Skip to main content

Sociolinguistic Metatheory

  • 1st Edition - June 28, 2014
  • Author: E. Figueroa
  • Language: English
  • Paperback ISBN:
    9 7 8 - 1 - 4 9 3 3 - 0 7 7 8 - 4
  • eBook ISBN:
    9 7 8 - 1 - 4 8 3 2 - 9 6 0 9 - 8

Linguistics is a discipline with ever expanding boundaries and interests. Despite the narrow definition of linguistics which dominates academia, sub-fields continue to flourish and… Read more

Sociolinguistic Metatheory

Purchase options

LIMITED OFFER

Save 50% on book bundles

Immediately download your ebook while waiting for your print delivery. No promo code needed.

Image of books

Institutional subscription on ScienceDirect

Request a sales quote
Linguistics is a discipline with ever expanding boundaries and interests. Despite the narrow definition of linguistics which dominates academia, sub-fields continue to flourish and ways of doing linguistics continue to expand. As ways to do linguistics increase, and as approaches to linguistics accumulate over time, it becomes increasingly necessary for students of linguistics to have ways of understanding and comparing developments in linguistics.

Sociolinguistic Metatheory is a book which explains foundational developments in linguistics by taking the past three decades of developments in sociolinguistics and relating them to contemporaneous developments in received linguistics. Sociolinguistic Metatheory takes the reader through the basic philosophical questions which drive linguistic research. It looks in detail at three models of sociolinguistics - Dell Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication, William Labov and Sociolinguistic Realism, and John Gumperz and Interactional Sociolinguistics - and focuses on such questions as: Where is language located? How is an utterance-based approach to linguistics different from a sentence-based approach? How do metatheoretical paradigm assumptions such as realism or relativism affect the development of linguistic theory? What interesting developments in linguistic theory and analysis have sociolinguistics provided?