The chapter establishes the role of context in an analysis. This is done by defining context, presenting a context continuum that can be used to understand an object of study, and introducing the types of conditions that shape understandings of discourse. Six different approaches to studying context are discussed in this chapter: systemic functional linguistics, the SPEAKING model, frames, indexicality, contextualization cues, and next-turn proof procedure. After reading this chapter, readers will understand what context is and why it is important; be able to study context using different models and constructs; and know how discourse and context work together to create meaning.

This chapter gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

This chapter reviews the study of variation in gesture and its theoretical underpinnings in the field of gesture studies. It questions the use of culture, language, or nationality as the default unit of analysis in studies of gesture variation. Drawing on theoretical developments in sociolinguistics and recent anthropologial analyses of gesture, it argues for the possibility that social factors and divisions other than linguistic/cultural boundaries may provide a more robust and comprehensive theoretical account for variation in gesture.

The notion of “context” is currently being deployed in Discourse Analysis within approaches that subscribe to its constitutive nature. Rather than being extraneous to talk and text, context is conceptualized as an integral part of discourse, in a mutually constitutive text-context relationship. This chapter will cover key insights from three influential and affiliated ways of analyzing context: context as dynamically and interactionally achieved; context as rooted in metapragmatic awareness; and context as historicized and multidimensional. The chapter will then illustrate how these three key insights manifest themselves in the framework of small stories research. After presenting these three features of context, the chapter will focus on two core issues at the forefront of current concerns, namely ambiguity in delineating “context,” and occurrences where what can be postulated as “relevant context” is not readily retrievable from textual data. Picking up on these issues, we argue that future research will need to address discourses and contexts becoming ever more fragmented, dispersed, and even disintegrated through new communication technologies. In this respect, an analytical focus on metapragmatic awareness may aid the identification of interactionally relevant features of context as well as of the (re)affirmation of participants’ shared meanings.

Sound empirical analysis draws upon (and refines) theories about a particular set of concepts, and understanding the social meaning of grammatical variation requires that we study language as it relates to social practice and forms of social engagement. Chapter 3 interrogates how sociolinguists study social meaning and the processes involved in meaning making. It explains the concepts that we need to know to understand how social meaning develops (the sign, style, persona, social type, indexicality, character type, stance, index, icon, sound symbolism, qualia, rhematisation, indexical field, stance accretion, erasure, axis of differentiation, and enregisterment), providing detailed exemplification from the Midlan High dataset. The chapter also considers the techniques required to understand how these concepts operate (experimental perception studies, ethnography, pragmatic analysis). Given that social meaning may interact with pragmatics, this chapter also highlights the need to combine research on the pragmatics of spoken language with variationist work on the social embedding and social distribution of linguistic variables.

Does the iconic status of a highly stigmatised linguistic variant like negative concord (e.g., I didn’t do nothing) more tightly constrain the social meanings associated with it? In exploring how we infer social meaning about negative concord, this chapter reveals that its precise syntactic configuration (the presence of two negative elements - n’t and nothing in the example above) may convey pragmatic meaning associated with emphasis, stress, surprise or remarkability. However, its highly stigmatised status constrains the extent to which these subtle meanings are perceived. For most of the young people at Midlan high, its stigmatised social associations are antithetical to their persona style and this inhibits their use of negative concord in any circumstances. However, some, in particular, the Townies, exploit both the pragmatic and social functions of negative concord to enrich the social meaning of their utterances. Importantly, this chapter emphasises how different speakers engage differently with the same grammatical variable, arguing that indexical fields need to reflect a range of social evaluations.

How stylistically sophisticated can the use of morpholexical/morphosyntactic variation be? By focusing on the range of social meanings that can be articulated by ‘levelled were’ (e.g., she were funny) – a regionally restricted variant of the type most frequently studied in sociolinguistics – this chapter explores the extent to which social meanings are fixed by a variant’s enduring association with place. It first considers how children acquire linguistic variation and the extent to which this process interacts with their ability to vary grammatical items stylistically. The analysis then explores how levelled were patterns by social class, parental place of birth, and community of practice at Midlan High. It provides evidence that all of these factors play a role in the use of levelled were, but that the most robust correlation is with community of practice. This data is used to argue that grammatical variants can mark distinctive social styles and personas, and that speakers can adapt their use of variation providing that (i) they have access to a range of variants, and (ii) that they are motivated to use them by virtue of its utility to them as a social symbol.

