Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics

by Penelope Eckert

Linguistic styles particularly variations in pronunciation, carry a wide range of meaning - from speakers' socio-economic class to their mood or stance in the moment. This book examines the development of the study of sociolinguistic variation, from early demographic studies to a focus on the construction of social meaning in stylistic practice. It traces the development of the 'Third Wave' approach to sociolinguistic variation, uncovering the stylistic practices that underlie broad societal patterns of change. Eckert charts the development of her thinking and of the emergence of a theoretical community around the 'Third Wave' approach to social meaning. Featuring brand new material alongside earlier seminal work, it provides a coherent account of the social meaning of linguistic variation.

Genres: Linguistics

218 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 5, 2018

About the author

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University in Stanford, California, where she holds the position of "Albert Ray Lang Professor of Linguistics". She is a prominent scholar of variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.

Reviews

[Nat]

At one of the weekly "coffee hours" in grad school (which always involved beer and chips but no coffee), Bill Wimsatt told me I should go read a bunch of sociolinguistics and say what that discipline's significance for debates in philosophy of language would be. I wish I had listened to him at the time--only now, 10 years after finishing, am I finding all this super cool work on linguistic variation that clearly has significance for how philosophers think about meaning.

As a speaker of the Anglo California ethnolect (discussed in Ch.10), I am particularly interested in the "California Vowel Shift" (whereby "dude" comes to sound like "djude" and "bitch" comes to sound like "batch"--Kelly exemplifies the shift in the classic Shoes youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3y...). I wasn't aware of the way the Anglo California ethnolect is opposed to Chicano Californian in various respects (see Ch.10).

I appreciate Eckert's biographical prefaces to the essays, where she explains the personal and material conditions under which each was written--e.g. as someone who had just been denied tenure (Ch.6), or who was being stalked (p.29), or having to secure outside funding for an interdisciplinary institute (p.123). And Eckert's ethnographic observations about high school and middle school are intensely evocative of the experience of those spaces--the descriptions of the group of girls complaining that none of the boys had "become cute over the summer" (p.120), or of the preppie girls at Palo Alto High School in 1985 giving a stylistic nod to the relatively independent-minded black-clad new wavers by adopting the convention of pegging their jeans (though not wearing black--that'd be too radical) are vivid enough to trigger flashbacks.

There is so much interesting material here for philosophers to chew on, so many underexplored phenomena, that nobody should feel obligated to write on the reference of singular terms ever again.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a sketch of the intellectual trajectory of arguably the most important scholar in sociolinguistics at the moment, Penny Eckert. Following her development from her work with William Labov and others in her graduate school days, through her participation in the Second Wave and into the creation and proliferation of Third Wave thought, the book succinctly and clearly explains sociolinguistics as a (sub)field in its entirety, from both a broad and personal perspective.