Socio talk Thursday, 5/15: Andrew Wong
Stanford linguistics alum Andrew Wong (California State University East Bay) will be visiting on Thursday, May 15 to speak to us about ‘Perceptions of Unconventional Spelling in Brand Names.’ The talk will be in the Greenberg Room from 3:30-5:00.
Perceptions of Unconventional Spelling in Brand Names
<Starz>, <Netflix>, and <La-Z-Boy>. These are just a few household brand names that consist of unconventional spellings of English words. Third-wave variationists (e.g., Campbell-Kibler 2010, Eckert 2012, Podesva 2011) have recently called for a new approach to sociolinguistic variation that takes social meaning rather than linguistic change as its point of departure. This approach has led researchers to use perceptual methodologies to study the full spectrum of linguistic resources that have the potential to take on social meaning. The present study furthers these efforts by using perception data to examine the social meaning of unconventional spelling in brand names.
An online survey was used to collect data from 395 respondents (207 men, 185 women) on their perceptions of four spellings of poetic: <POETIC>, <POETICK>, <POETIK>, and <POETIQ>. In this presentation, I will focus on the potential of the three unconventional spellings to convey newness and distinctiveness to people of different backgrounds. I will argue that it is limiting to look at spelling practices through a normative lens. Unconventional spellings do not all produce the same effects, and the standard/non-standard binary is not useful for understanding the meaning of orthographic variation. This study also demonstrates the indeterminacy and uneven distribution of the social meanings of orthographic variation. The <c>~<ck>~<k>~<q> alternation evokes a field of potential meanings. Depending on various contextual factors, any of these meanings may be evoked in the situated use or interpretation of the variable, and certain meanings may be activated for some people but not others.
References
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn 2010. The sociolinguistic variant as a carrier of social meaning. Language Variation and Change 22: 423-441.
Eckert, Penelope 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87-100.
Podesva, Robert 2011. Salience and the social meaning of declarative contours: Three case studies of gay professionals. Journal of English Linguistics 39: 233-264.