Sociolinguistics and Discourse 3500-JIS-2-SiD
The course combines sociolinguistic and discursive approaches to trace patterns of social life in speakers’ choices of linguistic structures. Research tools of classical and interactional sociolinguistics as well as discourse analysis are applied to show how language mediates social exchange. Diverse strategies of interaction are discussed as means by which speakers build their social environments. The devices include speech sounds, words, grammatical structures, styles, dialects or codes, which define the people's social background in terms of their class, status, education, occupation, sex, gender, age, as well as regional or ethnic origin. The strategies are also indicative of the speakers’ discourse practices through which they build social networks, events, orders and domains.
During the course, special attention is given to the analysis of selected phenomena of English-language popular culture, in particular film and music, from the sociolinguistic perspective. The students are acquainted with major problems regarding the choice of a given variety of English for stylisation purposes, as well as typical trends involved in this type of style-shifting: Americanisation of British singing accent, the use of Cockney and other regional British accents or South American English stylisation. The analysis covers both phonological and socio-cultural factors, such as the overall image of a given artist or character, compared with phonetic stereotypes regarding a given variety, as well as the significance of musical genres, the lyrics or ideologies. The course focuses on accent stylisation from the perspective of the history of English-language popular culture. The examples of the above phenomena are discussed with regard to the film industry, e.g. Disney’s productions, as well as the music industry, starting from The Beatles and Bob Dylan, ending with Adele and Dizzee Rascal. In order to establish the significance and extent of potential stylisation, staged performance is compared with the spoken accent of a given artist.
The course involves learning activities such as: discussion, team work, the students’ presentations.
Type of course
Mode
Prerequisites (description)
Course coordinators
Assessment criteria
Assessment methods
The final grade comprises:
- continuous assessment: class attendance, active participation and being prepared for the classes, mini-tasks/quizzes on GC
- final oral exam
Assessment criteria
Satisfactory: the student was prepared for the classes and participated in in-class discussions
Good: the student was prepared for the classes, participated in in-class discussions and completed mini-tasks/quizzes on Google Classroom (scoring a minimum of 60%)
Very Good: the student was prepared for the classes, participated in in-class discussions, completed mini-tasks/quizzes on Google Classroom (scoring a minimum of 60%) and demonstrated a very good command of the course’s subject matter at the final oral exam.
Final oral exam is evaluated on the basis of the students’ command of the course’s subject matter and their achievement of the assumed learning outcomes. The students’ answers are scored and then graded in accordance with the following scale:
60-69% = 3
70-74% = 3+
75-84% = 4
85-89% = 4+
90-100% = 5
Bibliography
Obligatory sources (fragments):
Bell, Allan. 2014. The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Coupland, Nikolas and Jaworski, Adam. (eds). 1997. Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook, Houndmills: Macmillan Press
Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Sociolinguistics. A resource book for students. London and New York: Routledge.
Trudgill, Peter. 2000. Sociolinguistics: an introduction to language and society. London: Penguin books.
Wardhaugh, Ronald. 2006. An introduction to sociolinguistics (5th ed). Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell Publishing.
Additional sources:
Beal, Joan C. 2009. “You're not from New York City, you're from Rotherham”: Dialect and identity in British indie music. Journal of English Linguistics 37(3). 223-240.
Bell, Allan and Andy Gibson. 2011. Staging Language: An Introduction to the Sociolinguistics of Performance, Journal of
Sociolinguistics 15 (5). 555–572.
Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, Ben and Crystal, David. 2014. You Say Potato: A Book About Accents, New York: Macmillan.
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dobrow Julia R., Calvin L. Gidney. 1998. The Good, the Bad, and the Foreign: The Use of Dialect in Children's Animated
Television. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 557, 105-119.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gibson, Andy and Allan Bell. 2012. Popular Music Singing as Referee Design. [in]: Juan M. Hernández-Campoy and Juan A.
Cutillas-Espinosa (eds.), Style-Shifting in Public. New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation, 139-164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in Late-Modern Age. New York: Polity Press.
Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Konert-Panek, Monika. 2017. „Don't follow leaders, watch the pawking metaws”. Akcent Boba Dylana a tradycje muzyczne
amerykańskiego Południa, [in]: Nowe słowa w piosence. Źródła. Rozlewiska, Budzyńska-Łazarewicz M., Gajda K (eds.), Poznań: Fundacja Instytut Kultury Popularnej, 87-101.
Konert-Panek, Monika. 2017. Overshooting Americanisation. Accent stylisation in pop singing – acoustic properties of the BATH and TRAP vowels in focus, „Research in Language” 15 (4), 371-384.
Konert-Panek, Monika. 2018. Singing accent Americanisation in the light of frequency effects: LOT unrounding and PRICE
monophthongisation in focus. „Research in Language” 16:2, 155-168.
Lippi-Green, R. 2012. English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States (2nd ed.). London; New York: Routledge
Milroy, Leslie. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell.
Morrissey, Franz A. 2008. Liverpool to Louisiana in One Lyrical Line: Style Choice in British Rock, Pop and Folk Singing. [in]: Miriam A. and Jürg Strässler (eds.), Standards and Norms in the English Language, 195-220. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sackett S. J. 1979 Prestige Dialect and the Pop Singer American Speech 54 (3), 234-237.
Simpson, Paul. 1999. Language, Culture and Identity: With (another) look at accents in pop and rock singing, Multilingua 18(4). 343-367.
Trudgill, Peter. 1983. Acts of Conflicting Identity. The Sociolinguistics of British Pop-Song Pronunciation. In Peter Trudgill (ed.), On Dialect. Social and Geographical Perspectives, 141-160. Oxford: Blackwell
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: