Register And Social Dialect Variation: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

Abstract Although certain patterns of linguistic variation have been found repeatedly in sociolinguistic studies across a range of speech communities, the systematic nature of those patterns is still perplexing and controversial. Despite a few attempts to explain particular aspects of these patterns, no theory to date has adequately integrated them. In this chapter we describe certain systematic patterns of register variation and social dialect variation, arguing that situational variation underlies social dialect variation for a substantial set of linguistic features. The argument relies on two claims: (1) that the distributional patterns of these features across situations can be motivated functionally and (2) that such features function in comparable ways for all members of a speech community. We present evidence that these patterns of variation across situations are a consequence of the communicative functions served by the features, and that the systematic patterns of variation found across social dialects, along with the parallelism between social dialect and register variation, derive from the functional patterns of register variation and the fact that social groups have differential access to the range of communicative tasks..