回复: Studies in Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins)两本新书简介
Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating age and gender in female talk (Studies in Corpus Linguistics系列第38卷)
Bróna
Murphy
University of Edinburgh
Studies in Corpus Linguistics 38
2010. xviii, 231 pp.
Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date, research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages such as childhood and adolescence, ignoring, for the most part, healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of scrutiny. This book examines the discourse of adulthood and accounts for sociolinguistic variation, with regards to age and gender, through the exploration of a 90,000 word age-and gender-differentiated spoken corpus of Irish English. The book explores both the distribution and use of a number of high frequency pragmatic features of spoken discourse that appear as key items in the corpus. Part 1 of the book provides an introduction, a theoretical overview of age as a sociolinguistic variable and a description on how to compile a small spoken corpus for sociolinguistic research. Part 2 consists of five chapters which investigate and explore key features such as hedges, vague category markers, intensifiers, boosters and high-frequent items of taboo language in relation to the variables, age and gender. The book is of interest to undergraduates or postgraduates taking formal courses in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics or discourse analysis. It is also of interest to students and researchers interested in using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research.
Table of contents
Foreword
xiii–xiv
Acknowledgements
xv
Introduction. Why study adult talk?
xvii–xviii
Chapter 1. Age as a sociolinguistic variable
1–16
Chapter 2. Contextualising age-related research
17–29
Chapter 3. How to build and use a corpus for age-related research
31–46
Chapter 4. Hedging
47–84
Chapter 5. Vague category markers
85–109
Chapter 6. Amplifiers
111–133
Chapter 7. Boosters
135–161
Chapter 8. Taboo language
163–204
Chapter 9. Conclusion
205–209
References
211–224
Appendix
225–227
Index
229–231
“Recent years have seen advances in how sociolinguists incorporate age into their analyses of variation. Murphy’s work is a fine example of this. Working from a large corpus, and analysing variation in a number of different features, she sheds light on core concepts such as apparent time and age-grading, and meshes quantitative and qualitative perspectives in a way that will inform and stimulate readers at all levels.
”
Miriam Meyerhoff,
University of Edinburgh
“This book addresses several gaps in the research literature. It examines age variation, which has received surprisingly little attention, and also the interplay of age and gender in their impact on language use. The analysis focuses on pragmatic phenomena often neglected in variational linguistics and is based on a corpus of spoken Irish English, still an understudied variety regarding language-use conventions. The book is highly recommended to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, in corpus linguistic methodology and the study of Irish English.
”
Klaus P. Schneider,
University of Bonn
