6.2 Style

Not only do some of the same linguistic features figure in patterns of both regional and social dialect differentiation, but they also display correlationswith other social factors.The intersection of social and stylistic continua is one of the most important findings of nowadays linguistics: namely, if a feature occurs more frequently in working-class speech, then it will occur more frequently in the informal speech of all speakers [16, p. 75]. The behaviour of each social class group varies according to

whether its style is casual or formal. Style can range from formal to informal depending on social context, relationship of the participants, social class, sex, age, physical environment and topic.Although each class has different average scores in each style, all groups style-shift in the same direction in their more formal speech style, that is, in the direction of the standard language [6, p. 11]. This similar behaviour can also be taken as an indication ofmembership in a speech community.All groups recognize the overt greater prestige of standard speech and shift towards it inmore formal styles. In this particular aspect the notion of formality is defined primarily in terms of the amount of attention speakers pay to their speech.

Style refers to ways of speaking – how speakers use the resource of language variation to make meaning in social encounters. Style therefore refers to the wide range of strategic actions and performances that speakers engage in, to construct themselves and their social lives [16, p. 76].

Stylistic differences can be reflected in vocabulary, as in “The teacher distributed the new books” versus “The teacher gave out the new books”; syntax, as in an increased use of the passive voice (in English) in formal speech (“The meeting was cancelled by the president” versus “The president called off the meeting”); and pronunciation (colloquial pronunciation such as “readin”, “singin” versus more formal ones such as “reading”, “singing”).

Principles of Linguistic Style stated by William Labov

1. Principle of Style-Shifting: There are no single-style speakers.

2. Principle of Formality: Any systematic observation defines a formal context inwhichmore than theminimal attention is paid to speech.

3. Vernacular Principle:The vernacular, in whichminimal attention is paid to speech, is the most regular in its structure and in its relation to the history of the language.

4. Principle of Attention: Styles may be ordered along a single dimension, measured by the amount of attention paid to speech.

5. Principle of Subordinate Shift: Speakers of subordinate dialects who are asked direct questions on language shift their speech irregularly towards or away from the superordinate dialect [9; 10].

Linguists generally define notions of language style and register primarily as sets of linguistic featureswith a particular social distribution. Notice that is not very different from how we define language, dialect or variety – the distinction is a bit vague. In Chambers [3, p. 5] this notion is implicit – he actually does not refer to sets of features directly or attempt to define style. He says style has “a simple social correlate, viz. formality”. Confusingly, he also uses the termto refer to this social dimension, which underlies the variation – but obviously, that should be kept separate from the linguistic elements. Allan Bell [2, p. 240] is somewhat clearer in emphasizing the linguistic elements: style is “the range of variation within the speech of an individual speaker”. Note that this does not do much to cut down the field either, e.g. it appears to include code-switching between two completely different languages as style-shifting.WaltWolfram & Natalie Schilling-Estes [21, p. 214] define language style quite similarly, as “variation in the speech of individual speakers”. Mac A. K. Halliday’s systemic-functionalist approach distinguishes two kinds of linguistic variation: 1) “according to the user” (what we normally think of as social dialect variation, where people speak differently because of some relatively permanent aspect of their identity as group members, such as ethnicity, region of

origin, or social class); 2) “according to the use”. He calls the second type of variation ‘register’ and includes in it what variationist sociolinguists mean by style [8, p. 14].

But most linguists have two kinds of variation by use inmind. They distinguish style from register, and mean something narrower by the latter – something characterized by less permanent aspects of people’s identities, such as their occupations (lawyers as in legalese, or firefighters, as in the lexicon of smoke-jumpers), or temporary roles

(an adult interacting with a child, as in baby-talk). To Suzanne Romaine, for example, registers are distinguished by differences in vocabulary, while also being typically “concerned with variation in language conditioned by uses rather than users and involving consideration of the situation or context of use” [16, p. 20]. It is notable that style is rarely explicitly defined [8 – 10; 16] and often only very broadly when it is [1; 2].