The haves and have nots: Sociolinguistic surveys and the assessment of speaker competence

Abstract

ABSTRACTA central concern in linguistics is assessing the linguistic competence of individuals or groups. Formal linguists usually accomplish this by the study of intuitions with little regard for observed usage, while survey sociolinguists usually depend on observations – especially the data of “spontaneous” interviews – with little regard for intuitions. In this paper I argue that survey sociolinguists need to make greater use of repeated recordings and elicited intuitions.The existence of this need is illustrated in most detail by an attempt to replicate an earlier implicational analysis of pronominal variation in the Guyanese creole continuum. It is shown that with repeated sampling and the inclusion of elicited intuitions, the discontinuities on which implicational scaling depends disappear almost entirely. With a clearer idea of what speakers can say, however, the sociolinguistic interpretation of what they do say in the spontaneous interviews and recordings is rendered more reliable and revealing.In the conclusion, some of the theoretical implications and methodological difficulties involved in extending the use of repeated recordings and elicited intuitions in sociolinguistic surveys more generally are discussed. (Sociolinguistic survey methodology, variation, style, implicational scaling, creoles)