Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-15T14:39:04.243Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A gay paper: why should sociolinguistics bother with semantics?

Can sociolinguistic methods shed light on semantic variation and change in reference to the adjective gay?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2012

Justyna A. Robinson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The study of meaning and changes in meaning has enjoyed varying levels of popularity within linguistics. There have been periods during which the exploration of meaning was of prime importance. For instance, in the late 19th century scholars considered the exploration of the etymology of words to be crucial in their quest to find the ‘true’ meaning of lexemes (Geeraerts, 2010; Malkiel, 1993). There have also been periods where semantic analysis was considered redundant to linguistic investigation (Hockett, 1954: 152). In the past 20–30 years semantics has enjoyed a period of revival. This has been mainly led by the advances in cognitive linguistics (and to some extent, historical linguistics) as well by the innovations associated with the development of electronic corpora and computational methods for extracting and tracing changes in the behaviour of the lexicon (cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 168ff, 261ff). However, there are still areas of linguistics which hardly involve lexis in their theoretical and epistemological considerations. One such area is sociolinguistics.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 38 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aaron, J. E. 2010. ‘An awkward companion: disability and the semantic landscape of English lame.’ Journal of English Linguistics 38 (1), 25–55.Google Scholar
Algeo, J. 1990. ‘Semantic change.’ In Polomé, E. C. (ed.), Research Guide on Language Change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 399–408.Google Scholar
Allan, K. & Robinson, J. A. (eds.), 2012. Current Methods in Historical Semantics. Berlin/ Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Anderson, E. 2009. Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bailey, G. 2002. ‘Real and apparent time.’ In Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, P. & Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.), The Handbook of Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 312–32.Google Scholar
Beeching, K. 2005. ‘Politeness-induced semantic change. The case of quand même.’ Language Variation and Change 17, 155–80.Google Scholar
Bierwisch, M. 1989. ‘The semantics of gradation.’ In Bierwisch, M. & Lang, E. (eds.), Dimensional Adjectives. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 71–261.Google Scholar
Blashki, K. & Nichol, S. 2005. ‘Game geek's goss: Linguistic creativity in young males within an online university forum’. ‘Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3, 77–86.Google Scholar
Boberg, C. 2004. ‘Real and apparent time in language change: late adoption of changes in Montreal English.’ American Speech 79, 250–69.Google Scholar
British National Corpus, Version 3 (BNC XML Edition) (2007). Online at <http://www.sketchengine.co.uk> (Accessed January 1, 2009).+(Accessed+January+1,+2009).>Google Scholar
Burchfield, R. W. (ed.) 1996. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Burridge, K. 2004. Weeds in the Garden of Words. Further Observations on the Tangled History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Butters, R. R. 1998. ‘Cary Grant and the emergence of gay “homosexual”.’ Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 19, 188–204.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. & Pagliuca, W. 1987. ‘The evolution of future meaning.’ In Giacalone-Ramat, A., Carruba, O. & Bernini, G. (eds.), Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 109–22.Google Scholar
Campbell, L. 2004. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Second edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Carter, R., Goddard, A., Reah, D., Sanger, K. & Bowring, M. 2001. Working with Texts: A Core Introduction to Language Analysis, Second ed.London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cherry, R.L 1986. English Words from Latin and Greek Elements. Arizona University Press.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. 2007. ‘Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 11, 155–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, J.Fox, S., Kerswill, P. & Torgersen, E. 2008. ‘Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change. Linguistic innovation in London.’ Sociolinguistics 22, 123.Google Scholar
Coates, J. 2004. Women, Men and Language. 3rd edn.London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Coleman, J. 2012. The Life of Slang. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cook, P. & Hirst, G. 2011. ‘Automatic identification of words with novel but infrequent senses.’ In Gao, H. H. & Dong, M. (eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language Information and Computation (PACLIC 25), Singapore, pp. 265–74.Google Scholar
