Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

{"title":"A Semiotic Approach to Social Meaning in Language","authors":"Anna M. Babel","doi":"10.1111/josl.12689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12689","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Linguistic awareness is a complex and multi-layered set of processes, existing in different forms of consciousness or knowledge. Social meaning resides in the ways that people perceive linguistic behavior as patterned and predictable, depending on their experience with, stereotypes about, and understanding of different groups. Ample evidence from experimental and ethnographic work indicates that sociolinguistic processes are actively engaged in the interactional construction of meaning. Furthermore, these processes hold material power over the world and how our positions in it are constructed. Theorizing these relationships is key to advancing research on sociolinguistic awareness and control and ultimately to understanding the complex linkages between language and social categorization, as evidenced in the contributions to this thematic issue. To illustrate these points, I present data from the Quechua–Spanish contact zone in Bolivia in which speakers report hearing differences in sounds that were not manipulated by the researchers in an experimental study. Second, I examine a case study in an educational setting in which Latinx students are categorized as English language learners based on racializing discourses and biased assessment tools. Both these examples demonstrate the importance of attending to listeners’ representations of socio + linguistic information, not only that which exists in a measurable way “in the world,” but that which is filled in by social expectation and pattern recognition at a sociocognitive level. I draw on semiotic theory, in particular the device of the <i>interpretant</i>, to argue that social information is perceived in dynamic and varied ways as part of the sign system that constitutes language. It is not something that is added on or filtered <i>after</i> linguistic information; indeed, the whole concept of “social vs. linguistic” is a false dichotomy that has led too many researchers astray. The interpretant incorporates elements of our theory of the world in our interpretation of signs and provides a third “leg” to the dualistic Saussurean sign–symbol relationship. That is, our perception of the relationship between sign and symbol is itself part of the sign. This recursive relationship helps us to access the sophisticated systems of social behavior and modeling that people contain and have knowledge of, information that not only assists them in interpreting but also plays a role in constructing meaning and content of socially laden signs. Social meaning resides in the ways that people perceive linguistic behavior as patterned and predictable, yet also dynamic and available for creative play. We cannot rely only on people's experience with, stereotypes about, and understanding of different groups but must also lean toward models that allow for creativity, innovation, and shifting hierarchies. These processes ultimately have material effects on our world and on the power structures that we inhabit and reprod","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"29 1","pages":"59-73"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12689","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143438869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to the Thematic Issue","authors":"Anna M. Babel,&nbsp;Kathryn Campbell-Kibler,&nbsp;Kevin B. McGowan","doi":"10.1111/josl.12690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12690","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The topics of awareness and control have been investigated for decades in sociolinguistics, but they have been approached in different ways, both theoretically and methodologically, in different corners of the subdiscipline. This has resulted in confusing and sometimes contradictory terminology, as well as divergent theoretical perspectives on what, exactly, is meant by these terms. As our understanding of the relationships between various social and cognitive systems has become more detailed and sophisticated, it has become increasingly urgent to untangle the overlapping and at times contradictory ways of understanding these concepts. For this reason, this Thematic Series responds to a need for further and more coherent development of the concept of awareness - and for coordination between different subfields of (socio)linguistics as we do so.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"29 1","pages":"44-58"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143438868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Place-Based Accentedness Ratings Do Not Predict Sensitivity to Regional Features","authors":"Kathryn Campbell-Kibler","doi":"10.1111/josl.12691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12691","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Discussions of sociolinguistic awareness are often about how patterns observed in one practice (often linguistic production) appear in others (often person perception or metalinguistic commentary). Models like Labov's indicator/marker/stereotype trichotomy force this complexity into a single dimension, due to presupposing a conscious/unconscious distinction unsupported in current cognitive psychology. A more effective approach takes a theoretical step back, asking basic questions about how analogous sociolinguistic meanings relate across activities. In this article, I do so by asking whether explicit verbal reports and speaker evaluations of accentedness in Ohio correlate in strength across individual language users. Such a correlation would suggest a shared representation and/or a shared learning process. A total of 1106 participants listened to Ohio talkers reading word lists of <span>trap</span>, <span>dress</span>, <span>lot</span>, or <span>goose</span> tokens. Participants rated each talker's accentedness, then the accentedness of seven Ohio places. The expected main effects emerged: southern and rural Ohio were most accented, then northern Ohio, and lastly cities and central Ohio. Likewise, the acoustic features influenced talker ratings. Crucially, however, these two effects largely did not interact: those most likely to describe northern (southern) Ohio as accented were no more or less sensitive to northern (southern) vowel features. These results support the small but growing evidence that indexical relationships are learned and used independently across linguistic practices. They also move us further from a unidimensional model of awareness toward an approach where different systems are treated independently.