Talk:Academia

Two very interesting articles: (1) Social categories and sociolinguistics, (2) Attribute networking -- Admin on behalf of anonymous contributor 18:28, 20 July 2011 (PDT)

I came across two very interesting articles and thought you might also be interested in them:

Sealey, Alison, and Bob Carter. 2001. Social categories and sociolinguistics: applying a realist approach. Language Contact Issues. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 152:1-19.

Dodsworth, Robin. 2005. Attribute networking: A technique for modeling social perceptions. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(2):225-253.

1. Sealey and Carter (2001)

In their article, Sealey and Carter (2001:1) argue "for a close collaboration between sociolinguistics and social theory, starting with the realist claim that empirical descriptions of the world are always incomplete, since the social world is not fully or directly intelligible to its inhabitants." The authors consider "how sociolinguistic research can take account of actors' own understandings and mobilizations of such categories while also embedding these within a theoretically adequate description of the social world".

More specifically, Sealey and Carter (2001:1f) argue "that the constitution of independent variables based on social categories is itself a task of theoretical description. Thus not only is the identification of such categories as "independent" problematic, but it also requires a defense of theoretical description itself. Second, we shall argue that the linear variable correlations often adduced in sociolinguistic research provide an insufficient description of social reality. Where such models are useful, we suggest, is in indicating empirically the `"traces" of causal relations, and we shall explore this idea in the context of proposing how a realist epistemology can inform methodology in sociolinguistic research."

What I find especially interesting is the authors' distinction between two kinds of categories: "those constituted by involuntaristic characteristics, and those characterized by some degree of choice on the part of the people who belong to them", social aggregates and social collectives, respectively.

In their discussion of the methodological implications of their approach, Sealey and Carter (2001:15) suggest that rather "than defining the problem as the correlation of linguistic variation with variations in speakers' membership of (theoretically defined) social categories, researchers might start from the case." As one example of such an approach, they mention Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, who "when they collected data from a random sample of children who had immigrated to Britain from the Caribbean." At the same time, though, Sealey and Carter (2001:15) point out that this "account runs the risk of giving too great a weight to self-definition, although for some research purposes self-defined social categories may be the most appropriate".

2. Dodsworth (2005)

When I read Sealey and Carter (2001), a fascinating article by Dodsworth (2005) came to my mind which I think exemplifies how one can start from the case rather than from preselected social categories.

Dodsworth (2005) wanted to investigate the distribution of two linguistic variables (/l/ vocalization; and (2) the phonetic realization of the before vowel-initial words) in a Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus (USA).

Rather than analyzing the elicited data (24 ethnographic interviews) according to preselected social categories, such as gender, age, education, etc., he applied an original network-based technique, attribute networking, to the interview data to systematically uncover and represent "community members' subjective conceptions of local social structures and processes" (p. 226).

I realize that in most cases we won't be able to conduct ethnographic interviews as Dodsworth conducted them, not to mention the anlaysis of hours and hours of recorded speech. Do you think though, that if modified, the approach Dodsworth (2005) describes has potential for our language survey work? How would you modify it? And what kind of implications, do you think, Sealey and Carter (2001) have for our work?