Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of Sociolinguistic Change

Language Variety and Ideology in Advertising

Joan O'Sullivan

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000710779
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoría: Linguistica

Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of Sociolinguistic Change demonstrates how particular styles and varieties of language are chosen and represented in the media, to reveal changing language ideologies and sociolinguistic change. Drawing on a corpus of ads broadcast on an Irish radio station between 1977 and 2017, this book shows how corpus linguistic tools can be creatively employed, in conjunction with frameworks and concepts such as audience and referee design and indexicality, and examines how accents and dialects (vernacular and prestige) are exploited in the ads across the decades. In addition, this book:

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• illustrates the key principles of corpus design for sociolinguistics studies and offers a framework for future diachronic corpus studies of advertising on social media;

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• provides a model for analysing corpus data at both inter-varietal and intra-varietal levels in terms of both accent and dialectal features and explores the efficacy of using particular corpus linguistic tools;

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• identifies key factors which can be used by researchers as evidence for sociolinguistic change and links these factors to relevant theories and frameworks;

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• demonstrates how corpus tools can be used to compare advertising discourse with naturally occurring discourse, with particular reference to markers of (pseudo) intimate discourse.

Building on the growing body of research relating to variation and change in Irish English, this book is key reading for researchers and advanced students undertaking research within the areas of sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

Chapter 1

Analysing sociolinguistic change through a radio ad corpus

1.0 Introduction

When a well-known Irish radio broadcaster died suddenly in 2010, a blog post on an Irish social media forum ran as follows:

So sad, I feel as if a member of my family has passed away… I never met you Gerry, but you came into my house everyday and were always on the road with me even if it was only going for a pint of milk.

(http://blog.marketing.ie 2010)

The blog post is referring to the presenter’s radio show, broadcast each week, Monday to Friday mornings, on an Irish radio station. To the writer of this post, the broadcaster was not just a radio personality but an essential part of her everyday life, a daily presence in her home and in her car, by means of radio broadcast.

A regular feature of such shows is the radio advertisement; ads are interspersed throughout radio shows and also become part of the ‘everyday’ experience of the listener. Indeed, whether it be through social and interactive media or more traditional media such as newspapers, television and radio, media communication is very much part of this ‘everyday experience’ in most societies.

It is crucial to the success of the advertising medium that such ads are in touch with the consciousness of the receivers of the ad, both in terms of getting their attention and promoting a positive attitude towards the product or service. Because advertisers are required to reflect the attitudes and aspirations of their audience, the analysis of advertising can function as a way of ‘taking the ideological temperature’ in a particular society (Vestergaard and Schroder 1985: 120–121).

Language, of course, is one of the key components in the advertising message and in media communication generally. Given its ubiquity, the media has the power not only to promote and propagate linguistic change but also to influence how language is evaluated and ideologised in societies (Coupland 2010: 56, 69) (Androutsopoulus 2017a). Due to the diversity of the broadcast media with regard to format and genre, we are exposed to an increasing range of ‘dialect’ and ‘style’ dimensions of variation. This, together with ideological changes, is leading to the establishment of a more multi-centred sociolinguistic culture. Coupland suggests that we must look for connections between changes such as these in the mediated world and the world of ‘everyday language’ (Coupland 2009a: 45).

The issue of the changing nature of the sociolinguistic situation of any given linguistic community and its interaction with market discourses has been highlighted. In investigating the use of language variety in advertising, Kelly-Holmes (2005a: 116) refers to the ‘interesting case-study’ provided by the Irish context which, like most linguistic situations, is complex. While under the Irish Constitution, Irish is the first official language of Ireland, Irish English¹ (IrE) has effectively replaced the Irish language as the first language of the majority of the population for all practical purposes; this has come about as a result of Ireland’s colonisation by Britain up to the early twentieth century as well as factors such as famine and emigration (Filppula 1999: 9–11). In spite of ongoing efforts to revive the Irish language (at least as a second language) which began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, according to the 2016 Census (Central Statistics Office 2017), less than 40 percent of the population declare themselves as able to speak Irish and the number who use Irish on a daily basis is far lower.

