Linguistics 212 – Introduction to Language, Culture, and Society Reed College, Spring 2015 Performing Arts Building 131 Section 1: TTH 10:30-11:50 Section 2: TTH 1:10-2:30

Kara Becker Vollum 125 [email protected] Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-4pm, Wednesdays, 10am-12pm (and by appointment) ______Prerequisite The prerequisite for this course is Linguistics 211: Introduction to Linguistic Analysis. ______Course Description This course is the second semester in the Linguistics Department’s yearlong Introduction to Linguistics. Building off key themes from Linguistics 211, we consider the inclusion of social aspects of language in linguistic inquiry – the dialogue between langue and parole. This course is presented as a survey of the central themes in the study of language and society. We will explore theoretical notions (variation, change, ideology, indexicality), methodologies for gathering sociolinguistic data, perspectives on sociolinguistic analysis at the level of the group (speech communities, communities of practice) and the individual (style, audience design, social practice), and the role of identity and social categories in sociolinguistics (age, race/ethnicity, gender). Students will collect original data and write short research write-ups, moving from a collaborative data project to a final research project of each student’s choosing. Conference. Fulfills Group B. ______Course Requirements

Project 1, Rapid Anonymous: 25% As a class, we will conduct rapid anonymous interviews and gather data on a linguistic variable. Fieldwork will be conducted individually and then compiled into a class database. Each student will then analyze and submit a 5-page (max) paper that presents a sociolinguistic analysis of some aspect of these data.

Project 2, Style: 25% Each student will create transcripts and conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of stylistic variation, and submit a 5-page (max) research write-up.

Project 3: 30% (Final Project) Your final project will be a research project. You will select a topic or variable of study, gather data on that variable, and submit a write-up of your research that is no longer than 10 pages.

Participation: 20% Participation in conference is, as always, critical to the success of the course. Come to class prepared to demonstrate the effort you put in to preparing our readings and to engage with your colleagues. Ask questions, connect concepts and readings, and clarify and/or expand on what others say in class.

Required: Contribute 4 sociolinguistic artifacts over the course of the semester: http://reed.edu/slx-artifacts/

An artifact is a piece of media (song, youtube video, news article, photo, etc.) that you feel relates to and/or enhances some concept from class discussion. In posting an artifact you need to contextualize it by explaining why you chose it (i.e. how it relates to class discussion). There are no deadlines for submitting an artifact.

Discussion Leading: In the second half of the course, each of you will serve as discussion leader for a particular day’s readings.

Course Policies

On Absences: Regular and prepared conferencing is essential to the success of the course. Once you have missed two weeks of class – whether or not your absences are excused – you will have missed two much material and will not receive credit for this course. If a condition is chronic, appropriate documentation and reasonable accommodations should be considered in consultation with both me and the Disability Support Services office. A notice from Student Services that are you are absent because of an illness or are taking a formal emergency absence does not mean that you are excused from meeting any of the requirements of this course. If you must be absent due to health or an emergency, it is your responsibility to catch up on missed material.

On Accommodations: If you are a student with a disability and believe you will need accommodation for this class, it is your responsibility to contact and register with Disability Support Services and provide them with documentation of your disability, so that they can determine what accommodations are appropriate for your situation. With your permission they will discuss with me those reasonable and appropriate accommodations. To avoid any delay you should contact the DSS office as early as possible in the semester, and contact me for assistance in developing a plan to address your academic needs in this course. Please note that accommodations are not retroactive and that reasonable disability accommodations cannot be provided until I have received an accommodation letter from the DSS office. You can reach Disability Support Services at (503) 517-7921 or [email protected]

On Incompletes: I don’t give them except in the case of an acute, extreme emergency or health crisis that interrupts what otherwise was good work in this course.

On Late Work/Extensions: You are entitled to one 24-hour extension on a due date in this course, no questions asked. Otherwise, any late work drops a full letter grade for every 24 hours past the deadline.

On Names and Pronouns: I will happily honor your preferred name and pronouns and expect all class members to do the same.

Course Outline Links to readings can be found on our course Moodle page.

Week One. Studying language in use. Tuesday 1.27 1. De Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Selections from A Course in General Linguistics. (8-20). Thursday 1.31 1 Hymes, Dell. 1974. Chapter 3, Why Linguistics needs the Sociologist, from Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. (69-81) 2 Fischer, John. 1958. Social Issues of the Choice of a Linguistic Variant. Optional Reading: Guy, Gregory R. 2011. Sociolinguistics and Formal Linguistics.

Week Two. Collecting Data Tuesday 2.3 1. Wolfram, Walt. 2011. Fieldwork methods in Language Variation. In the Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics. 296-309. 2. Labov, William. 1972. The social stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores. Thursday 2.4 1. Hall-Lew, Lauren, Elizabeth Coppack, and Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Indexing political persuasion: Variation in the Iraq vowels. American Speech 85 (1): 91-102. RA Project Discussion 1

Week Three. Variation and Change Tuesday 2.10 1. Mather, Patrick-Andre. The social stratification of /r/ in New York City: Labov’s Department Store Study revisited. Journal of English Linguistics 40 (4): 338-356. 2. Trudgill, Peter. 1972. Sex, covert prestige, and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. Language in Society 1(2): 179-195. Thursday 2.14 1. Harrington, Jonathan, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Catherine Watson. 2000. Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: An acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 30 (1-2): 63-78. 2. Variation in the Iraq vowels outside the public forum: The indexing of political persuasion reconsidered. American Speech 86 (2): 179-191. RA Project Discussion 2. *Due: Pilot Fieldwork for Project #1.

