At svømme to gange i samme flod - om sammenlignelighed af sociolingvistiske interview i virkelig tid

Activity: Talk or presentation typesLecture and oral contribution

Frans Gregersen - Lecturer

 

You cannot step into the same river twice Heraclitus A study of change in real time involves (at least) two studies, an earlier study (S1) and a recent one (S2). But how can we be sure that the studies are comparable? If the answer is a simple: "Because we use the sociolinguistic interview as the central means of data collection", we are begging the question: How can we be sure that the sociolinguistic interview is the same speech event, then and now? The empirical question is this: Given S1 and S2, both of them involving sociolinguistic interviews, can we find any differences in their internal structure that can be significantly related to the time of recording? In the LANCHART project, one of our S1s is the Copenhagen Urban Sociolinguistics study (Gregersen and Pedersen eds. 1991, cf Wolfram 1995). In the S2, we conducted a panel study of a total of 46 informants clearly contrasted as to age, gender and social class. In the paper, we present the results of a study of the 92 sociolinguistic interviews. We have analyzed the interviews using a coding scheme which categorizes the discourse according to six activity types, eight types of interaction structure, eight speech genres and five macro speech act types. We report the major differences between the S1 and S2 interviews in terms of the speech event characteristics and on the basis of these results discuss the problem of comparability.

 

7 Aug 2007

Event (Conference)

TitleInternational Congress of Historicial Linguistics, ICHL
Date07/08/200707/08/2007
CityMontreal
Country/TerritoryCanada

ID: 4517298