Allan Bell (sociolinguist)

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Allan Bell (born 26 July 1947), is a New Zealand academic and sociolinguistic researcher. He has written extensively on New Zealand English, language style, and media language. He is a founding co-editor of the international quarterly Journal of Sociolinguistics and is known for his theory of audience design. Currently, he is working as the Director of the Institute of Culture, Discourse & Communication and is a Professor of Language & Communication at Auckland University of Technology.

Contents

Education and early career

Bell received a PhD scholarship from the University of Auckland in 1970. Seeing as how Bell had wanted to study linguistics but lacked the sufficient background to do so, the scholarship allowed him to have the sufficient amount of funding to study abroad to do the coursework for the field. Bell ended up going to London, England and began attending and auditing courses that were being taught by well-known London linguists, including Randolph Quirk, Ruth Kempson, Neil Smith, Dick Hudson, and Bill Downs.

With Bill Labov serving as the external examiner for his PhD dissertation, Bell modeled his research in a similar manner that Labov had done by looking at the similarities and differences of different radio stations through varying social class audiences. Bell alluded in his dissertation that he applied VSLX methods to the study of newspaper language: "And I remember writing you know from New Zealand such a distant star in the Linguistic universe. Transformational grammar said, "you can't do this kind of work" you know studying news language to see how style works. You know there's no way to do this. It varies. We don't do "vary." Well, I discovered that there were these people who had started to study variation and that made possible what I did." [1]

Bell's dissertation took three radio stations in New Zealand, each one coming from the same studio, in order to tackle certain linguistic variables: consonant cluster simplification; the voicing of intervocalic t; negative contraction, auxiliary contraction, and specific determiner deletion. Through the use of VSLX techniques, Bell was able to uncover numerous difference amongst the radio stations. Bell led an audience survey, which uncovered that different sections and communities of the New Zealand population were being targeted in different manners by the radio stations. [2] [3] This led Bell to conclude that people will shift their styles based on who the audience they are targeting is. This idea led Bell to develop the theory of audience design, a theory that landed a prominent place within the field of sociolinguistics.

While also doing work within the field of sociolinguistics, Bell has worked as a journalist and editor for several news outlets, including daily news services, weekly newspapers, and monthly magazines. Bell was an Honorary Research Fellow at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Bell's notable students include Ineke Crezee, who completed her doctorate at Auckland University of Technology in 2008, supervised by Bell and Koenraad Kuiper. [4]

Journal of Sociolinguistics

Bell co-founded Journal of Sociolinguistics in 1996 with Nikolas Coupland. Having served as regular correspondents to each other's work since the mid-1980s, Bell and Coupland wanted to find a project or study that the two could work on together. The two decided to establish a new Sociolinguistics journal, especially during time when the field was beginning to grow and more publications were needed to be published: "But we had this idea that it would be nice to start a journal. We were both in awe of Language in Society and you know there were certainly other important journals around as well. But it simply occurred to me I think that there wasn't a journal called anything to do with Sociolinguistics and why not? And the [Sociolinguistics] Symposium was growing and there was lot of work around and we thought we could make it work. So, we approached Blackwell and they were utterly utterly wonderful from the very beginning. They saw the opportunity." [5]

The journal was well supported by members of the Sociolinguistic community. Encompassing various areas of sociolinguistics, the journal sought to promote contributions that present thorough research in linguistic and social-scientific endeavors. Bell and Coupland served as co-editors until 2007, which was when Coupland retired and Bell became the primary editor. [5]

Publications

New Zealand Ways of Speaking English (1990)

Co-edited with Janet Holmes, Bell discusses the attitudes, variations, and changes that are associated with New Zealand English. Also offers a pragmatic analysis of New Zealand discourse. [6]

The Language of News Media (1991)

Discussing what media language is and how importance the process of producing it is, Bell emphasizes throughout the publication that journalists and editors don't produce articles, but rather stories that have viewpoints and values that are meant to be analyzed. Bell also stresses his concerns on how audiences can influence media language styles and reconfigure the news that comes along with it.

Approaches to Media Discourse (1998)

Co-edited with Peter Garrett, Bell covers the approaches that are most prominent within media discourse:

Languages of New Zealand (2006)

Co-edited with Ray Harlow and Donna Starks, Bell looks at New Zealand English, a more recent variety of English that younger New Zealanders have started to claim as part of their identities. Bell, Harlow, and Starks distinguish the use of New Zealand English through the "use of Maori words such as kia ora (hello) and grammatical features such as 'at the weekend'." [7]

The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics(2013)

Serving as a comprehensive oversight to the field, Bell takes a gives an overview of the main terms and concepts of Sociolinguistics. He also discusses the goals and methods that come along with the field. Bell discusses the numerous areas that are associated with the study:

See also

Related Research Articles

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African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like other widely spoken languages, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.

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Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.

Variable rules analysis is a set of statistical analysis methods in linguistics that are commonly used in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to describe patterns of variation between alternative forms in language use. It is also sometimes known as Varbrul analysis, after the name of a software package dedicated to carrying out the relevant statistical computations. The method goes back to a theoretical approach developed by the sociolinguist William Labov in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and its mathematical implementation was developed by Henrietta Cedergren and David Sankoff in 1974.

Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary in pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate to language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.

The apparent-time hypothesis is a methodological construct in sociolinguistics whereby language change is studied by comparing the speech of individuals of different ages. If language change is taking place, the apparent-time hypothesis assumes that older generations will represent an earlier form of the language and that younger generations will represent a later form.

Audience design is a sociolinguistic model outlined by Allan Bell in 1984 which proposes that linguistic style-shifting occurs primarily in response to a speaker's audience. According to this model, speakers adjust their speech primarily towards that of their audience in order to express solidarity or intimacy with them, or away from their audience's speech to express distance.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shana Poplack</span> American linguist living in Canada, variation theory specialist

Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.

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References

  1. ↑ Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2016). Making Waves: The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. p. 34. ISBN   9781118455432.
  2. ↑ Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2016). Making Waves: The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 64–5. ISBN   9781118455432.
  3. ↑ Bell, Allan (1977). The language of radio news in Auckland a sociolinguistic study of style, audience & subediting variation (PhD thesis). ResearchSpace@Auckland, University of Auckland.
  4. ↑ Crezee, Ineke Hendrika Martine (2008). I understand it well, but I cannot say it proper back: language use among older Dutch migrants in New Zealand (PhD thesis). Auckland University of Technology.
  5. 1 2 Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2016). Making Waves: The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. p. 71. ISBN   9781118455432.
  6. ↑ Bell, Allan; Holmes, Janet (1990). New Zealand Ways of Speaking English. Multilingual Matters. ISBN   9781853590832.
  7. ↑ Bell, Allan; Harlow, Ray; Starks, Donna, eds. (2006-04-01). Languages of New Zealand. Wellington: Victoria University Press. ISBN   9780864734907.
  8. ↑ Bell, Allan (2013-09-23). The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   9780631228660.
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