinds of communities of practice to explore generalizations about how practice contributes to the linguistic con...

A community of practice is a collection of people who engage on an ongoing basis in some common endeavor. Communities of practice emerge in response to common interest or position, and play an important role in forming their members' participation in, and orientation to, the world around them. They provide an accountable link, therefore, between th...

Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. Copyright by the author. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 2005.

Adolescence is defined by Webster's Third New International Dictionary as “the period … from puberty to maturity,” and it is, as Penelope Eckert notes, a time in which the construction and marking of identity through style are prominent, particularly in secondary schools. Language is a key resource in the process. Among the features associated with...

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This article focuses on the use of linguistic resources from the perspective of the creation and maintenance of adolescent groups and categories, and specifically on the use of aspects of verbal style in the creation and maintenance of distinctiveness. It explores the use of a variety of types of linguistic resources, phonological and grammatical v...

The field of sociolinguistic variation has not so far developed a coherent theory of the social meaning of variables. This is because it has also not developed a coherent theory of style. The neglect of both is an outgrowth of the roots of the study of variation in the study of dialects and linguistic change. Variables have been selected for study...

This is a new introduction to the study of the relation between gender and language use, written by two of the leading experts in the field. It covers the main topics, beginning with a clear discussion of gender and of the resources that the linguistic system offers for the construction of social meaning. The body of the book offers unprecedented b...

Gendered linguistic practices emerge as people engage in social practices that construct them not only as girls or boys, women or men – but also as, e.g., Asian American or heterosexually active. Adequate generalizations about gendered language use and explanations of such generalizations require understanding the place of particular linguistic pra...

The passage from late childhood to early adolescence is a key life stage in our culture, for it is during this period that the age cohort moves decisively into a peer-based social order. Because kids are quite consciously working out their social arrangements during this period, it is an ideal site for watching the actual process of co-construction...

might abstract from this as gender. Inthe following pages, I will briefly sketch a series of events and developments, as a

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

Differences between male and female participation in speech events are based in differences in gender roles in society as a whole. Fruitful discussion of such differences, therefore, must account for the function of male and female interaction within a social theoretical framework. Such an approach is taken here to girl talk, a typically female spe...

Speaker's sex has emerged as one of the most important social factors in the quantitative study of phonological variation. However, sex does not have a uniform effect on variables or even on variables that represent sound change in progress. This is because sex is not directly related to linguistic behavior but reflects complex social practice. The...

Detailed participant observation among Detroit area adolescents provides explanations for the mechanisms of the spread of sound change outward from urban areas and upward through the socioeconomic hierarchy. The use of local phonological variables in adolescence is determined by a social structure within the age cohort, dominated by two opposed, an...

Statistical studies can identify the demographic characteristics of the adolescent smoking population but cannot reveal how clusters of demographic categories combine in the culture of the community to form salient social categories, or how social processes link these categories to smoking and smoking-related behavior. Because smoking and smoking-r...

Dimensions of Sociolinguistics and Ethnolinguistics - HudsonR. A., Sociolinguistics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. 250. - Volume 10 Issue 2 - Penelope Eckert

Whereas diglossia has been traditionally viewed from a static, structural-functional perspective, it can be a force in language shift. The social characterization of two languages in a situation of diglossia is a function of the domains in which each of the languages is used. The extent to which the domains of one language are exclusively associate...

The corporate world's overwhelming reliance on classroom training reflects a common view of learning as separate from, and preparatory for, work. It also reflects a preoccupation with the development of individual skills and with the individual's acquisition of knowledge and information. This traditional, purely cognitive, view of learning—the view...

Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. Copyright by the author. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 2006.