Meaning and Linguistic Variation

Penelope Eckert is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at Stanford University. She is author of Jocks and Burnouts (1990), Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (2000), co-editor of Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (Cambridge, 2002) with John R. Rickford and co-author of Language and Gender (Cambridge, 2013) with Sally McConnell-Ginet.

• Part I. Beginnings and Gascon: 1. The paradox of national language movements; 2. Diglossia: separate and unequal; 3. Back home; Part II. Jocks, Burnouts and the Second Wave: 4. Clothing and geography in a suburban high school; 5. Sound change and adolescent social structure; 6. The local and the extra-local; 7. Variation and a sense of place; 8. On the outs; 9. Communities of practice; 10. Liberated by gender; 11. The whole woman: sex and gender differences in variation; 12. Style; 13. Variation and personal/group style; 14. Back to elementary school; 15. Vowels and nailpolish: the emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace; Part III. The Third Wave: 16. Demystifying sexuality and desire; 17. /t/ release and beyond; 18. Agency; 19. Elephants in the room; 20. The nature of indexicality in variation; 21. Variation and the indexical field; 22. What kinds of signs are these?; 23. Where do ethnolects stop?; 24. The semiotic landscape; 25. Spreading vs circulation; 26. Where do we go from here?