In looking at Ireland’s linguistic situation and its potential in the context of advertising, Kelly-Holmes (2005a: 117) observes three elements available for exploitation by advertisers in Ireland: the Irish language as a symbol of Irishness; the Irish language as a communication tool in relation to the minority of the population who are everyday speakers of Irish; and finally, English with an Irish accent or dialect. Additional varieties available for exploitation are other varieties of English (e.g. Standard Southern British English [see section 1.2], North American English etc.), foreign language elements (e.g. French and German words), and English spoken with a ‘foreign’ (e.g. French) accent. The choice of variety at any given time is necessarily influenced by the operation of prevailing ideologies of language; for example, the use of Standard Southern British English can be indicative of the prevalence of standard language ideology (see Chapter 3).

The analysis of language use in advertising, therefore, can shed light on the way in which the relationship between language and society changes over time, in other words, on sociolinguistic change (Androutsopoulos 2014; Coupland 2009a, 2014a). Sociolinguistic change has been defined as ‘the changing relationship between language and society’, and as encompassing ‘changes that are socially consequential in one way or another for language users’ (Coupland et al, 2016: 37). Changes in language ideology are seen as clear examples of sociolinguistic change.

In researching sociolinguistic change, the processes of change being considered are not language change in the Labovian sense, but rather changes in the relationship between language and society, ‘when change is detectable in shifting ideologies of language, possibly resulting in new language practices, but not necessarily resulting in changed formal features of language or in a changed structure of a language or dialect system’ (Coupand 2016: 422). The concept of sociolinguistic change, therefore, brings together the concepts of linguistic and social change and challenges ‘the dualism that underlies [these] two traditions in the study of change’ (Coupland 2014a: 72).

Androutsopoulus (2017a: 409) highlights two patterns of sociolinguistic change, conversationalisation (Fairclough 1994) and vernacularisation (Coupland 2014a). The conversationalisation process refers to a leaning towards the use in the public forum of less formal forms of discourse than have been traditionally associated with public discourse. Similarly, vernacularisation is a process by which vernacular linguistic styles, features and genres ‘gain access into domains that have been the preserve of standardness’ (Coupand 2014a: 87). Vernacularisation can be understood as an aspect of conversationalisation (Androutsopoulus 2017a: 409); however, while conversationalisation is concerned more with informality rather than non-standardness, the focus of vernacularisation is on elements of regional or social varieties which are non-standard, or even stigmatised (Bell 2011: 180).

The value of media data in research on sociolinguistic change has been highlighted (Coupland 2016: 423). Media data has the capacity, not only to reflect language variation and change, but also to show how particular styles and varieties are contextualised in the media. A movement in broadcasting towards newsreaders with regional rather than standard accents, for example, can indicate language ideological change. This book uses a corpus of radio ads, the Irish Radio Advertisement Corpus (IRAC), by way of case study, to explore the way in which sociolinguistic change can be identified in a particular society, and the extent to which corpus linguistics (CL) tools can be of benefit in this analysis. The main focus is on the use of CL tools in the analysis of variety choice in terms of accent and dialect in the ads. However, in exploring the conversationalisation of public discourse, which is characterised by informality and pseudo-intimacy (Fairclough 1994), the analysis exploits existing corpus-based research and goes beyond the examination of accent and dialect to focus at a more micro-level on specific markers of (pseudo) intimacy which have been identified using corpus data, both in media communication (O’Keeffe 2006) and in naturally occurring intimate discourse (Clancy 2016).

The following section will look at how CL is exploited more generally in sociolinguistic research.

1.1 Using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research

1.1.1 Corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research: Adding an additional tool to the sociolinguistics work belt

The rationale for including corpus methods in this sociolinguistic analysis is based on the premise, that, as Baker puts it, sociolinguists ‘might want to add an additional tool to their work belt’ as opposed to substituting CL for their existing methods.

No method of linguistic analysis is ever ‘complete’ in that it alone can provide the answer to every research question about language that is asked. Instead, I believe that it is useful to be aware of the benefits and limitations of a range of methodologies, so that we are equipped with a good sense of when a method should be utilised (alone or in conjunction with others) or abandoned for the moment.

(Baker 2010: 12)

CL methods are increasingly being used in variationist sociolinguistic research (Andersen 2010: 558), for example at the levels of phonetics (e.g. Fletcher et al 2004; Kerswill et al 2008), syntax (The Nordic Dialect Corpus within the framework of the ScanDiaSyn project [Bentzen and Vangsnes 2007]) and pragmatics (Stenström et al 2002; Cheshire et al 2008). CL and sociolinguistics have been attributed with sharing ‘fundamental tenets of best practice’. Both approaches involve collecting and analysing naturally occurring language data with an emphasis on language-in-use and social context; they both employ quantitative methodologies in carrying out data analysis; both use sampling techniques in language analysis; both approaches focus on variation across a broad range of linguistic features and finally, they both attempt to provide explanations for their findings (Baker 2010: 8–9).

