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Example research essay topic: Lower Middle Class Tape Recorder - 1,394 words

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... rm and fair, where the next sound is not a vowel in the same word (as in very). At that time, New Yorkers sometimes used one variant and sometimes the other, which was of particular interest because the choice seemed to represent a change currently taking place, as New Yorkers moved from the previous norm of consistent (r): &# 61597; (as in British RP) towards a new and relatively consistent (r): [r] (as in many other United States accents). The study of linguistic changes currently taking place has been one of Labov's recurrent interests, ever since his Martha's Vineyard work).

Labov predicted that the proportion of (r): &# 61597; would be highest in the speech of older people (since (r): [r] is an innovation), and of lower-status people (since the new standard, (r): [r], is the result of influence from the high-status community outside New York). He farther predicted that (r): &# 61597; would be most frequent when speakers were paying least attention to their speech, since they would then be worrying less about how their hearers were assessing their social status; and finally that the linguistic context of (r) would influence the variant used, (r): &# 61597; being favoured more by a following consonant than by a following word-boundary as could be predicted on general phonetic grounds from the widespread tendencies to simplify consonant clusters. The results of Labov's survey were that the amount of r increases by social class and by formality of style. However, there is one noticeable exception: Lower middle class speakers outperform the upper middle class speakers on word-lists and pairs. Labov calls this a crossover in the graph an explains it as the phenomenon of hypercorrection. Lower middle class speakers realise how prestigious r-pronunciation is and therefore outperform the next highest social class, whenever they are able to monitor their speech, that is in word-lists and list of pairs.

Another investigation is that by James and Lesley Milroy in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The methods used are quite different from those of the classical Labovian approach. The main difference between the Milroy's work and that of Labov is that Lesley Milroy, who did most of the field-work, was accepted as a friend by the groups whose speech she studied, which made it unnecessary to use the formal interview, technique. This had the great attraction that it was possible to study genuinely casual speech, as used between friends, because the researcher's presence did not increase the formality of the situation.

By becoming a friend of the people one is investigating one becomes part of a network of relations among them, and can use the structure of this network as social data to which speech may be related. In her study, Lesley Milroy concentrated on the speech of working-class people in Belfast, only. Three specific working-class areas were selected, between which there were important differences still. Two were unambiguously Protestant and one Catholic, and in one of the Protestant areas the traditional local industry, the ship-yard, was still employing local men, whereas the traditional employer of men in the other Protestant area and the Catholic area was -the linen industry, which has declined, leaving men either unemployed or travelling outside the area to work. As a result of her efforts, Lesley Milroy became accepted as a friend who could 'drop in' at certain houses at any time, to sit in the kitchen listening or taking part in the conversation for as long as she wanted and even to use her tape-recorder, after explaining that she was interested in Belfast speech. Under such circumstances it seems unlikely that her presence, or even that of the tape-recorder, affected the way in which people spoke.

The most obvious source of influence on linguistic variables is the speaker himself, i. e. the kind of person he is and the experiences he has had. An individual's use of a linguistic variable depends on the degree to which he is influenced by one or more norms in his society. The Milroy's have specifically investigated this aspect of variation.

They selected their speakers through personal introduction s within a network of contacts, and they were able to spend a great deal of time in the households concerned, getting to know the structure of their social relations. The three communities studied were all typical poor working-class areas, and many of the families involved were typically working-class in being part of a 'closed network', a network of people who have more contacts with other members of the same network than with people outside it. This affects the kinds of relations they have, for, in a traditional working-class area, ties of friendship, work, neighbourhood and kinship will all reinforce one another. One effect of belonging to such a closed network is that people are very closely constrained by its behavioural norms and there is consequently little variation between members in their behaviour (or at least in the norms which they accept). Conversely, people who do not belong to a closed network, or who belong to a network united by fewer types o bond, might be expected to show a relatively low degree of conformity to the speech norms of any closed network. Some of the people the Milroy's recorded were from extremely closed networks, but others had looser relations to the community.

Each speaker was therefore scored for the 'strength' of the network connecting him or her to the other members - a so-called 'network strength score' (NSS), which was calculated by taking account of five factors, for example, whether or not the person concerned has substantial ties of kinship in the neighbourhood, and whether he worked at the same place as at least two other people from the area. Five of the eight linguistic variables studied showed an overall correlation with NSS, i. e. were influenced by NSS in all subsections of the communities studied - whereas the other three were influenced by network strength in some subsections, though not in all. It is also possible to use the NSS to connect scores on some linguistic variables with known facts about social structure. For instance, there are clear differences between males and females for most of the variables in Belfast, and equally there are differences in NSS, where men score higher than women.

Since the sex differences on linguistic variables show that men use more of the core variants than women, sex differences on the linguistic variables can be explained as an automatic consequence of differences on the network strength variable, and consequently we need no longer postulate sex as an independent social factor influencing this linguistic variable. The theory of networks provides an easy answer: assuming that men go out to work more than women do, and that they work with men from their own neighbourhood, men form more work body than women, but have roughly the same number of other bonds. Overall, therefore, their networks have more bonds and their NSS will thus be higher. The differences in speech can therefore be explained, more or less directly, with reference to differences in employment patterns. Linguists have tended to select relatively focussed communities for their studies, and have consequently constructed theories of language which have relatively little room for variability. Even in the small, closely knit communities studied by the Milroy's, there was a considerable amount of variation in detail, so we may expect relatively gross variation in more diffuse communities.

But the results of the Milroy's remain: the stronger the social network, the greater the use of certain linguistic features of the vernacular. Milroy's hypothesis: a close knit network has the capacity to function as a norm enforcement mechanism, could be confirmed. They also stated beforehand that a close knit network structure appears to be very common in low status communities. Low-status varieties enable those who use them to show their solidarity with one another and achieve some kind of group identity. Sociolinguistics studies have only a short history in the canon of linguistic sciences and there remain some open questions that are worth to be asked.

I. e. what social forces kept these norms alive and do they influence the middle or higher class? Can the same phenomenons of the Milroy's research be seen in the middle class too? We may look forward to understanding these processes better after a few more decades of sociolinguistic research.


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Research essay sample on Lower Middle Class Tape Recorder

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