Labov's Argument Analysis

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Introduction The quote in the title of this essay is by William Labov, a well-known man in the field of sociolinguistics. Style-shifting can be described as the act of changing ones standard linguistic style, or code-markers (Saville-Troike, 2003). It’s something all of us do, to varying degrees and it may occur when speaking to a specific social group, age group, authority or gender. When trying to figure out if this statement is correct or not, there are several factors one has to take into consideration. We’ll take a closer look on Labov’s work and how he reached this conclusion and other sociolinguistic theories that may have a different view. Argumentation Labov’s studies In the 1960s, Labov conducted an experiment in New York City with …show more content…

It builds on some aspects from the speech accommodation theory, for example that the speaker adjusts their speech to express some kind of connection to their addressee. The Audience Design model continues however to not just consider the addressee, but also other possible listeners. These are more exactly named auditors, the persons not directly addressed, but still participating in the conversation; over-hearers, the persons not participating in the conversation, but still known to be within hearing distance of it; and lastly the eavesdroppers, the ones not known to be there, but their possible presence would change the speaker’s speech patterns. (Chambers et al., …show more content…

What made exactly these to different from the others however was that they were broadcasted from the same studios, with the same individual newscasters, but for two different radio channels. The local channel, ZB, and a national one, YA. The results from these recordings showed that there was an apparent variation in some parts of the newsreaders’ speech that happened when they would read the news for the two different stations. This led Bell to the conclusion that there are at least four determining factors for style-shifting, the speaker, the setting, the topic or genre and the audience. When applying that to the example of the two stations in New Zealand, we find that the first three factors are constant and therefore the determiner for the variations had to be the change of audience. (Coupland,

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