“My Vocal Cords are Made of Tweed”: Style-Shifting as Speaker Design
Keywords:
style shifting, intraspeaker variation, sociophonetics
Abstract
Intraspeaker variation is evaluated in terms of speaker design in a number of studies (Coupland 1985, Schilling-Estes 1998, Podesva 2008). This study explores possible motives for variation from a speaker design perspective through the analysis of three phonetic variables with differing social status. The variables occur in the speech of Stephen Fry, an intellectual whose public identity is closely linked with his Received Pronunciation (RP) speech. Fry uses more non-standard forms in contexts where his identity is more directly relevant, suggesting his desire to “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative” associations of the RP register (Meyerhoff 2011:28). However not all the data fit this pattern, demonstrating the need for a broad model of speaker design incorporating multiple motives for style-shifting. It is proposed that the use of linguistic variables with differing social evaluation can give insight into prioritisation of speaker motives in future speaker-centred studies.
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amazon.co.uk. 2006. Fry’s Potter [Interview Transcript]. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=49953.
Audacity Team. 2006. Audacity (Version 1.2.5) [Computer program]. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.
Austin, John. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Beal, Joan. 2009. “You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotheram”: Dialect and identity in British indie music. Journal of English Linguistics 37:223–240.
Bell, Alan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13:145–204.
Bell, Alan. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2011. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.2.12. Accessed 28 January 2011, URL http://www.praat.org/.
Bybee, Joan. 2002. Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation and Change 14:261–290.
Carroll, John B. 1970. An alternative to Juilland’s usage coefficient for lexical frequencies, and a proposal for a Standard Frequency Index (SFI). Computer Studies in the Humanities and Verbal Behaviour 3:61–5.
Chishick, Toby. 2011. The Fry effect [Blog post]. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL http://www.agenda21digital.com/blog/the-fry-effect.
Coupland, Nikolas. 1985. ‘Hark hark the lark’: Social motivations for phonological style-shifting. Language and Communication 5:153–171.
Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. Language, situation and the relational self: Theorising dialect-style in sociolinguistics. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. J. Rickford and P. Eckert, 185–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fry, Stephen. 2004. Moab is My Washpot. London: Arrow.
Fry, Stephen. 2008a. Broken Arm [February 20, Episode 1, Audio podcast]. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL http://itunes.apple.com.
Fry, Stephen. 2008b. Language [December 21, Series 2, Episode 3, Audio podcast]. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL http://itunes.apple.com/.
Fry, Stephen. 2012. Stephen Fry’s podgrams. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL www.stephenfry.com.
Giles, Howard. 1973. Accent mobility: A model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics 15:87–105.
Harrington, Jonathan, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Catherine Watson. 2000. Does the Queen speak the Queen’s English? Nature 408:927–28.
Harris, Jonathan. 2003. Wordcount [BNC frequency ranks]. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL www.wordcount.org.
Hazen, Kirk. 2006. IN/ING variable. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. K. Brown, 581–84. Oxford: Elsevier.
Houston, Ann. 1985. Continuity and change in English morphology: The variable (ING). Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Johnson, Daniel. 2009. Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3:359–383.
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, William. 1989. The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1:85–97.
Lausberg, Hedda, and Hans Sloetjes. 2009. Coding gestural behavior with the NEUROGES-ELAN system. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 41:841–849.
LePage, Robert, and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 2011. ELAN [Computer program]. Version 4.0.1. Accessed 23 February 2011, URL http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/.
Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2011. Introducing Sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge.
Milroy, James. 2001. Received Pronunciation: Who “receives” it and how long will it be “received”? Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36:15–33.
Milroy, Lesley. 2004. An essay in historical sociolinguistics?: On Donka Minkova’s “Philology, linguistics and the history of [hw]~[w]”. In Studies in the History of the English Language II, ed. A. Curzan and K. Emmons, 47–53. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Minkova, Donka. 2004. Philology, linguistics and the history of [hw]~[w]. In Studies in the History of the English Language II, ed. A. Curzan and K. Emmons, 7–46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Murray, R. 1997. Sound Change. In Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, ed. W. O’Grady, M. Dobrovolsky, and F. Katamba, 318–322. London: Longman.
Podesva, Robert. 2008. Three sources of stylistic meaning. Texas Linguistic Forum Proceedings of the Symposium about Language and Society – Austin (SALSA 15) 51:134–143.
Roach, Peter. 2004. British English: Received Pronunciation. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34:239–245.
Rowling, Joanne. 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury.
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. Investigating “self-conscious” speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language and Society 27:53–83.
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2002. Investigating stylistic variation. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J. Chambers and N. Schilling-Estes, 375–401. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stekelman, Gregory. 2010. Stephen Fry’s opinions are not so important [Blog post]. Accessed 3 December 2012, URL http://themanwhofellasleep.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/stephen-frys-opinions-are-not-important/.
Trudgill, Peter. 1983. Acts of conflicting identity: The sociolinguistics of British pop-song performance. In On dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives, ed. P. Trudgill, 141–160. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wells, John. 1982a. Accents of English 1: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wells, John. 1982b. Accents of English 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wells, John. 1994. The cockneyfication of R.P.? In Nonstandard Varieties of Language: Papers from the Stockholm Symposium, 11-13 April 1991, ed. G. Melchers and N. Johannesson, 198-205.
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03-Mar-2015
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