Crowley, T. 1997. An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Third edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J., Katamba, F., Kerswill, P., Wodak, R. & McEnery, T. (eds) 2009. English Language: Description, Variation and Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curzan, A. 2003. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cymbalista, P. 2009. ‘Cleopatra wore a bracelet gay– How words change their meanings?’ In Kleparski, G., Kiełtyka, R. & Więcławska-Szymańska, E. (eds), Mielec Anglistentag. Mielec, Rzeszów: NKJO in Mielec and Rzeszów University, pp. 20–37.Google Scholar
Davies, M. 2010. ‘The Corpus of Contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor of English.’ Literary and Linguistic Computing 25 (4), 447–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, P. 1998. ‘Gender and sociolinguistic variation.’ In Coates, J. (ed.), Language and Gender: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 64–75.Google Scholar
Eckert, P. 2008. ‘Variation and the indexical field.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 12, 453–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, P. 2012. ‘Three waves of variation study: the emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 81–100.Google Scholar
Finnegan, K. 2011. ‘Linguistic variation, stability and change in middle-class Sheffield English.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation. The University of Sheffield.Google Scholar
Frawley, W. 2003. Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Vols 1–4). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Geeraerts, D. 2010. Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Glynn, D. & Robinson, J. A. (eds) Forthcoming. Polysemy and Synonymy. Corpus Methods and Applications in Cognitive Semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gramley, S. & Pätzold, K.-M. 2004. A Survey of Modern English. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hasan, R. 1989. ‘Semantic variation and sociolinguistics.’ Australian Journal of Linguistics 9, 221–75.Google Scholar
Hasan, R. 1992. ‘Meaning in sociolinguistic theory.’ In Bolton, K. & Kwok, H. (eds), Sociolinguistics Today: International Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 80–119.Google Scholar
Hasan, R. (ed.) 2009. Semantic Variation: Meaning in Society and in Sociolinguistics. The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Hockett, C. F. 1954. Two Models of Grammatical Description. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Hopper, P. J. 1991. ‘On some principles of grammaticization.’ In Traugott, E. C. & Heine, B. (eds), Approaches to Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 17–35.Google Scholar
Hughes, G. 1991. Swearing. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hughes, G. 2009. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture. Maldon, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jing-Schmidt, Z. 2007. ‘Negativity bias in language: a cognitive-affective model of emotive intensifiers.’ Cognitive Linguistics 18 (3), 417–43.Google Scholar
Kay, C. J. & Allan, K. Forthcoming. English Historical Semantics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Kerswill, P. 2006. ‘Socio-economic class.’ In Llamas, C. & Stockwell, P. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge, pp. 51–61.Google Scholar
Labov, W. 1963. ‘The social motivations of a sound change.’ Word 19, 273–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, W. 1972. ‘The social motivation of a sound change.’ In Labov, W. (ed.), Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–42.Google Scholar
Labov, W. 1978. Where Does the Linguistic Variable Stop? A Response to Beatriz Lavandera. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.Google Scholar
Lalor, T. & Rendle-Short, J. 2007. ‘“That's so gay”: a contemporary use of gay in Australian English.’ Australian Journal of Linguistics, 27 (2), 147–73.Google Scholar
Lavandera, B. 1978. ‘Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop?’ Language in Society 7, 171–83.Google Scholar
Lehrer, A. 1992. ‘A theory of vocabulary structure: retrospectives and prospectives.’ In Pütz, M. (ed.), Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution: Studies in Honour of René Dirven on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 243–56.Google Scholar
Leith, D. 1997. A Social History of English. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Llamas, C. 1999. ‘A new methodology: data elicitation for social and regional variation studies.’ Leeds Working Papers in Phonetics and Linguistics 7, 95–118.Google Scholar
Mac an Ghaill, M. 1994. The Making of Men. Buckingham: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Macaulay, R. K. S. (2005). Talk that Counts: Age, Gender, and Social Class Differences in Discourse. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Macaulay, R. K. S. 2006. ‘Pure grammaticalization: the development of a teenage intensifier.’ Language Variation and Change 18, 267–83.Google Scholar
