Doing Sociolinguistics

A practical guide to data collection and analysis

Miriam Meyerhoff, Erik Schleef, Laurel MacKenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317527138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Doing Sociolinguistics: A practical guide to data collection and a nalysis provides an accessible introduction and guide to the methods of data collection and analysis in the field of sociolinguistics. It offers students the opportunity to engage directly with some of the foundational and more innovative work being done in the quantitative or variationist paradigm.

Divided into sixteen short chapters, Doing Sociolinguistics:

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• can be used as a core text in class or as an easy reference whilst undertaking research

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• walks readers through the different phases of a sociolinguistic project, providing all the knowledge and skills students will need to conduct their own analyses of language

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• features excerpts from key research articles; exercises with real data from the authors' own research; sample answers to the exercises; and further reading

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• is supported by the Routledge Sociolinguistics Companion website ( www.routledge.com/textbooks/meyerhoff ) which features further online exercises with sound files.

Designed to function as both a core text for methods classes in sociolinguistics and as a companion to the Routledge textbook Introducing Sociolinguistics, this book will be essential reading for all students studying and researching in this area.

Part I

Data collection

1 Finding a topic

Sometimes the hardest part of doing research is deciding on the topic. The task of honing a good topic is threefold: the topic has to appeal to you; you have to make it appeal to others; it has to be doable given the time and resources you have at your disposal.

We are going to start this book by running through some principles that will help you with each of these challenges. We’ll discuss how you might formulate a research topic, how you might motivate your research topic and how you might implement your research topic with a research plan. (Of course, the bulk of the rest of this book is devoted to how you might implement a topic, so in this chapter we’ll keep that part to the point.)

Formulating a research topic

There are six main ways researchers use to identify a satisfying research topic. One way to remember them is: career, idea, ‘not found here’ (observation), conflict, theory and further research.

Career

A lot of the angsting over choosing a research topic can be forestalled once you realise that the main reason for undertaking a research project is to benefit some kind of professional or career goal.

If you are simply looking for a research topic for a course you’re enrolled in, you might ask yourself what you plan to do with yourself after you finish this course (or, indeed, finish this degree). Are there skills that you would want to have to make these goals possible? If you have more substantial intellectual ambitions, you might ask yourself what you want to contribute to your subject area or what you want to learn more about within your discipline or across disciplines. How you answer these questions can play a major role in how you frame your research topic.

For example, suppose that you want to work in the media or do graduate training in journalism, you might decide that it would demonstrate interest and commitment if you were to analyse an example of mediated discourse, let’s say the structure and content of question-answer sequences in radio interviews. Or you might decide that it will be useful to be able to demonstrate skills in interviewing people.

If, on the other hand, you want to do speech and language therapy later on you might instead find it more interesting and helpful to analyse the discourse of doctor-patient interactions. Alternatively, you might want to undertake a detailed description of what’s normative speech for a minority speech community, e.g. how exactly are back vowels in Asian English pronounced (this sort of question is important because we need the norms of typically developing speakers to assess the emergence of atypical or pathological habits). Another option might be to do an acquisition study, where you track the development of one child over several months.

SKILLS VALUED IN LINGUISTICS GRADUATES

Sometimes people are not at all sure where they want to go next, but work by college and university careers offices tell us that Humanities and Social Science graduates are valued for:

• presentation and communication skills (effective written and spoken language);

• planning and management skills (planning a project, managing and completing it on time);

• problem-solving skills (being critical in analysing problems, flexibility in devising solutions and evaluating them);

• teamwork, collaboration and interpersonal skills (working effectively in a team, negotiation of planning, management and completion of a project, engaging with others and establishing rapport);

• leadership skills (learning to lead others effectively by understanding their strengths and needs);

• mastering information communications technology (word and data-processing to specialised software skills);

• data collection (e.g. designing and undertaking interviews, questionnaires, systematic observation, etc.);

• qualitative and quantitative skills of data processing and analysis (e.g. data analysis and at least some basic skills in inferential statistics);

• self-reliance, self-reflection, self-motivation and self-confidence.

Idea

Some research projects start with a very general idea. “I don’t know what to do. I think I’m interested in gender, like, in how women and men talk differently from each other.”

This is not a good topic as it stands – it’s far too broad. If you have an idea like this, the next step is to go to the literature and see what people have recently claimed, and make sure you define a topic that reflects recent developments in the field.

You might find, for instance, that some researchers (e.g. Cameron 2014; Freed 2014) have suggested that our obsession with gender differences tells us more about society than about language. Assuming that’s true, then you might pick a research topic where you analyse how the media builds up an ideology of language differences based on speaker sex/gender.

A study of recent work on gender and language should also highlight how much research questions in the field have changed over time. Researchers now are more concerned with finding out when, why and how different women and men use particular linguistic strategies. This might help shape more specific and tractable research questions. You could start from generalisations that have been made in the literature or the popular press (e.g. women give compliments/talk more than men; women lead certain sound changes and men follow) and you could see whether this holds in specific contexts or in a specific group of speakers you have access to.

