The Linguistic Individual by Johnstone
Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though they all acknowledge that no two individuals speak alike, few study individual variation and voice. The individual has always been thought to be outside the purview of linguistic theory. Johnstone makes the case for the importance of the role of the individual, and the individual's idiosyncrasies, in language and linguistics. Using theoretical arguments and discourse analysis, along with linguistic examples from a wide variety of speakers and settings, Johnstone illustrates how speakers draw on linguistic models associated with class, ethnicity, gender, region, among others, to construct individual ways of sounding. In doing so,she shows that certain important questions in sociolinguistics and pragmatics can only be fully answered with reference to individual speakers. Her study is important not only for the understanding of speech as expressive of self,but for the study of of variation and the mechanisms of linguistic choice and change.
Barbara Johnstone has written the sort of book I suspect many of us would like to writeShe has woven various strands of her own personal approach to linguistics, but also might legitimately be said to present a fresh perspective on language-or better, on the ways we express ourselves to each other in talk. Those of us already engaged in discourse analysis will profit from Johnstone's focus on the individual voice and on the way it informs her analyses, while linguists of other stripes should read this book as an introduction to the new humanistic tendencies in the study of language. * Anthropological Linguistics *
Barbara Johnstone is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Texas A&M University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780195101850 |
| ISBN 10 | 0195101855 |
| Title | The Linguistic Individual |
| Author | Barbara Johnstone |
| Series | Oxford Studies In Sociolinguistics |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Year published | 1996-09-12 |
| Number of pages | 232 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |