When the founder of modern linguistics, Saussure (1966 [1916]), divided the concept of language into langue, language as an idealized system, and parole, speech or the realization of the system in what people actually say in defined circumstances, he...

Scientific discipline developed from the cooperation of linguistics and sociology that investigates the social meaning of the language system and of language use, and the common set of conditions of linguistic and social structure. Several areas of...

In sociolinguistics, descriptive approaches that presume the systematically ordered heterogeneity of natural languages. Such linguistic variants result from (a) spatial differences ( dialect), (b) class-specific linguistic behavior, (c) situative...

Turn-taking is a basic characteristic in interactions, but its realizations are culturally bound, change with age (e.g. Philips 1976; Garvey and Berninger 1981) and vary from discourse type to discourse type. Turn-taking is discussed in various models...

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It also studies how lects...

1. RP as a minority accent An often cited statistic has it that in Britain RP speakers constitute only 3 percent of the population. When this statistic first became commonplace in the sociolinguistics literature, it was not unusual for people to dispute...

As we consider the mind that acquires a second language -- when we ask what is innate to that mind, or whether we need a specially nativist or a generally nativist theory of second language acquisition (SLA), we must remember that innateness is...

This is a research paper about Deborah Tannen's essay "Rapport-talk and Report-talk. This essay discusses the different styles of how men and women talk. Men are found to be public speakers, while women are private speakers.