Observation (‘Not found here’)

Another route that often leads to an engaging research topic is when the researcher has noticed something that occurs ‘here’ but not ‘there’. That is, it occurs in one context or with one speaker but not in others. For example, one of Erik’s students had noticed that people in Manchester sometimes produce a tap for their /r/ when it is intervocalic. Now she’d like to know whether everyone does this, whether it only occurs intervocalically and whether it is a change taking place in Manchester.

LOOK AND LISTEN

You may be surprised how generous your immediate community is in giving you research topics: pay attention to how people use language and how language is used around you.

Assessing conflicting claims

Another productive source of research questions is when you notice that two sources make competing claims. Does the data you have access to support one or the other? Are some claims associated with certain kinds of data? If so, what different data sources could help to assess the validity of that claim?

Testing theory

Some linguistic, social or cognitive theories lend themselves to quite specific theory-internal questions about the way we use language. For example, some researchers have asked how a generative theory of syntax could accommodate variation (Adger 2006; Embick 2008). Others have asked whether listeners’ expectations about the social attributes of a speaker affect what they ‘hear’ (Niedzielski 1999; Campbell-Kibler 2009). Different theories of human cognition model the way we share attention to forms and derive norms on the basis of that shared attention. Testing a theory that focuses on interaction might require that you frame a research topic so that it makes reference to social and visual channels of information. Testing theories that emphasise frequency of exposure might require you to have larger corpora so you can explore different measures of frequency.

Further research: jumping to conclusions

A final source of ideas for research topics may be the conclusion section in previously published papers. When they outline their conclusions, some researchers are as open and direct about what they haven’t addressed as about what they have addressed. These sorts of topics can be deeply satisfying because they allow you to make a meaningful contribution towards advancing a research tradition. Previous researchers do not always answer all their questions fully, or they may not be able to consider all factors that may influence language use. Sometimes open questions remain and researchers often highlight these gaps themselves in their data analysis and conclusion, so pay attention to these little hints researchers give you in their writing and follow them up. For example, Drager analyses factors influencing the phonetic realisation of discourse like. She includes a large number of variables in her statistical analysis, and these give us a good idea of what may influence the realisation of like. However, she does admit that an analysis of prosodic features may give additional depth to her analysis, so exploring the prosodic positions of like tokens may help explain differences in realisations of like across its different functions (Drager 2011: 705).

Motivating your research topic

For every research project, it is important to choose a topic because you think it will be fun. This may sound flip, but it really is important. It can sometimes be the crucial difference between pressing on and trying to finish (especially a longer project, like a PhD) and throwing in the towel and sitting the exams for law school, or the civil service.

But this is never all it can be. A good research topic must fill some sort of research niche. If you chose your topic because you had identified competing claims or the predictions about the way language can pattern internally, the niche is filled from the start. So the step of motivating your topic has to be foregrounded when your topic has been defined based on Career, Idea and Not found here topics.

Again, you will do this much better if you motivate your topic choice in the light of recent developments in the field. One of the most common flaws we have seen in students working with us is someone who has gone back to what was a key piece of literature in, say, 1975 and used that as the basis for formulating their research topic. Although it is very important to read the classic literature on a specific topic, sometimes this is a research topic that has been thoroughly outdated by developments in the field. The more recent literature on the topic may suggest new topics and these are much more satisfying for the researcher and their audience.

Drawing up a research plan

The final step in identifying a good research topic is to think about how much time you have and decide how much of that time you think you’ll need for data collection, analysis and write-up (all subjects of later chapters in this book). Before you start, it can be very helpful to have a rough idea about how long you can devote to the different stages in your project. This allows you to make principled adjustments to the scope of your research topic if, for some reason, you find yourself short on time.

EXERCISES

Exercise 1 – finding a topic and motivating it

Consider the following introductions, which have been extracted from research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. How did the authors find their research topic and how do they make a case for their research being interesting and important?

Mauritian Creole and language attitudes

On creole-speaking multilingual Mauritius, languages act as important markers of identity (Eriksen, 1998; Stein, 1982). In fact, most of the 12 languages present on the island are associated with specific ethnic and/or religious groups. The various languages can broadly be divided into three groups: ancestral languages (Indian and Chinese languages) whose usage is limited, colonial languages (English and French) and language of everyday interactions (Mauritian Creole/Kreol – see Note 1) (Rajah-Carrim, 2005). While most of these languages have a place in the education sector – as medium of instruction or subject – the native language of most Mauritians, Kreol, tends to be excluded from the classroom.

The teaching of languages has become a highly politicised issue in Mauritius. In 2004, the Minister of Education declared that Kreol would be officially introduced in the education system in the coming years. The new political leaders who came to power in 2005 are also committed to the promotion of Kreol. But how do the Mauritians themselves feel about the introduction of Kreol in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface and user guide
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Data collection
• Part II Data analysis
• Index