Dartmouth Events

Layered selves: A socio-cognitive model of speech style

When sociolinguists study style-shifting today, the focus is often on audience, identity, and other social indexicality. This social constructivist approach is widely seen as having "very largely supplanted" (Coupland 2007) the earlier interest in attention-paid-to-speech (Labov 1972). In this talk I look at micro-fluctuations in style production and suggest that attentional effects are in fact pervasive in spoken interaction and give us clues to underlying psycholinguistic processes. 

Devyani Sharma is a sociolinguistics professor and chair of the Linguistics department at Queen Mary University of London.[1] Her research interests include language variation and change, syntactic variation and style. Sharma's work particularly focusses on these topics within World Englishes and British Asian communities.

For the Zoom link please contact: James.N.Stanford@Dartmouth.edu