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1.9 Sociosituational variationAccent use is also a function of register, defined by Sanders (1993a: 27) as sociosituational variation, or variation dependent on the setting and the relationship between interlocutors. The complex of factors which determine the choice of register, as derived and elaborated by Sanders (1993: 38) from Offord (1990) in the context of French but obviously applicable to other languages, includes the age, sex, socioeconomic status, and regional background of both speaker and addressee, the degree of intimacy between the participants in the speech-event, and the formality of the situation (cf. Offord, 1990). Common observation shows that higher-status addressees are likely to call forth greater approximation to standard accents (and indeed hypercorrection (Labov, 1972b: 244) or “hyperadaptation” (Trudgill, 1994: 56, 67), while informal situations produce greater use of nonstandard accents and other spoken forms. While sociolinguists like Labov and Trudgill attempt to correlate phonological variables with social class, and Milroy with social networks, accommodation theory explores the ways speakers adjust their speech in relation to the speech of their interlocutors (Giles and Smith, 1979), with convergence or divergence taking place as a function of some of the sociosituational factors that have been listed. An important contribution to situational sociophonology is Le Page and Tabouret-Keller's (1985) concept of “acts of identity,” which offers an explanation of how and why speakers adjust, in any given situation, to the perceived norms of “imagined” communities (cf. Sebba, 1993: 126), given that they are strongly motivated to identify with those communities, and are able to modify their own behavior, including accent. Interlocutors” reactions, providing feedback, are also an important factor here, since it is well known that, for example, speakers of standard varieties who attempt to “accommodate” in the direction of nonstandard spoken forms are suspected of mockery, while accommodation in the other direction does not usually carry this implication.
The complexity of motivational and situational factors makes it difficult to apply in sociophonology the notion of implicational scales. According to this hypothesis, linguistic variables can be presented on an implicational scale that plots their relatedness, and enables predictions to be made, from the presence of one or more variables, about the likely presence of others. Though there may be some support for this in the field of syntax (for example), the greater instability of phonological compared with grammatical forms, the extent to which phonological features are controlled by their speakers and to which they are conscious of them, and the extent to which these features are salient in the social group concerned, make this whole notion much more problematical; see Chambers and Trudgill (1980: 152–61). Thus, for example, Barbour and Stevenson report (1990: 115) a study in which particular groups of speakers in parts of pre-unification Berlin were shown to use some specific sounds to give their speech a “Berlin tinge,” but without otherwise adapting their pronunciation in a
particular way.
1.10 Critical areas of influence
In English, a standard accent can be shown to enhance the credibility of a defendant or witness in a court case, and, as well as possibly being crucial to the outcome of a job interview, can even influence the kind of diagnosis a patient will receive from a doctor (Honey, 1989: 61, 190; on problems of sociolinguistic methodology in identifying the voices of speakers in legal proceedings, see J. Milroy, 1983). Indeed, sociophonology indicates that differences in accent – perhaps involving simply the differential use of postvocalic [r'], or word-initial [h], or [t]-glottalling – have the potential to be more decisive than other dialect features such as grammar or lexis, because they may be salient in every social encounter in daily life. That teachers’expectations may be unduly influenced by pupils’accents is attested by a vast literature (see especially Robinson, 1979). Such differences may also be exploited by politicians in order to create a particular public image: On Margaret Thatcher, Bob Hawke, Harold Wilson, and Arthur Scargill, see Honey (1989); on the French communist leader Georges Marchais see Durand (1993: 263).
Despite criticisms (Robinson, 1979: 223–6) of specific aspects of methodology, the work of William Labov (especially 1972b) remains the most valuable introduction to the significance of particular phonological variables in the USA, the techniques of their investigation, and the nature of sociophonological change. For Britain the best introduction, though not always the best interpretation, is to be found in the work of Peter Trudgill and his collaborators (Trudgill 1974, 1978, 1983a, b; but see also Robinson, 1979, and Petyt, 1980: 158–9) and the publications of Howard Giles and associates.
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