The chapter focuses on the pragmatic valence of the parenthetical clause ut mihi (quidem) uidetur, a formulation which, by underscoring the subjective value of a statement, often conveys important interactional functions. A close survey of the use of this expression in Latin authors from Cicero to Augustinus highlights the essentially redressive value of the formula, which mainly acts as a mitigating hedge in stance taking, aimed at avoiding the negative effects of potential face-threatening acts and at managing self-presentation. Special attention is paid to Cicero’s usage of the formula as a refined conversational marker, through which the speaker showing modesty and awareness of others’ value reveals his superior moral and social standing. Hence, the chapter explores the role of speaker-oriented strategies of politeness in Rome, as part of an interactional style aimed at indexing a precise social identity.

Chapter 24 examines the topic of language and gender in the context of Korean studies. Korean is well-known for its highly sophisticated honorifics and other resources that index hierarchy, formality, personal closeness, etc. Korean speakers “perform” gender using politeness distinctions as a primary resource. Studying how gender is performed requires the examination of language and gender in local contexts as they are indexed and constructed. This chapter also looks at the relative frequency of men’s use of formal language such as caney “you”, yey “yes”, and the supnita style, in comparison to women. The result of this is that women may feel like “interlopers” in prestigious professions where formal language is the norm. On the other hand, as Korea is rapidly moving away from a hierarchical society and toward a more egalitarian one, informal language, including caki “you”, ney “yes”, the eyo style, and other patterns associated with women, is becoming preferred over formal language to some extent across genders. This is especially evident among the younger generation.

Contemporary Urban Vernacular (CUV) French is a way of speaking that is associated with the banlieues of French cities, settings which are often strongly multilingual. Drawing on focus-group methodology and indexicality theory, this chapter explores listeners’ perceptions of a series of linguistic features in relation to macro-social categories (such as gender, age, region and socioeconomic status) and the speech styles of particular groups of speakers. Our analysis demonstrates the fluid nature of the socio-semiotic values associated with linguistic features, highlighting the importance of the speech context (for example, whether a feature occurs in isolation or with other CUV features), the complex mix of social meanings associated with certain features, and the role played by the listener’s experience. Where an explicit link to the banlieue is identified, we find a group of interconnected stigmatizing associations. Our analysis underscores the importance of understanding the link between language practices and perceptions of social categories in contemporary France, where the power and prestige of ‘standard French’ remains considerable.

This chapter introduces basic notions and questions about meaning, reference, content, truth, truth conditions, and context-sensitivity in semantic theories of natural languages.

This chapter investigates perceived speaker style, reporting results from a matched-guise experiment examining the effect of pitch on perceived talker characteristics. The experiment, conducted in Hawai?i, uses an ethnically diverse talker and participant sample. Two types of analyses were conducted: one used quantitative analysis and broad social categories and the other used tag clouds, where font size represents token frequency, and comparisons across the tag clouds were made qualitatively. The results demonstrate a nuanced relationship between pitch and perceived social characteristics, where the effect of pitch differs depending on what other characteristics are attributed to the speaker. Results also provide evidence that the perceived size of the talker can shift in ways that are counter to widely held beliefs about the link between pitch and perceived size. The results from this study demonstrate that researchers investigating the effect of linguistic variation on perceived social information should examine a range of perceived traits (as well as interactions between those traits) and should include voices and participants from demographic groups that are underrepresented in the literature.

How expansive are the social meanings inferred by a nonstandard syntactic variant, and how are these social meanings constructed? This chapter suggests that the social meanings of syntax lie at the nexus of pragmatics and social distribution. Furthermore, the analysis shows that certain social meanings are enriched when syntactic items co-occur with specific phonetic variants. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of adolescents, this chapter focuses on the social meanings of negative concord by exploring the correlation between social class, social practice, topic of talk, nonstandard phonetic variants and instances of negative concord. Negative concord increases across social groups in-line with their placement on a pro-/anti-school continuum, but a topic analysis suggests that this a consequence of different groups talking about different things: there is more negative concord in talk about delinquent behaviour than there is in talk about non-delinquent behaviour (irrespective of social group). In exploring why negative concord is a useful device for talking about delinquency, the pragmatics of the construction itself are examined, exposing a relationship between social distribution and pragmatic function. Finally, an analysis of the relationship between negative concord and co-occurring phonetic variants suggests that different levels of linguistic architecture work synergistically to create social meaning.