Although CL contrasts with what are considered traditional sociolinguistic methods such as the sociolinguistic interview or discourse completion tests, a more flexible understanding of what constitutes a corpus allows for more specialised corpora which use distinct sampling techniques to be included (Vaughan and Clancy 2016: 366). The fact that sociolinguists are increasingly viewing their data as corpora, ‘as coherent, self-contained, representative samples of a language variety’ (Kendall 2013: 41), allows them to be more specific as to what is included in the data and how it is accessed, as well as facilitating the replication of the research. Even though sociolinguistic recording collections may not aim to meet sampling and size criteria, nevertheless the reconceptualisation of such data as corpus data may have benefits in terms of organisation and manageability of data which can help with re-using the data (either for the creator of the corpus or for other researchers) and can increase the short and long-term life of the data. Given that CL is viewed more in terms of a methodology than a theoretical approach, it can be usefully employed as an additional tool in studies relating to language variation and change (Kendall 2013: 41). Corpus research is extremely valuable in its capacity to support the notion that language variation is systematic and can be studied using empirical, quantitative methods (Friginal and Hardy 2014: xiii). Corpus approaches can be useful in providing information and standards with regard to building representative corpora as well as facilitating the identification of language patterns and frequencies and comparisons across different populations in sociolinguistic research (Baker 2010: 9).

1.1.2 Diachronic analysis

CL has been found to be useful in analysing linguistic variation both synchronically (how language is at a particular time point) and diachronically (how language develops over a number of time periods) (Andersen 2010: 548). In relation to IrE, the ‘striking paucity of empirical research taking a long-term diachronic perspective’ has been noted (McCafferty and Amador-Moreno 2012a: 265). Baker (2010: 50) stresses the importance of comparability in diachronic studies. The analysis in this book is based on five subcorpora which provide ‘snapshots’ of radio ad compilations, taken at ten yearly intervals between 1977 and 2017, and therefore facilitates such comparability, in order to look for empirical evidence of diachronic linguistic change and language ideological change.

The analysis of ‘snapshots’ does, however, come with a caveat; the use of multiple corpora, with short intervals between them, is recommended to give a more reliable picture of change (Baker 2010: 69). However, Baker advises that researchers should not become ‘paralysed’ with regard to making claims based on analysis of frequencies in diachronic corpora. Qualitative analysis through the use of contextual information can help overcome the inadequacies of diachronic analysis based on such samples in a given time period. Such contextual information can be provided by using concordance lines to investigate the linguistic feature at a deeper level and how it is being used; in addition, research into the historical and social contexts of the time periods in question can be used to supplement the quantitative data (Baker 2010: 80). This is particularly relevant to the study on which this book is based, given our concern with the changing relationship between language and society.

1.1.3 Sociophonetic analysis

An area of primary interest in some sociolinguistic research contexts, and indeed which is germane to the present study, is that of sociophonetics. Sociophonetic analysis can encompass pronunciation of words and discourse in terms of segmental (e.g. various vowel and consonant sounds) and suprasegmental (e.g. intonation, rhythm, stress) features. Research has highlighted difficulties associated with using CL methods in analysing sociophonetic features of speech. Friginal and Hardy (2014: 64) argue that corpora, as ‘static representations of language’, limit the potential to investigate the contexts and circumstances in which speakers make particular choices in relation to accent and pronunciation. Such choices are influenced by factors such as power dynamics, contextual factors and psychosocial behaviours, which cannot be captured through CL analysis. However, the analysis of accent in radio ads is affected to a lesser extent by such limitations. This type of analysis allows us to explore the context more easily as the entire ad, and therefore the only admissible context, is available for analysis; the ads, in that they are attempting to relay a clear and unambiguous message, are very often quite transparent. Additionally, analysis according to the components of the ad, whereby the voiceover or slogan is associated with the authoritative voice, allows us to see the extent to which accent is associated with power relations in the advertising context, and may be ideologically driven.

1.1.4 Small and specialised corpora

The use of specialised corpora can be considered...