Linguistics Colloquium: Penelope Eckert
How do kids "acquire" social variation?
| What | Colloquium |
|---|---|
| When |
2009-11-04 03:30 PM
2009-11-04 05:00 PM
November 04, 2009 from 03:30 pm to 05:00 pm |
| Where | Alumni & Visitors Center: Founders Board Room |
| Contact Email | pmfarrell@ucdavis.edu |
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Professor Eckert, a
sociolinguist in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University,
is well known for her research on the social meaning of linguistic
variation. By means of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, she explores
the relation between variation, linguistic style, social identity and
social practice. Recent books include Language and Gender, with Sally McConnell-Ginet (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, edited with John Rickford (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (Blackwell, 2000).
Abstract
The early days of variation study viewed variation as reflecting adult social hierarchies, and as a social-semiotic system that one learned as one moved towards adulthood. As the focus broadened to take in adolescents, it became clear that variation is a resource for the construction of local social categories that articulate the adolescent life stage with the broader political economy. With this came the insight that variation does not index demographic categories directly, but indexes more local concerns that produce and reproduce those categories. This talk takes the insight a stage earlier. Adolescent studies deal with already set social categories that have a clear relation to the adult political economy. But how do they get there? Based on ethnographic/sociolinguistic work with a cohort of preadolescents, I will focus on variation in the passage from childhood to adolescence, arguing that kids originally learn variation in relation to childhood concerns ˆ most particularly domestic social relations and affect. As they move towards adolescence, these childhood concerns (and their expression in variation) enter into the development of adolescent concerns (and their expression in variation).
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