Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh
LING 2267: Sociolinguistics
Instructor:
Dr. Scott Kiesling
Office: CL 2822
Phone: 624-5916
Email: kiesling@pitt.edu
Web: www.pitt.edu/~kiesling
Blackboard: http://courseweb.pitt.edu
Office hours: MF 2:30-4pm and by appointment
Meetings:
Monday, Wednesday 1-2:15pm
WWPH 5P57
Objectives
We will investigate the social basis of language, and the linguistic basis of social life:
what happens when languages come into contact, how dialects form, how and why
language changes, and how and why different social groups (age, gender, ethnicity, class)
speak differently. We will also consider how people manage to carry on fluent,
competent conversations, and how they convey their social relationships with their
interlocutors in those conversations.
Texts
Primary texts:
1. Downes, William. 1998. Language and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. ISBN 0-521-45663-0. Call No. P40 .D65 1998.
2. Articles as noted. These will be available in the department office for copying, and on
reserve in Hillman for 2 hour loan.
Supplementary text:
1. Coupland, Nikolas and Adam Jaworski. 1997. Sociolinguistics: A Reader and
Coursebook. New York: St. Martin's Press. P40 S5775 1997.
Requirements
Class participation and tutorials
Worth 40% of your grade. We will generally begin a week with a new background
reading. This will be followed by a workshop or discussion of a particular article, the
written component of which will be due on Friday. These written components will be part
of a weekly participation grade; in other words, you will be graded as much on effort as
on skill for the in-class assessments.
Written assignments
Worth 30% of your grade. These two assignments will ask you to apply the concepts
learned by gathering and analyzing original data. The first assignment will be on
discourse, the second on variation. Both have a data and analysis component; descriptions
of the assignments will be distributed separately. The assignments are due 21 October
and 25 November.
Final project
Worth 30% of your grade. For this project, you have some latitude in topic and approach,
but in general I would like you to collect some original data, analyze it, and relate it to
some of the larger issues we discuss throughout the semester. The data and to some
extent the analysis portions can be done in groups. You are also welcome to expand one
of your written assignments into a larger project. There are some topics for which
secondary data will be appropriate, such as language planning projects. You should be
thinking throughout the semester what your topic will be; at the very latest I would like to
have a topic proposal from you by November 11.
Calendar
Readings in (parentheses) are optional; in italics are from Coupland and Jaworski
Mtg
Date
Topic
Reading/Assignment Due
1
26 Aug
2
28 Aug
Goals and Principles of
Sociolinguistic Analysis
Indexicality and address terms
3
4
2 Sep
4 Sep
NO CLASS
Indexicality and Address Terms
Duranti p. 204-213
5
6
9 Sep
11 Sep
Discourse Goals & Methods
Transcription
(Duranti 122-154)
16 Sep
Discourse Structures
Downes 275-287, 294-301,
368-384
Discourse and Context
Downes 301-308, 384-402
(Saville-Troike)
Assignment 1 DATA due
Discourse Strategies
Downes 288-294 (Brown &
Levinson, Tannen, Herbert)
7
8
18 Sep
23 Sep
9
10
11
Downes Ch. 1
25 Sep
30 Sep
2 Oct
12
13
14
7 Oct
9 Oct
15
16
14 Oct
16 Oct
NO CLASS
NO CLASS
17
18
21 Oct
23 Oct
Language Choice
Assignment 1 due
Downes Ch. 2-3 (Gal)
19
28 Oct
30 Oct
Sociolinguistic Variation:
Goals & Methods
Downes Ch. 4 (Milroy, Wolfram
and Fasold)
Variation Patterns
Downes Ch. 6 (all articles in Part
III of Coupland and Jaworski)
11 Nov
13 Nov
Style shifting and code-switching
Assignment 2 DATA due
Kiesling & Schilling-Estes
(Giles & Powesland, Bell)
18 Nov
Meaning and explanation in
variation
Kiesling (Hewstone & Giles,
Edwards)
20
4 Nov
21
22
23
6 Nov
24
25
26
20 Nov
27
28
25 Nov
27 Nov
2 Dec
29
30
4 Dec
31
9 Dec
Assignment 2 due
NO CLASS
Language, Identity, and Social
Meaning
Downes Ch. 11
Final Papers Due
Bibliography:
Below are the full references for the readings in the calendar, with the exception of the
two texts.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language
Usage. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 55-84. P40.5 E75B76 1987
Duranti, Allessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University
Press. pp. 204-213, 122-154. P35 .D87 1997
Kiesling, Scott. Forthcoming. Intersections of norms and gender. In Handbook of
Language and Gender, Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds). Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers. Photocopy on reserve.
Kiesling, Scott and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. Language style as identity
construction: A Footing and framing approach. Poster presented at NWAVE-27.
Photocopy on reserve.