Dialect, Register, And Genre: Working Assumptions About Conventionalization

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter I attempt to make explicit a number of working assumptions about conventionalization that seem to be implicit in sociolinguistic research touching on dialect variation, register variation, genre identification, and verbal interaction. In doing so I hope also to clarify some of the basic concepts of sociolinguistic research for students of human language phenomena. In recent years researchers and theorists operating from a number of different perspectives have come to make use of such terms as dialect, register, genre, and conversation in ways that sometimes cause confusion. The sociolinguistic perspective has, of course, no monopoly on correctness or truth or insight into the human condition. Also, conceptual confusion may sometimes signal the emergence of new and useful ways of thinking. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that clarification of this one perspective may be of help in reducing some of the unnecessary and unhelpful confusion that appears in cross disciplinary studies dealing with conventionalization in language. Of the various fundamental and mysterious processes involved in the use of human language, one of the most fundamental and most mysterious is the process of conventionalization, that is, the process by which members of a community some how come to share the sound-meaning pairings that constitute their means of verbal communication, in spite of the fact that no two speakers speak exactly the same way and the shared language keeps changing. Human language, although based on a species-specific innate ability to develop and use this special form of communication, is nevertheless largely a matter of convention, that is, an implicit contract among a community of users of a language variety that certain expressions will mean certain things when used in certain combinations under certain social conditions.