Believing is seeing : awareness and alignment in the acquisition and communication of social meaning

When speakers engage in the complex phenomenon of speech, they use language to convey and understand social information about identities, stances, moods and goals through the use of linguistic forms. While it is true that social evaluation studies have demonstrated that individuals show awareness of the socially-indexed meaning of linguistic forms, many expected associations are not always, if at all, identifiable by listeners. Such asymmetry raises a significant question in sociolinguistic research: if individuals cannot reliably show an awareness of social meaning, how can it be used as a resource to construct identities, stances and personas? Building on the growing body of work which examines individuals’ agency and awareness of socially-indexed meaning, this study’s objective was to investigate the role of individuals’ beliefs and their alignment to linguistic forms in the awareness of socially-indexed meaning. The specific aim of the current study was to examine the apparent mismatches between expected socially-indexed meanings born of linguistic variables which are socially stratified and individuals’ actual sociolinguistic awareness. An experimental series was designed which employed social evaluation judgements combined with corpus analyses and self-report tasks to investigate the role of the individual in the acquisition and communication of social meaning. The research questions targeted the situational context (no-context vs a workplace), the variant’s social salience (stereotypes, markers and indicators), the alignment of the individual to a linguistic form (a user of the form vs a non-user), and the method by which the association between the form and social category were acquired (implicitly vs explicitly). Two languages were chosen for their suitability and validity towards the current project’s research questions and aims; namely, Japanese and Australian English. Within the languages, sociolinguistically relevant variables and categories were chosen to provide a rigorous examination of individuals’ perceptual awareness of socially-indexed meaning, investigate how associations are learned by individuals, and examine the role of individual alignment to a linguistic variable and its expected social meaning. Overall, the results of the experimental series suggested that the explicit beliefs and the alignment of the individual to a linguistic form mediates their linguistic experience and thus shapes their awareness of the form’s socially indexed meaning. While the situational context of the linguistic form did not impact individuals’ judgements considerably in the current study, the social salience of the form was shown to play a role as a factor which mediates individuals’ awareness of the form’s socially-indexed meaning. In the case of individual alignment, speakers who do not identify as users of a particular variant appear to be more sensitive to the social meaning of the variant than those who identify as users. Finally, on the notion of acquisition, individuals showed awareness of indexical associations that did not reflect the distribution of the variant in the speech community, suggesting that a mechanism may exist by which individuals override their linguistic experience to reflect socially constructed beliefs about the distribution of forms