Variation and third age: A sociolinguistic perspective

Style and Sociolinguistic Variation

Simulated consultations: a sociolinguistic perspective

BACKGROUND Assessment of consulting skills using simulated patients is widespread in medical education. Most research into such assessment is sited in a statistical paradigm that focuses on psychometric properties or replicability of such tests. Equally important, but less researched, is the question of how far consultations with simulated patients reflect real clinical encounters--for which so...

A sociolinguistic perspective on sociophonetic research

The four papers in this issue of the journal are jointly focused on two distinct themes: sociophonetics—the study of speakers and listeners’ sensitivity to the social context in which language is produced and perceived—and exemplar theory, as a way of explaining this behavior. In these comments, I will try to relate the findings in the first area to the field of sociolinguistics, and then relat...

Language Iconicity from Sociolinguistic Perspective

This paper offers a definition of language iconicity. And it studies it from a fresh perspective--sociolinguistics. The paper discusses it from the following five sections: social class corresponds to language diversity; traditional concept corresponds to word order iconicity and syntactic iconicity; intimity or estrangement corresponds to lexicalization; regional varieties correspond to differ...

Age Grading in Sociolinguistic Theory

Distinguishing linguistic change at the community level (‘generational change’) from linguistic change at the individual level (‘age grading’) is ‘‘one of the major issues in contemporary sociolinguistics’’ (Tagliamonte 2012:247). This article gives a brief history of the study of language change in the community, before turning to the types of linguistic behavior that have been observed across...