Form and Meaning: Studies of Grammatical Variation and Communicative Choice in Spanish

Nikolas Coupland^*

Foreword

Social meaning is a diffuse notion. A quick online search reveals it to be a key notion across the humanities and social sciences. There is interest in the social meaning of baroque architecture, of gold shoes, and even of chewing gum! When it comes to language, where meaning is of course fundamentally implicated, the idea of social meaning remains challenging. One fundamental challenge is to locate the boundary between linguistic meaning and social meaning, if indeed any such boundary can cogently be said to exist at all.

The present book meets this challenge head-on. It is concerned with social aspects of linguistic variation at the level of grammar. In this connection it is worth remembering that linguists have historically propounded models of grammatical organisation that are only minimally social. A rigorous, socially-grounded account of grammar is therefore timely and welcome, particularly one that connects directly with contemporary priorities in sociolinguistics. Contributors to the present volume explore how formal choices in the morpho-syntax of Spanish contribute to subtle indexical meanings, in a range of social and cultural contexts. As a world language, Spanish of course lends itself to a project on this scale.

The discipline of sociolinguistics was founded, in part, as an effort to challenge the sort of a-sociality seen in dominant approaches to grammar, and to challenge the assumption that language can be analysed as a homogeneous, autonomous system. The political correlates of this approach mattered too. Sociolinguistics needed to challenge the assumption that only one way of using a given language—the one referred to as ‘standard’, in its grammar, lexis and its pronunciation—was socio-culturally valuable. As the editors of this collection point out, however, sociolinguistics has not settled on a specifically grammatical approach to variation—another challenge that this book takes on, both theoretically and empirically.

What aspects of social meaning, then, should sociolinguistics interrogate? There is no simple answer, but what is clear is that we need to enlarge what we might call ‘the indexical envelope’, relative to early designs. It is well known that William Labov’s foundational research treated social meaning as a narrow set of connotative associations between specific linguistic features, treated as variables, and a narrow range of socio-structural categories—social class, gender and levels of contextual formality. Associations to place and time could also be established through Labov’s methods, and the paradigm has been truly ground-breaking and enormously influential.

Yet what is most striking, in retrospect, is the sheer complexity of potential social indexicalities in the contemporary world, relative to those contemplated in early sociolinguistics. For example, both class and sex/gender in most western societies have become less linear and more multi-dimensional. Social status does not map cleanly onto occupation or wealth in the way it arguably once did. For example, the attribution ‘posh’, at least in Britain, is nowadays just as likely to be made in deprecation as in deference. Vernacular practices (and speech) find new forms of credibility and appeal, as we might expect in highly mediated, individualised, celebrity-dominated societies. So-called informality is often a valued and marketable quality of interaction, as we might expect in people-facing, service-sector work domains. Linkages between place and speech are inevitably complicated by increased mobility, and new antagonisms have emerged between globalist and nationalist priorities. These are just some of the complex and changing social fields in which contemporary linguistic indexicalities function.

A rational response is to home in on specific clusters of variable linguistic options and on specific genres and domains of language use, as opposed to presupposing highly generalised models of linguistic and social structure. This closer focus is the approach I think we see in the present book. The chapters illustrate the very considerable range of meanings, often subtle and context-specific, in which grammatical styling is implicated—from signalling a speaker’s degree of involvement in a subject being spoken about, to degrees of subjectivity/objectivity in a discourse, to audience alignment/non-alignment, individualistic versus universalist stance, and so on. These are ‘mid-range’ social meanings that inflect so many contexts of contemporary social interaction.

In an effort to contribute to this same general agenda, I have, with colleagues, invoked the established concept of ‘style’, particularly to capture the interplay of socio-structural and creative aspects of social meaning. After all, the social world is replete with conventional associations between language and situation—social and sociolinguistic styles, then. Up to a point, we know how to carry forward particular roles and purposes in talk, as the concepts of ‘genre’ and ‘register’ imply. Yet, a register or a genre inevitably has to be achieved or ‘brought off’ in specific instances. Any given style needs to be enacted, and this means we have to allow for a degree of agency and indeed creativity on the part of the participants. We can use the verbal form ‘styling’ to capture the creative aspect of style.

It follows that a ‘style and styling’ perspective opens a window on change. Labov taught us that variation in language implies a potential for change. But change need not be confined to ‘language change’ in the conventional sense, where we assume that details of speech and language change within an unchanging social matrix. We need to broaden our scope to investigate what I have suggested we call sociolinguistic change. This can be broadly defined as changing relationships between language and society, whereby new ways of speaking, often subtle and unnoticed, are systematically related to new ways of ‘being in the world’—new ways of achieving sociality. What the present book makes clear is that our profoundly changing social worlds are being constituted, in part, as new ways of meaning in which grammatical organisation plays a dynamic part.

* Professor Emeritus, Cardiff University.

Miguel A. Aijón Oliva^* & María José Serrano^**

IntroductionVariation, choice, and the construction of meaning

Abstract: The scientific study of linguistic variation has evolved from traditional models based on synonymy and correlational analysis to a conception of communicative choice as the construction of meaning in context. This has been made possible by the introduction of social constructivist approaches to language as a resource for the development of identities, as well as of functional and cognitive models whereby linguistic form is seen as undetachable from function. At the current stage of research, style appears as the fundamental concept on which a theory of variation should be built. Style does not merely concern the association of linguistic forms with social and situational factors, but also the potential to construct meaning at all possible semiotic levels. In this sense, one of the most relevant functions of variable grammatical choices is the establishment of discourse viewpoint, shaping a continuum between subjectivity and objectivity along which cognitive-communicative styles can be placed. The analysis of desubjectivizing choices including initiator-defocusing constructions, as well as that of grammatical features related to modality, are currently among the most promising paths for research along these lines.