Full Description
By the award-winning former president of the Linguistic Society of America, this collection of some of John Russell Rickford's pioneering works shows how linguists in sociolinguistics and creole studies can benefit from utilizing data, theories and methods from each other, as they more frequently did in the 1960s and 1970s, when both subfields, in their modern forms at least, were getting started. The volume addresses fundamental sociolinguistic topics such as social class, style, fieldwork, speech community, sociolinguistic competence and language attitudes with data from Guyanese and other Caribbean creoles. Recurrent concepts are also considered including language versatility, variation and change, vernacular use, school success and criminal justice in African America and the Caribbean, using models, case studies and methodologies from sociolinguistics. Theoretical and applied scholars, students apprehensive about sociolinguistic fieldwork, and those considering dynamic methods like implicational scaling about which little is written in linguistics textbooks, will find this volume invaluable. Includes a Foreword by Gillian Sankoff.
Contents
Foreword Gillian Sankoff; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Sociolinguistic fieldwork in a racial and political maelstrom: getting in, getting on, and primary recording instruments and techniques; 2. Symbol of powerlessness and degeneracy? Or symbol of solidarity and truth? Paradoxical attitudes towards pidgins and creoles with Elizabeth Closs Traugott; 3. 'Me Tarzan, you Jane!': cognition, expression and the creole speaker; 4. The haves and have nots: sociolinguistic surveys and the assessment of speaker competence; 5. Connections between sociolinguistics and pidgin-creole studies; 6. Implicational scales; 7. Variation and the versatility approach to language arts in schools and societies with Angela E. Rickford; 8. Le Page's theoretical and applied legacy in sociolinguistics and creole studies; 9. The social and the linguistic in sociolinguistic variation: Mii en noo (me ain' know); 10. A variationist approach to subject-aux question inversion in Bajan and other Caribbean creole Englishes, AAVE and Appalachian with Robin Melnick; 11. Situation: stylistic variation in sociolinguistic corpora and theory; 12. Language and linguistic on trial: hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the courtroom and beyond with Sharese King; 13 The continuing need for new approaches to social class analysis in sociolinguistics; 14. Concord and conflict in the speech community; 15. The joy of sociolinguistic fieldwork.
