Linguistic Variation and Change

Scott F. Kiesling is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published on a wide variety of sociolinguistic projects. Through analyses of language in use in a number of different populations and places, he has focused on understanding how speakers create social meaning with language.

• ContentsList of figuresList of tablesPreliminaries and acknowledgementsTerminology and Notation conventionsPhonetic notationPart I: Questions and method1 Questions about language and variation, and where we got themQuestions about languageWhere we got the questions: From comparative philology to variationist theoriesOrderly heterogeneity and constraints on its form2 The Linguistic Variable Definitions and typesLinguistic variables at different linguistic levels Variable rules and their 'quiet demise'Criticisms of the notion of linguistic variableThe tyranny of correlation and the problem of atomization3 Discovering and Describing patterns of variation and changeEthical linguisticsFinding language to measureSpeech communities and samplingGetting speech: interviews and other talkRecording and managing recordingsCoding variablesDescribing patternsFinding structure in variabilityTesting statistical significance and modelling variationPart II: Variation and social relationships4 Social patterns I: Interspeaker variationStratificationCanonical patterns: AccommodationCanonical patterns: DifferentiationChallenges to canonical patterns5 Social patterns II: Intraspeaker variationIntraspeaker patterns, community patterns, and styleSpeech event, register, genre, frameStance and identity6 Meaning and social patternsIndexicality: Meaning in the sociolinguistic variableExperimental evidence for meaningIndexical webs, cycles, and fieldsDimensions of social meaning in language7 Acquisition of variationHow is variation learned?Early childhoodOlder children and adolescentsAdulthoodTransmission and incrementation of changesPart III: Variation, change and linguistic structureIntroduction to Part III8 Structural patterns I: Phonology and MorphologyPhonological variation: Patterns of change, structural effects, and explanationChange in progressShifts and chain shiftsMergersRegular

Kiesling succeeds in beginning most chapters with guiding, thought-provoking questions, outlining topics discussed in previous sections or chapters, presenting what will be discussed subsequently, and linking the previous and forthcoming theories or concepts together. He also explains findings and conclusions in technical and plain language and buttresses complex ideas with helpful examples that are sometimes related to personal hypothetical situations… This book will be particularly fitting as a textbook for introducing graduate students to linguistic variation for the first time.