Studies in theory and method in sociolinguistics

Abstract

Problems raised in a pilot linguistic survey of a street in Newcastle upon Tyne (Pellowe 1967) are here treated positively. An informal normative model of the hearer's treatment of the speaker's output is developed in terms both of psychological processing and of social interpretation. This model is then interpreted methodologically and used to generate an analytical framework and a set of mete-interpretive procedures. These are tested in various ways on samples of speech from members of the Tyneside speech community, on experimental groups of hearers and speakers, and on various miscellaneous data. The generality, replicability and accountability of the methods are examined, and the consequences of the model and its techniques are contrasted with those of other studies.