Abstract

What is Folk Linguistics?

Highlights

  • In Folk Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), Nancy Niedzielski and I hope to have shown that the beliefs about, reactions to, and comments on language by what we call "real people" are interesting, illuminating, and empowering from ethnographic, linguistic, and practical points of view

  • One result of intersubjective sharing is that interpretations made about the world on the basis of the folk model are treated as if they were obvious facts of the world

  • I do not believe that there is a straight and easy path from the content of or underlying belief systems inherent in utterances to the structural elements which encode them, I do believe that some aspects of language structure, perhaps discourse structure in particular, but by no means exclusively, may be profitably examined to help characterize what mental constructs speakers bring to bear on a linguistic topic

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Summary

Introduction

In Folk Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), Nancy Niedzielski and I hope to have shown that the beliefs about, reactions to, and comments on language by what we call "real people" (i.e., nonlinguists) are interesting, illuminating, and empowering from ethnographic, linguistic, and practical (or applied linguistic) points of view. Some of the techniques suggested in Preston (1993, 1994) offer ways of investigating the patterns of a discourse in relation to its subject matter, and I hope these techniques and others may allow future work in the field to delve even more deeply into the conceptual realms which lie behind folk comment about and reaction to language, those shared by a cultural group.

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