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Date: March 19, 2021
Date: March 19, 2021
Time: 16:30h
BIO
Dr Cooper's research focuses on how regional dialect features are enregistered in English. Enregisterment is a process whereby a repertoire or set of language features becomes overtly linked with social values (see also Agha 2003, Johnstone et al. 2006). These social values can include class membership, regional origin, or personality traits such as ‘friendliness’. Evidence for enregistered features can be seen in dialect writing (e.g. dialect poems, songs, or where dialect is represented in literature), as well as in metapragmatic discourse or ‘commentary’ on language in forums where language is discussed (newspapers, or online in social media posts on Twitter, for instance); or where dialect features are used on commodities such as dialect dictionaries or t-shirts. Further evidence of this kind can be gained from conducting interviews to elicit speakers’ knowledge of which language features are linked to what social values.
His current research looks at the enregisterment of Yorkshire dialect, both in historical contexts (via the study of nineteenth-century dialect writing) and today (via interviews with Yorkshire speakers, online surveys, and the study of modern dialect writing). He is also interested in Liverpool English, a.k.a. Scouse, and the social values associated with this variety. Additionally, he is looking at how both of these varieties are evaluated and used as linguistic resources in educational contexts by younger speakers.
Further information:
Enregisterment in historical contexts: nineteenth-century Yorkshire dialects
There has been a relatively stable repertoire of enregistered (Agha 2003) dialect features indexically linked with Yorkshire since at least the nineteenth century (Beal 2009). This repertoire can be observed in dialect literature and literary dialect, dialect dictionaries and glossaries, travel writing, and articles in popular magazines. These sources also include metalinguistic commentary which serves as evidence for third-order indexical awareness (Johnstone et al. 2006) of the social values associated with Yorkshire dialect by historical audiences (Cooper 2013).
In this paper I illustrate what nineteenth-century textual material can tell us about historical perceptions of the language features used to represent Yorkshire dialect in writing using the methodological framework for the study of historical enregisterment proposed by Cooper (2013). Moreover, these same historical sources highlight the existence of embedded enregistered repertoires associated with more localised areas in the county. Using a corpus of dialect literature and literary dialect as well as qualitative metacommentary I discuss the systematic differences in written representations of “Yorkshire” dialect from different parts of the county. I argue that the features that are represented and discussed most frequently and consistently are evidence of their enregisterment. That is, they were imbued with specific social values, particularly those relating to specific geographical areas within Yorkshire, to nineteenth-century audiences. I conclude that we can observe both a general “Yorkshire” repertoire as well as distinct repertoires of “Yorkshire” dialect, each corresponding to a different area in the region, which illustrates an awareness of distinct “Yorkshire” dialects in the nineteenth century.
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