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"29 1","pages":"74-92"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12691","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143438870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Existential challenges and interactional sociolinguistics/linguistic ethnography","authors":"Ben Rampton","doi":"10.1111/josl.12685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12685","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;I am not a specialist in digital communication, and instead I do interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (henceforth ‘IS’ and ‘LE’), a syncretic research programme that draws &lt;i&gt;inter alia&lt;/i&gt; on linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis and Goffman, usually cross-referring to relevant work in other disciplines (Rampton, &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; IS/LE centres on the careful ethnographic observation, recording and analysis of embodied communication, and it investigates communication's embedding in a layered and interweaving multiplicity of social, cultural and material systems and processes. Depending on the questions and arguments that it is addressing, IS/LE certainly varies both in the forms of semiosis and the systems that it attends to (and I myself have tended to focus on spoken interaction in recreational and educational locales affected by racism, social class and securitisation). But when Helen Kelly-Holmes asks whether artificial intelligence (AI) now departs from ‘the known world for sociolinguistics’, it is a timely opportunity to reflect on the possibilities for—or indeed possibility &lt;i&gt;of&lt;/i&gt;—IS/LE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kelly-Holmes speaks of a ‘seismic shift’ in the scholarly universe, citing Jan Blommaert (&lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;, p. 7), who also advocated ‘an acute eye for change’, saying that ‘reality changes. The bastard changes all the time; society refuses to sit still’ (Blommaert &amp; Van de Aa, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;, p. 6). But Blommaert could also be rather equivocal about the significance of these changes, and elsewhere recommends less spectacular adaptations—‘we have to adjust… [and] what you do needs to be relevant, so don't go for the big recipes’ (2020, p. 6). Not knowing more about AI, I cannot gauge authoritatively the magnitude of its implications for IS/LE, but pursuing Blommaert's more muted second option, I can see several ways in which AI can remain a researchable empirical topic (Rampton, &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;, pp. 314–324).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of this can be studied empirically (Georgakopoulou et al., &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;). Yes, these technological developments are likely to stretch IS/LE's methodological repertoire, also warranting the formation of new interdisciplinary collaborations with, for example, different kinds of computer scientist. But digital processes like these are actually drawn into analytical salience by one of IS/LE's foundational preoccupations: ‘algorithmic knowledge and media ideologies are now – alongside other semiotic resources and language ideologies – central in &lt;i&gt;having a voice&lt;/i&gt;’ (Maly, &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;, p. 15; emphasis added).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At least two terms figure prominently in this shift, driven by reckonings not only with AI but also with coloniality and the climate emergency (Chakrabarty, &lt;span&gt;2012&lt;/span&gt;; Kell &amp; Budach, &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;; Pennycook, &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;). Post-humanism is one, inter alia proposing a ‘philosophical critique of the Western humanist ideal of the “man o","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"38-43"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12685","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142685278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Artificial intelligence and the future of sociolinguistic research: An African contextual review","authors":"Patience Afrakoma hMensa","doi":"10.1111/josl.12679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12679","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"26-30"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142691210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Language is not a data set—Why overcoming ideologies of dataism is more important than ever in the age of AI","authors":"Iker Erdocia,&nbsp;Bettina Migge,&nbsp;Britta Schneider","doi":"10.1111/josl.12680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12680","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Helen Kelly-Holmes’ call to explore the implications for sociolinguistics arising from the increased commercially driven digitalization of society is very timely. Like Kelly-Holmes, we share the view that the growing prevalence of online and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in all aspects of our lives requires a critical assessment of assumptions, approaches, and practices that have grounded sociolinguistic research since its inception. While our discussion confirms Helen's observations, we also urge the development of a general critical attitude toward understanding language as digital data. The starting point for our argument is Helen's claim that there is an erasure of “authentic” languages from public digital spaces, “making it more difficult to gather data on real usage because it would be necessary to rely on public areas and/or negotiate access to these private spaces” (p. 5). For us, her observation brings to the fore that treating language as data has always been problematic. We want to raise two issues: the general epistemological limitations of using digital user data as a representation of language and community, and the consequent need for methods that take seriously the study of language in its social, political, and technological context. We suggest ethnography as a method for understanding what speakers actually do, and an opening of language research to also consider the workings and socio-political embeddings of digital and generative AI language technologies. Our discussion is in the