Social meaning in linguistic perception
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- As individuals position themselves and others in the social landscape, they use language to convey and to understand the social meanings indexed by linguistic forms. Research taking social meaning as central to the study of linguistic variation has shown that linguistic features are deployed as components of styles, or clusters of features, and speakers use these styles to enact particular personae, or social types. Though a majority of studies in this realm have focused on speakers' production of styles, semiotic links between styles and personae are formed, reproduced, and reinterpreted in the interactional space between the speaker, who produces these styles, and the listener, who construes them. This dissertation focuses on the listener perspective, exploring the cognitive underpinnings of links between social meaning and linguistic variation at various levels of awareness. This dissertation provides evidence that social meanings and linguistic features are inextricably intertwined in listener perceptions. The same links between a single linguistic feature (the backing of the TRAP vowel) and its social meanings are examined in four paradigms that range from more controlled to more automatic perceptual behavior, asking (1) how persona-based information can affect linguistic categorization, (2) when in processing links between social and linguistic information become evident, (3) how these links can affect memory (and thus, cognitive representations), and (4) the relation of all of these processes to explicit social evaluations. At all of these levels, I show that social meanings crucially shape the way that linguistic perceptions unfold. Specifically, I argue that the constructs of social personae are integral to the way that language is interpreted online, in interactions, advocating for movement beyond the heavy focus on macro-social information in studies of sociolinguistic perception. Further, I demonstrate gradience in listener awareness of feature-meaning links below the level of consciousness, showing that explicit social evaluations of language do not straightforwardly predict effects in more implicit perceptions.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | D'Onofrio, Annette | |
|---|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics. | |
| Primary advisor | Eckert, Penelope | |
| Primary advisor | Podesva, Robert | |
| Thesis advisor | Eckert, Penelope | |
| Thesis advisor | Podesva, Robert | |
| Thesis advisor | Sumner, Meghan | |
| Advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Annette D'Onofrio. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Annette Kumsun D'Onofrio
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...