This meeting will take place in the Mary Sunley Suite at St. Catherine's College, Oxford (OX1 3UJ). There will be signs directing you to the venue.
How do we adapt our grammar to communicate social detail? Do all working class people have a local dialect or are we able to adapt our language to communicate more subtle things about ourselves and our utterances? This talk seeks to answer these questions. Using data from an ethnographic study of high school girls, it demonstrates that we use grammatical variation to communicate alignments and to construct our social style or social identity. However, how and why we adapt our language is governed by our place in the social order. Engaging real life examples will show that grammatical variants, like negative concord (e.g. I didn’t do nothing to mean ‘I didn’t do anything’), have multiple interactional functions, but different people are more or less able (and more or less willing) to make use of these functions. This talk argues that, to truly understand how language works, we need to examine how three types of meaning – referential, pragmatic and social – interact. Understanding this spectrum of meaning (and its role in language acquisition) has implications for linguistic theory, but it has educational implications too, given that educational policy frequently asks young people to change their language style on demand.
