1 - Why Does the Social Meaning of Grammar Matter?

Summary

The study of grammatical variation is crucial to understanding how language is used to undertake social action. To explore the relationship between grammar and social life, we need to consider what people have learnt about language and how they employ that learning to make meaning in the world. In particular, this chapter considers how grammatical variation is used to infer things about a speaker’s social background, whilst also potentially communicating more subtle information about a speaker’s preferences, their alignment as to what they are saying, and their feelings are about who they are saying it to. This chapter also explores the types of grammatical variation (morphophonemic, morpholexical, morphosyntactic, syntactic) studied by sociolinguists and the extent to which these fit with the standard notion of the ‘linguistic variable’. It argues that the ability for syntactic constructions to encode pragmatic meaning by virtue of their grammatical configuration makes them quite different from phonological variants, and the focus on the latter in sociolinguistics has hindered our understanding of the relationship between grammatical variation and social meaning.