英语专业毕业论文：社会语言学.doc

The definition of Sociolinguistics and its Characteristic外语系06接本6班 尹珊珊 24号AbstractSociolinguistics is a term including the aspects of linguistics applied toward the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations. It ranges from the study of the wide variety of dialects across a given region down to the analysis between the way men and women speak to one another. Sociolinguistics often shows us the humorous realities of human speech and how a dialect of a given language can often describe the age, sex, and social class of the speaker; it codes the social function of a language.Key words sociolinguistics sociolinguistics variation social functionContentSociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individual socio-economic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, and language usage varies among social classes. It is socialists that sociolinguistics studies.The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determine language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations. Sociolinguistic differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latters focus is on the languages effect on the society. While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few fundamental concepts on which most sociolinguistic inquiries depend.Sociolinguistics is different from many of the other branches of linguistics in that it studies external as opposed to internal language. Internal language applies to the study of language on the abstract level, or in the head, put simply. External language applies to language in social contexts, or outside the head. This distinction is important, because internal language analyses, such as syntax and semantics, operate on the assumption that all native speakers of a language are quite homogeneous in how they process and perceive language. External language fields, such as sociolinguistics, attempt to explain why this is in fact not the case. These two approaches, while distinct, complement each other in practice.Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the social networks in which language is embedded. This may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but also to the inter-personal level of neighborhoods or a single family.Sociolinguistics as a field distinct from dialectology was pioneered through the study of language variation in urban areas. Whereas dialectology studies the geographic distribution of language variation, sociolinguistics focuses on other sources of variation, among them class. Class and occupation is one of the most important linguistic markers found in society.One of the fundamental findings of sociolinguistics, which has been hard to disprove, is that class and language variety are related. As can be implied from the example below, the working class tends to speak less standard language. The lower, middle, and upper middle class will in turn speak closer to the standard. However, the upper class, even members of the upper middle class, may often speak less standard than the middle class. This is because not only class, but class aspirations, are important.Men and women, on average, tend to use slightly different language styles. These differences tend to be quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, to say that women make more minimal responses than men is akin to saying that men are taller than women. The initial identification of a womens register was by Robin Lakoff in 1975, who argued that the style of language served to maintain womens role in society. A later refinement of this argument was that gender differences in language reflected a power difference. However, both these perspective have the language style of men as normative, implying that womens style is inferior. More recently, Deborah Tannen has compared gender differences in language as more similar to cultural differences. Comparing conversational goals, she argued that men have a report style, aiming to communicate factual information, whereas women have a rapport style, more concerned with building and maintaining relationships. Such differences are pervasive across mediums, including face-to-face conversation, written essays of primary school children, email, and even toilet graffiti. Communication styles are always a product of context, and as such, gender differences tend to be most pronounced in single-gender groups. One explanation for this, is that people accommodate their language towards the style of the person they are interacting with. Thus, in a mixed-gender group, gender differences tend to be less pronounced. A similarly important observation is that this accommodation is usually towards the language style, not the gender of the person. That is, a polite and empathic male will tend to be accommodated to on the basis of their being polite and empathic, rather than their being male.Sociolinguistics has drawn more and more attention since it became an independent discipline in mid 1960s. But scholars from various disciplines look at sociolinguistics from different perspectives, and carry out sociolinguistic stud