Joan Beal is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests are in the fields of History of English, Historical Sociolinguistics and Dialectology. Her publications include English In Modern Times 1700-1945 (Arnold, 2004), An Introduction to Regional Englishes (EUP 2010) and (with Lourdes Burbano-Elizondo and Carmen Llamas) Urban North-Eastern English: Tyneside to Teesside) (EUP 2012). She is a series editor for the De Gruyter Dialects of English series and is currently editing a volume of the new Cambridge History of the English Language.

ABSTRACT

INDEXICALITY, ENREGISTERMENT AND THIRD WAVE SOCIOHISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

The ‘third wave’ of sociolinguistics is characterized by a focus on the active agency of communities of practice in constructing social meaning via linguistic variation. Eckert describes the third wave as “in its infancy” (2012, 88), and Conde-Silvestre (2016) admits that “historically-oriented approaches within the third wave are, at the moment, scarce” but, as Conde-Silvestre’s paper and those in Kopaczyk and Jucker’s (2013) collection demonstrate, historical sociolinguistics is beginning to catch the third wave. Although the study of communities of practice has been the defining feature of third wave studies, two concepts that are essential to understanding the construction of social meaning from linguistic signs are those of indexicality and enregisterment. These terms have been used by Silverstein (2003) to account for different levels of awareness of the association between linguistic features and social characteristics on the part of speakers and hearers. Agha has developed and applied these concepts to explain “how the use of speech is interpreted in the light of […] value-systems” and “how particular systems of speech valorization come into existence in the first place and, once formed, exist as cultural phenomena over the course of some period for some locatable group of social persons” (2007, 15-16). Johnstone succinctly expresses the key research question for studies of indexicality and enregisterment: “How do particular words, ways of pronouncing words, grammatical patterns, and patterns of intonation come to point to particular identities and activities?” (2016, 632). In this session, we will explore the potential usefulness of indexicality and enregisterment as tools for historical sociolinguistics. After a discussion of the key concepts and methodology we will draw on historical evidence of metalinguistic and metapragmatic commentary to construct possible ‘indexical fields’ for historical varieties of English.

References and suggested reading

Agha, Asif. 2003. ‘The social life of cultural value’ Language and Communication 23: 231-273.

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beal, Joan. 2019. ‘Enregisterment and historical sociolinguistics’, in Jansen, Sandra and Lucia Siebers (eds.) Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 8-23.

Bergs, Alexander. 2005. Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421-1503). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo. 2016. “A 'Third-wave' Historical Sociolinguistic Approach to Late Middle English Correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters.” In Current Trends in Historical Sociolinguistics, ed. by Cinzia Russi, 46-66. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Cooper, Paul. 2013. Enregisterment in Historical Contexts: a Framework. University of Sheffield PhD Thesis. (Available on www.etheses.whiterose.ac.uk)

Eckert, Penelope. 2008. ‘Variation and the indexical field’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/ 4: 453-476.

Eckert, Penelope 2012. “Three waves of variation study: the emergence of meaning in the study of variation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87-100.