Saturday, January 22, 2011

Social and linguistic variables

Social often involves studies making use of quantative analasys which establishes correlations between certain social and linguistic variables. In many cases once a sample of sppeech data has ben obtained from a groupe of speakers representing particular social catagories, the emphasis is subsquently almost entirely on quantifying, formalizing and analyzing the linguistic variables. For example words, like singing and fishing are sometimes pronounced as singin and fishin. The final sound in these words may be called the linguistic variables (ng) with its two variants singing and singin. Another linguistic variable can be the cases of re-pronounciations. In words like farm and far, sometimes it is given r-less pronunciations. Accordingly we have a linguistic variable (r) with two linguistic variants of (r) and zero. Like wise we also have a linguistic vaqriants [h] and zero pronunciations. The linguistic variable can also be seen at the syntactic level in black english such as the presence or absence of be with as the 3rd person singular subject the negative particle with multiple newgations.

1 comment: