Prescriptivism: An Overview - Rice University
Social Structures and Social Differentiation
▪ Social Structure – What is it?
o Two ways it has been conceptualized historically:
▪ Institutional structure
▪ Relational structure
▪ Sometimes these labels simply describe different aspects of the same phenomenon
o Institutional Structure
▪ Institutional structure has to do with abstract configurations of social positions
• Family Medicine: What positions are involved?
▪ Institutional structure involves expectations of the roles people play, or role expectations
▪ The emphasis with institutional structure is on norms
o Relational Structure
▪ Focus is more on actual relationships, how people are organized into different social groupings
▪ What types of social configurations are there?
▪ Kinship relations
• Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, etc.
▪ Institutional and Relational structures are related
• What about a “friend” relation, or the institution of “friendship”?
▪ Collectivities: Social networks, or the aggregate of relations one contracts with others
▪ Social Differentiation
o Social categories, or social groups
o Has to do with group identity, collective awareness
o Three factors in social differentiation:
▪ Class
▪ Ethnicity
▪ Gender
o These often correlate with differences in language use
▪ Levels of Social Organization
o When we’re doing sociolinguistic research, what level of social organization should we focus on?
▪ A city? A village? A bridge club?
▪ It depends!
o Historically, the focus was on “communities”
▪ Problems with this term (What is a community? How do define it?)
▪ In the past, Labov and others relied on a primarily linguistic definition
o Three levels of social organization commonly discussed in sociolinguistics:
▪ Speech Community
▪ Community of Practice
▪ Networks
o Speech Community:
▪ Labov’s conception: An aggregate of people who orient to shared norms for speech and the evaluation of speech
▪ A mainly linguistic conception; no emphasis on the non-linguistic relations among people
▪ Some problems:
• Focuses on consensus, shared norms: What about conflict?
• Not a concept used in other social sciences
▪ Newer, more anthropologically-oriented conceptions of speech community
• People who view themselves as a community, some collective awareness among people
• See themselves as sharing symbolic resources—like language!
• This concept is similar to a community of practice
o Community of Practice
▪ Group of people, mutually-engaged in some meaningful endeavor
▪ Different approach from the traditional view of language communities
• Language is viewed as one of many social practices that are part of what make the community what it is
• Focus on the social meaning of language use and variation
▪ Smaller unit of analysis
▪ Ethnographic methodology, more fine-grained social analysis
o Networks
▪ Lesley Milroy’s work in Ireland
▪ Draws on social network theory
▪ Looks at actual relationships, start with one person, go from there
▪ Different kinds of network ties
• First order and second order
o Sociolinguists most interested in a person’s first order network connections
• Multiplex vs Uniplex
o Multiplex: People connected in several different kinds of relations
o Uniplex: People connected in only one kind of relation
• High vs Low density
o Dense networks: Everyone you know, knows each other
o Low density: People you know don’t know each other
▪ Dense, multiplex networks: reinforce norms, support vernacular usage
▪ Low density, uniplex networks: more susceptible to change
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