7 - Coda: Style and social reality

Summary

CHANGE WITHIN CHANGE

The narrative of this book has been a movement away from one way of looking at linguistic variation towards another – in fact from one very particular, consolidated, disciplined and productive perspective to a much more open, critical but speculative perspective. As I said near the beginning of the book, the first conception of style in a sociolinguistic context was a variationist one, defining style as a simple plane of linear variation within the speech of a single person. As the book has progressed, reflecting changes over time in the sociolinguistic analysis of style, it has become less and less satisfactory to work with any simple definition of style. In relation to general and literary stylistics, Jean Jacques Weber summarises these priorities as follows:

meaning and stylistic effect are not fixed and stable, and cannot be dug out of the text as in an archaeological approach, but they have to be seen as a potential which is actualized in a (real) reader's mind, the product of a dialogic interaction between author, the author's context of production, the text, the reader and the readers' context of reception – where context includes all sorts of sociohistorical, cultural and intertextual factors (Weber 1996b: 3).

If we substitute a more complex notion of ‘participants’ for ‘reader’ in the above quote, including speakers, listeners and analysts as parties engaged with and impacted by stylistic meaning, then Weber's sentence stands as a useful summary of what a sociolinguistic stylistics, as I have argued for it in the book, can aspire to be and do.