Janet Holmes | |
|---|---|
 Holmes in 2016 | |
| Born | 17 May 1947 Liverpool, United Kingdom |
| Citizenship | New Zealand |
| Alma mater | University of Leeds |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Victoria University of Wellington |
| Thesis | The language of spoken monologue: an analysis of topic and narrative structure. (1970) |
Janet Holmes ONZM (born 17 May 1947) [1] is a New Zealand sociolinguist. Her research interests include language and gender, language in the workplace, and New Zealand English.
After obtaining an MPhil at the University of Leeds, Holmes moved to Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, later becoming a naturalised New Zealander in 1975. [1] She published a textbook Introduction to Sociolinguistics in 1992 which has run to five editions. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and won the Dame Joan Metge Medal in 2012. [2] She is now an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Holmes has published widely on an array of topics. In 1996, she established the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) project, [3] which is an ongoing study of communication formats occurring in the workplace, which examines “small talk, humour, management strategies, directives, and leadership in a wide range of New Zealand workplaces”.
Holmes has been featured on the media, such as the Radio New Zealand and newspapers. Topics she talked about included the way people communicate at work, [4] how complicated the phenomenon of sexist language is, [5] the pitfalls and possibilities of cross-cultural communication in the workplace, [6] or whether men or women talk more. [7]
In recognition of Holmes' contributions to the field of Sociolinguistics, Linguist at Work: Festschrift for Janet Holmes [8] brings together works by Holmes's colleagues, students, collaborators, and friends which present new ideas and analysis within the field. In the 2016 New Year Honours, Holmes was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to linguistics. [9]
In 2017, Holmes was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's "150 women in 150 words", celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand. [10]
In July 2019, Holmes was conferred with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Warwick. [11]
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
Peter Trudgill, is an English sociolinguist, academic and author.
Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in linguistics and other disciplines.
The International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), is an international interdisciplinary academic organization that promotes research on language, gender, and sexuality. Claire Maree is its current president.
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist who served as the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture". Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
Mary Bucholtz is professor of linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. Bucholtz's work focuses largely on language use in the United States, and specifically on issues of language and youth; language, gender, and sexuality; African American English; and Mexican and Chicano Spanish.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, and other features. Different communities or individuals speaking the same language may differ from each other in their choices of which of the available linguistic features to use, and how often, and the same speaker may make different choices on different occasions.
Allan Bell 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.
Small talk is an informal type of discourse that does not cover any functional topics of conversation or any transactions that need to be addressed. In essence, it is polite and standard conversation about unimportant things.
Complimentary language is a speech act that caters to positive face needs. Positive face, according to Brown and Levinson, is "the positive consistent self-image or 'personality' claimed by interactions". Many studies examine complimentary language in relation to gender because of the noticeable differences in compliment topic, explicitness, and response depending on gender of the speaker as well as the gender of the addressee. Analysts use these studies to demonstrate their theories about inherent differences between the genders and the societal impact of gender roles.
Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.
Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
Miriam Meyerhoff, is a New Zealand sociolinguist and academic. In 2020, she was appointed a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In 2024 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Bethan Benwell, is a British linguist. She has been a senior lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, for the Division of Literature and Languages, at the University of Stirling since 2008.
Susan Lynn Ehrlich is a Canadian linguist known for her work in both language and gender, language and the law, and the intersections between them. She studies language, gender and the law, with a focus on consent and coercion in rape trials.
Deborah Sue Schiffrin was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers.
Wendy Larner is a New Zealand social scientist who has focussed on the interdisciplinary areas of globalisation, governance and gender. She has been Vice-Chancellor and President of Cardiff University since September 2023, having previously been provost at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.
Sociophonetics is a branch of linguistics that broadly combines the methods of sociolinguistics and phonetics. It addresses the questions of how socially constructed variation in the sound system is used and learned. The term was first used by Denise Deshaies-Lafontaine in their 1974 dissertation on Quebecois French, with early work in the field focusing on answering questions, chiefly sociolinguistic, using phonetic methods and data. The field began to expand rapidly in the 1990s: interest in the field increased and the boundaries of the field expanded to include a wider diversity of topics. Currently, sociophonetic studies often employ methods and insight from a wide range of fields including psycholinguistics, clinical linguistics, and computational linguistics.
Simon Tait Keller is a philosophy academic, and a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. As at 2023, he is head of the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations. His work focusses on political philosophy, ethics and the philosophy of mental health. He has published works on topics including family relationships, friendships, the moral and political dimensions of relationships, patriotism and the possibility of time travel.
Meredith Helena Marra is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor of linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in sociolinguistics and workplace discourse.
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