Saturday, January 22, 2011

Sociolinguistics methodology

Sociolinguistics methodology : Often it is claimed that sociolinguistics has lacked a convincing theoretical model within which to situated and explain its findings. While sociolinguistics have shown the importance of heterogeneity and developed powerful stastistical methods for analyzing it, some critics have claimed that they have not really explained it. There has been some confusion in sociolinguistic discussions about what it means to explain something, as about cause and effect.This is particularly true in studies making use of quantitative certain social and linguistic variables. Infact it is almost paradoxical that for many this kind of speech data has been obtained from a group of speakers representing particular social catagories such as class, gender etc. are taken as given and the social context which motivated the collection of data in the first place is often lost sight of in the final product within such stastical studies it is often easy to forget that speakeakers create and interpret language rather than merely respond passively to variables such as style, social class membership etc.

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