Malkiel, Y. 1993. Etymology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCormack, M. 2011. ‘The declining significance of homohysteria for male students in three sixth forms in the south of England.’ British Educational Research Journal, 37 (2), 337–53.Google Scholar
McMahon, A. M. S. 1994. Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, M. 2011. Introducing Sociolinguistics. Second edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Milligan, K. (ed.) 2002. ‘New uses of “gay”.’ LINGUIST List 13, 23 February. Online at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-498.html (Accessed July 1, 2012).Google Scholar
Millward, C. M. & Hayes, M. 2010. A Biography of the English Language, Third edition. Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
Milroy, L. & Milroy, J. 1992. ‘Social network and social class. Toward an integrated model.’ Language in Society 21, 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nerlich, B. & Clarke, D. D. 1992. ‘Semantic change: case studies based on traditional and cognitive semantics.’ Journal of Literary Semantics 21, 204–25.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, T. & Raumolin-Brunberg, H. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman.Google Scholar
O'Grady, W., Archibald, J., Aronoff, M. & Rees-Miller, J. (eds) 2005. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Fifth edition. Boston: Bedford / St Martin's.Google Scholar
Office for National Statistics 2008. Online at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/fng0908.pdf (Accessed January 1, 2010).Google Scholar
Office for National Statistics: Standard Occupational Classification 2000, Volume 2 – Coding Index 2000. London: The Stationery Office.Google Scholar
Oxford English Corpus 2008. Online at http://www.sketchengine.co.uk (Accessed January 1, 2009).Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online 2000. Online at http://dictionary.oed.com (Accessed June 1, 2012).Google Scholar
Pollack, W. 1998. Real Boys. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Pütz, M., Robinson, J. & Reif, M. (eds) 2012. ‘Cognitive sociolinguistics: social and cultural variation in cognition and language use.’ Special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 10 (2).Google Scholar
Radwanska-Williams, J. 1990. ‘Expression and communication as basic linguistic functions.’ Intercultural Communication Studies 3(1), 91–100.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, M. L. 2004. ‘“That's so gay!”: a study of the deployment of signifiers of sexual and gender identity in secondary school settings in Australia and the United States.’ Social Semiotics, 14 (3), 289–308.Google Scholar
Reif, M., Robinson, J. A. & Pütz, M. (eds) 2012. Variation in Language and Language Use: Sociolinguistic, Socio-cultural and Cognitive Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Robinson, J. A. 2010a. ‘Awesome insights into semantic variation.’ In Geeraerts, D., Kristiansen, G. & Piersman, Y. (eds), Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 85–110.Google Scholar
Robinson, J. A. 2010b. ‘Semantic variation and change in present-day English.’ Unpublished PhD Dissertation. The University of Sheffield. Available via http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2232/Google Scholar
Robinson, J. A. 2012. ‘A sociolinguistic perspective on semantic change.’ In Allan, K. & Robinson, J. A. (eds), Current Methods in Historical Semantics. Berlin/ Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 191–231.Google Scholar
Sankoff, G. 2006. ‘Apparent time and real time.’ In Brown, K. (ed.), Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 110–16.Google Scholar
Squire, K. 2000. ‘Cultural framing of computer/video games.’ Games Studies 2, 1–11.Google Scholar
Stenström, A.-B. 2000. ‘It's enough funny, man: intensifiers in teenage talk.’ In Kirk, J. M. (ed.), Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 177–90.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weinreich, U., Labov, W. & Herzog, M. I. 1968. ‘Empirical foundations for a theory of language change.’ In Lehmann, W. P. & Malkiel, Y. (eds), Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 97–195.Google Scholar
Wijaya, D. T. & Yeniterzi, R. 2011. ‘Understanding semantic change of words over centuries.’ Proceedings of the 2011 International Workshop on Detecting and Exploiting Cultural Diversity on the Social Web. New York: ACM, pp. 35–40.Google Scholar
Wong, A. D. 2002. ‘The semantic derogation of tongzhi: a synchronic perspective.’ In Campbell-Kibler, K., Podesva, R., Roberts, S. J. & Wong, A. D. (eds), Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford, California: CSLI, pp. 161–74.Google Scholar
Wong, A. D. 2006. ‘Tongzhi, ideologies, and semantic change.’ Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 42, 303–17.Google Scholar