Week Four. Attitudes, Standards. Tuesday 2.17. 1. Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19: 273-309. 2. Milroy, James and Lesley Milory. 1985. Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. Chapter 1: Prescription and Standardization. Thursday 2.19. Standard Language Ideology 1. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982. Chapter 1 from Language and Symbolic Power, 43-65. 2. Preston, Dennis. 2002. Language with an Attitude. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change 40-66. Optional Reading: Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1994. Accent, Standard Language Ideology, and Discriminatory Pretext in the courts. Language in Society 23: 167-197. *Due Thursday: Fieldwork for Project #1

Week Five. Communities Tuesday 2.24. The Speech Community 1. Gumperz, John. 1968. The speech community. International encyclopedia of the social sciences. New York: Macmillan. 381-386. 2. Otheguy, Ricardo, Ana Celia Zentella, and David Livert. 2007. Language and dialect contact in Spanish in New York: Toward the formation of a speech community. Language 83 (4): 770-802. Thursday 2.26. Communities of Practice 1. Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1999. New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research. Language in Society 28: 185-201. 2. Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society 28: 203-223. **Due Friday 2.27 at 5pm: Project #1 Write-up**

Week Six. Individuals and Style Tuesday 3.3. Style and Attention to Speech 1. Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2004. Investigating stylistic variation. In J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.) The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden: Blackwell. 375 – 401. 2. Labov, William. 1972. Contextual Styles, from Sociolinguistic Patterns. 79-109. Thursday 3.5. Audience Design 1. Rickford, John R. and Faye McNair-Knox. 1994. Addressee- and Topic-influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study. In Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan (eds.) Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. 235-275. 2. Hay, Jennifer, Stefanie Jannedy, and Norma Mendoza-Denton. 1999. Oprah and /ay/: Lexical frequency, referee design, and style. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~jannedy/DOCS/icphs.html). *Project 2 is handed out

Week Seven. Tuesday 3.10. Style and Social Meaning 1. Eckert, Penelope. 2004. The meaning of style. Texas Linguistic Forum 47: 41-53. 2. Podesva, Robert J. 2007. Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11 (4): 478-504. Thursday 3.12. Discourse Style 1. D’arcy, Alexandra. 2007. Like and language ideologies: Disentangling fact from fiction. American Speech 82 (4): 386-419. 2. Bucholtz, Mary. 2000. The politics of transcription. Pragmatics 32: 1439-1465.

Week Eight. Tuesday 3.17. Crossing, Appropriation, Whiteness 1. Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3/4: 443-460. 2. Cutler, Cecilia. “Keeping it Real”: White hip-hoppers’ discourses of language, race, and authenticity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13 (2): 211-233. Thursday 3.19. Code-switching and Codes 1. Lo, Adrienne. 1999. Codeswitching, speech community membership, and the construction of ethnic identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3 (4): 461-479. 2. Gal, Susan. 1987. Codeswitching and consciousness in the European periphery. American Ethnologist 14 (4): 637-653. Optional Reading: Romaine, Suzanne. 1995. Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell. Chapters 1, Introduction to the study of bilingualism, and Chapter 2, The bilingual speech community. **Due Friday, March 20th at 5pm: Project Write-up #2

Week Nine. Happy Spring Break!

Week Ten. Indexicality Tuesday 3.31 1. Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. 2. Cameron, Deborah. 1997. Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. Language and masculinity. 47-64. Optional Reading: Lakoff, Robin. 1973. Language and women’s place. Language in Society 2: 45-80. Thursday 4.2 1. Gaudio, Rudolph P. 1994. Sounding gay: Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69: 30-57. 2. Zimman, Lal. 2014. The discursive construction of sex: Remaking and reclaiming the gendered body in talk about genitals among trans men. In Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender and Sexuality. 13-34.

Week Eleven. The Third Wave Tuesday 4.7 1. Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: the emergence of meaning in the sociolinguistic study of variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87-100. 2. Zhang. Qing. 2008. Rhotacization and the ‘Beijing Smooth Operator’: The social meaning of a linguistic variable. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(2): 201-222. Thursday 4.9 1. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23: 193-229. Optional Reading: Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the Indexical Field.

Week Twelve. Tuesday 4.14. Repertoires 1. Benor, Sarah. 2010. Ethnolinguistic Repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14 (2): 159-183. 2. Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15 (2): 151-196. Thursday 4.16. The CVS and Ethnicity 1. Fought, Carmen. 1999. A majority sound change in a minority community: /u/-fronting in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(1): 5-23 2. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Where do ethnolects stop? International Journal of Bilingualism 12 (1/2): 25-42.

Week Thirteen. Strategic Essentialization and Stigma Tuesday 4.21 1. Labov, William. 1969. The logic of nonstandard English. In Georgetown Monographs in Language and Linguistics 22. 2. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. Moral Panic in Oakland. In English with an Accent, 303-321. Thursday 4.23 1. Matsuda, Mari J. 1991. Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination law, and a jurisprudence for the last reconstruction. The Yale Law Journal 100 (5). Sections I - IV (pgs. 1329-1367).

Week Fourteen. Tuesday 4.28 1. Matsuda, Mari J. 1991. Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination law, and a jurisprudence for the last reconstruction. The Yale Law Journal 100 (5). Sections V to the end (pgs. 1367-1407). Thursday 4.30 Final Project Presentations

Final Papers are due Tuesday, May 12th, at 5pm

Additional Readings: Hill, Jane. 1999. Language, race, and white public space. American Anthropologist 100 (3): 680- 689. Inoue, Miyako. 2002. Gender, language, and modernity: Toward an effective history of Japanese women’s language. American Ethnologist 29 (2): 392-422.