Linguistique anglaise, variationisme

Résumé du document

Examen de linguistique anglaise sur le variationisme (Labov). Réponses détaillées à des questions de théorie et des exemples pratiques.

Extraits

[...] It would have been very easy not to notice this important phenomenon if the researchers had not rigorously mapped out their data on a variety of smaller coherent categories, regardless of previously identified predictive trends. Indeed, when variation was mapped on gender only, girls did use more standard variants on the whole. Though predictive models exist and have proven useful, they cannot account for the multiform individuality, and thus unpredictability, of all speakers. [...]

[...] Variation is a choice a speaker makes (to signal membership in a social group or other social phenomena) between two or more options that have the same denotative – but not the same social – meaning. It can be conscious or not, but it obeys general rules and has its own logic. Variation is distributed along various social lines, such as social categories (age, race, class, gender . ) or membership in a social network family, a workplace, an association . for instance. One of the earliest general trends Labov observed is that the higher the class of a speaker, the more standard their speech is. [...]

[...] Linguistic change can be studied synchronously by analyzing the speech of different living generations, and not only comparatively at different points in time. This statement by Chambers sums up variationist linguistics' central axiom, as explained above – except he is adding the crucial distinction “either broadly or narrowly”. Indeed, initially, variationism was concerned with broad “census categories” rather artificial, although productive, definition of social class, for instance) and was rather too blunt to explain many sociolinguistic facts, pertaining to smaller, more local groups that do not necessarily have much significance beyond a localized scale, environment, or time. [...]

[...] Indeed, previously, linguists worked in the abstract, off of intuitions. Labov made field studies necessary and commonplace, placing actual speakers at their center. He used questionnaires and interviews, attempting to elicit different types of speech (from casual conversation to the more formal, reading aloud) in different contexts (famously, he went to numerous department stores, acting as a simple client, to make employees pronounce the phrase 'fourth floor', as a means to study the distribution of the rhotic/its absence; it would have been difficult or impossible to recreate this spontaneous realization in an interview setting). [...]

[...] Yet this is only true of census categories, and is not enough to explain most finer aspects of variation. It can even obscure phenomena. Eschewing assumptions learned from previous studies, researchers on the “jocks and burnout” study discussed above took a finer look at their data. They noticed, contrary to what would seem most likely, that the group that used the most non-standard variables were “burnout burnout girls”, and not boys. To signal their membership to the most fringe group, they differentiated themselves from other girls even more than “burnout burnout” boys did with other boys. [...]