spirit of a joint fruitful and constructive debate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let us start with a general critique of approaching language as “data” that correlates with social groups, which is so far a neglected aspect in the debates surrounding language, sociolinguistics, and AI. Historically, this discussion links to the colonial backgrounds of Western science and linguistics specifically. Colonial or missionary linguistic research (e.g., Deumert &amp; Storch, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;; Errington, &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;) demonstrates that dominant Western epistemologies of language and research methods in linguistics were shaped during the period of European colonialism. An important legacy of European colonialism is that it “sought to fundamentally change and reorganize the social and economic order of the societies it colonized, as opposed to satisfy itself with extracting tribute” (Couldry &amp; Mejias, &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;, p. 70). Part of this endeavor involved language “development” activities aimed at the goal of Bible translation and turning the colonized into Christian disciples. This was based on constructions of language that are still dominant today. They developed on the grounds of “collecting data” (in colonial times, often from single speakers) and then transforming the human capacity of embodied, interactive and collaborative meaning-making into word lists, grammar books, or dictionaries (e.g., Deumert &amp; Storch, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;; Gal &amp; Irvine, ","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"20-25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12680","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142685266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Socio)linguistics and generative AI: Taking the reins as researchers and steering its use toward ethical outcomes","authors":"Matt Kessler,&nbsp;J. Elliott Casal","doi":"10.1111/josl.12682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12682","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"31-34"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142685277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fairness, Relationship, and Identity Construction in Human–AI Interaction","authors":"Jie Dong","doi":"10.1111/josl.12687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12687","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"35-37"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142691212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Claiming the research expertise on human–GenAI interaction for sociolinguistics","authors":"Kok-Sing Tang","doi":"10.1111/josl.12683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12683","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"16-19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142685300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AI, power and sociolinguistics","authors":"Ico Maly","doi":"10.1111/josl.12681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12681","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Ico Maly is associate professor Digital Culture Studies (Tilburg University, The Netherlands).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In her opening essay, Hellen Kelly-Holmes asks herself and us ‘how Artificial intelligence will change the way that sociolinguists carry out research’. Instead of giving a clear-cut answer to that question, I would like to take one step back. Before we can think about the concrete ways sociolinguists can use artificial intelligence (AI), it would not be a luxury to first have a sociolinguistic theory on AI. AI is not a neutral tool, it has its own epistemology, produces specific discourses and changes sociolinguistic environments. I do not pretend to have such a full-blown sociolinguistic theory of AI, but I would like to use this opportunity to give a first preliminary sketch of what such a sociolinguistic theorization of AI could look like.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Starting with the latter, it strikes me how Kelly-Holmes downplays her own work and states that ‘the writing (of ChatGPT) is substantially more correct than my own rambling’ (Kelly-Holmes, 2024). She is clearly not alone in such an assessment of AI. Most users of ChatGPT are equally impressed. It explains the success of the app among our students, and the world at large. By February 2023, the app had 100 million people using it on a weekly basis. And in 2024, that number would rise to 180 million. ChatGPT is now so omnipresent that we have to understand it as a &lt;i&gt;cultural force&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The discourses ChatGPT produces are being used in a vast number of fields: journalism, law, academia, marketing, politics and digital culture in general. And more, the app is now also embedded in social media like Instagram. Other companies have their own LLMs implemented in search engines, smartphones and social media platforms. AI generates language and is used to moderate language, to help you search, to give you a more personalized digital experience and much more. AI has become a central social structure (re)producing and policing language. And in that sense it gives direction to discourse and culture.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is exactly this success that warrants sociolinguistic attention as it has effects on individuals, society and language. On the most micro-level, understanding the relation between AI-produced language and society warrants studying it as interaction. When we do that, we see that users are entering a specific type of communicative relation with specific communicative norms. One entity—the human—is taking up the role of the one asking for information, placing the other—the AI—system in a position of knowledge. This framing of the AI bot as the producer of knowledge is a cultural format. It is steered by the example prompts on the ChatGPT website, but also by the many social media pages and YouTube videos that are dedicated to developing the ‘correct prompts’. The other side of the interaction—the chatbot—is programmed to respond in particular ways. This specifically programmed relation is inherent in the d","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"11-15"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12681","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142685299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}