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Talk that counts: Age, gender, and social class differences in discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2007

Jennifer Smith
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow, Scotland, jennifer.smith@englang.arts.gla.ac.uk

Extract

Ronald K. S. Macaulay. Talk that counts: Age, gender, and social class differences in discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp 3–225.

In Talk that counts: Age, gender and social class differences in discourse, Ron Macaulay tackles two contentious but very different issues within Labovian Sociolinguistics. The first is the analysis of discourse level phenomena, specifically how to deal with ‘higher level’ variation within a quantitative paradigm. The second is Bernstein's (1971) restricted vs. elaborated code and the claim that middle class speakers have access to a more complex range of discourse structures when compared to lower class speakers. His findings on both are revealing.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

Bernstein, Basil (1971). Class, codes and control. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.CrossRef
Ito, Rika, & Tagliamonte, Sali (2003). Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 32(2):257279.Google Scholar
Linell, Per (2001). Dynamics of discourse or stability of structure: Sociolinguistics and the legacy from linguistics. In N. Coupland, S. Sarangi, & C. N. Candlin (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Social Theory, 10726. London: Pearson Education.