Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation

by Eckert

We cannot consider gender an independent variable, but must consider it in relation to other variations such as socioeconomic status, identity, and regional variation.

Eckert challenged Labov's generalization that women's speech is more conservative than men's by examining two groups of white teenagers at a Detroit high school. The groups were the jocks and the burnouts, who together accounted for about half the school's populations.

Eckert examined phonological variation among jock and burnout males and females. She found that there was a complex relationship between nonstandard vowels and identity, concluding that we cannot look at gender differences without examining the communities of practice in which the women and men use language.

Intensive and quotative all: something old, something new

by Rickford et al.

"the intensifier all is not new but has expanded in syntactic environments." quotative all is new and dates from CA in the 80s.

Intensifier all has been used since Old English, but has recently expanded its usage to before full verbs.

Rickford believed that quotative all was on the decline after peaking in the 1990s (I think he's probably wrong here).

In their corpus they found the most frequent intensifiers were: really- 52.3%, so- 18.9%, very- 9.4%, all- 7.4%, totally- 2.7%.

"intensifier all most frequently modifies present participles, PPs, and adjectives..."

Quotative all was the most frequent quotative among CA teenagers in 1990 and 1994, accounting for 45.9%. Quotative like: 17.5%. Unframed quotes: 15.9%. Say: 10.6%

All was much less likely to occur in 2005. Like: 69.3%. Say: 12%. Unframed: 10.7%. all: 4.3.%

Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language

by tagliamonte and denis in toronto

The authors studied thousands of IMs gathered from teen mentees in Toronto and analyzed quotatives, future modals, and abbreviations stereotyped as being IM language. The authors found that "Contrary to
expectation, speech has a more innovative profile in comparison to IM. The
incoming forms so, be like, and have to are all more frequent in the speech
data. At the same time, speech tends to be more vernacular, containing
higher rates of going to than will. In contrast, IM language is consistently more
varied, exhibiting a wider range of variants than speech and, in particular,
containing a higher proportion of standard forms than speech."

Haha is more commonly used than lol, despite popular perceptions.

Tagliamonte says that the "language police" are exaggerating the amount of lols and colloquialisms in IM speech and that IM speech has the same linguistic variation and change as written and spoken language.

It is a register where people can fuse formal and colloquial language and therefore is a free space, ripe for language innovation.