7 - How Does Grammar Combine with Other Elements of Language?

Summary

Syntactic variants are contentful: they don’t just differ by their syntactic structure, they also differ by their lexical content and, in speech, by their phonetic content. Do these different levels of linguistic architecture work individually or synergistically to create social meaning? By examining tag question constructions (like ’He were bad, though, weren’t he?’), this chapter shows how grammatical environment can work synergistically with other levels of linguistic architecture – including phonetics – to create social meaning. In modelling how to examine all of the linguistic characteristics of a syntactic item, this chapter shows how we might better integrate the study of syntactic variation into a wider understanding of the social meaning of language more generally. It also explores whether the universality of syntactic variables like tag questions (i.e., variables that everyone uses to some extent to express interactional positioning) means that they do not acquire the types of social meanings found for other linguistic variables.