What does it mean to view grammar as a fluid, flexible social resource? For linguists, it requires attending to the pragmatic consequences of syntactic items being structured in particular ways whilst accounting for any indexical links that grammatical variants have to social types. For those interested in educational issues, it means conceptualising grammar, not as rigid and inflexible, but as a semiotic resource for meaning-making. This book has demonstrated that the intertwined nature of language and persona is perhaps the most powerful constraint on language use in the school years. Consequently, by focusing on the social meaning of grammar we would work with children’s experiences, rather than against them. What might happen if children are encouraged to view their syntactic variability as a linguistic skill, rather than as something to be overcome in favour of linguistically uniform ‘standards’? Whilst it is well established that misconceptions about social class groups and their language varieties perpetuate social inequalities, this chapter also argues that misconceptions about how grammar functions also serve to disadvantage children by underestimating their linguistic skills.

Contemporary Urban Vernacular (CUV) French is a way of speaking that is associated with the banlieues of French cities, settings which are often strongly multilingual. Drawing on focus-group methodology and indexicality theory, this chapter explores listeners’ perceptions of a series of linguistic features in relation to macro-social categories (such as gender, age, region and socioeconomic status) and the speech styles of particular groups of speakers. Our analysis demonstrates the fluid nature of the socio-semiotic values associated with linguistic features, highlighting the importance of the speech context (for example, whether a feature occurs in isolation or with other CUV features), the complex mix of social meanings associated with certain features, and the role played by the listener’s experience. Where an explicit link to the banlieue is identified, we find a group of interconnected stigmatizing associations. Our analysis underscores the importance of understanding the link between language practices and perceptions of social categories in contemporary France, where the power and prestige of ‘standard French’ remains considerable.

The chapter focuses on gender-differentiated patterns. It begins with a review of Labov’s principles regarding gender differentiation and proceeds to rectify misconceptions about the interpretation of Arabic data. It contains ample examples from a variety of regions and dialects that illustrate different patterns of gender-based variation.

In this chapter we investigate the role of socio-psychological motivations in accounts of grammatical change. Laboratory and corpus evidence is presented to substantiate the impact of dynamic prestige meanings (associated with non-posh media cool) on the diffusion of the object pronoun hun 'them' as a subject in Netherlandic Dutch. In a speaker evaluation experiment, 185 listener-judges rated speech stimuli with standard and non-standard pronouns on pictures which were the best instantiations, according to a preceding norming task, of the evaluation dimensions old prestige (superiority), new prestige (dynamism), and disapproval. While subject-hun was found to be significantly less superior than the standard pronoun, it was perceived to be no less dynamic. The impact of this dynamic prestige meaning was further investigated on the basis of a dataset of tweets. Regression analysis demonstrated that the preference for hun could be adequately predicted on the basis of production proxies of hun’s social meaning. Taken together, all the available data suggest that the social meaning of hun is a pivotal determinant of its diffusion, viz. its use as a consciously deployed 'stylizer', but also the internal conditioning of its non-conscious use as a pronoun alternative.

This chapter investigates perceived speaker style, reporting results from a matched-guise experiment examining the effect of pitch on perceived talker characteristics. The experiment, conducted in Hawai?i, uses an ethnically diverse talker and participant sample. Two types of analyses were conducted: one used quantitative analysis and broad social categories and the other used tag clouds, where font size represents token frequency, and comparisons across the tag clouds were made qualitatively. The results demonstrate a nuanced relationship between pitch and perceived social characteristics, where the effect of pitch differs depending on what other characteristics are attributed to the speaker. Results also provide evidence that the perceived size of the talker can shift in ways that are counter to widely held beliefs about the link between pitch and perceived size. The results from this study demonstrate that researchers investigating the effect of linguistic variation on perceived social information should examine a range of perceived traits (as well as interactions between those traits) and should include voices and participants from demographic groups that are underrepresented in the literature.

How do the semantic and pragmatic properties of a linguistic expression inform its social meaning(s)? We show that the intensifiers totally in American English and -issimo in Italian are perceived as more salient carriers of social meaning in context that require substantial pragmatic work to be interpreted; that is, when they occur in the absence of a gradable predicate (e.g., “totally click on a link”), as opposed to when they target a lexically supplied scale (e.g. “totally full””). We suggest that two factors make these semantic variants particularly apt to serve as social indexes. First, in both cases the semantics of the intensifiers fosters a heightened degree of epistemic and evaluative convergence between the speaker and the hearer, making these expressions particularly apt to perform identity work at the interactional level. Second, both uses of totally and -issimo are linguistically marked with respect to their lexical counterparts. As such, they emerge as suitable linguistic resources to be used for stylistic purposes, in a similar fashion to what has been observed for marked variants in the domain of phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic variation (Bender 2000; Campbell-Kibler 2007, Podesva 2011; Acton and Potts 2014).

The chapter extends a third-wave perspective to the sociolinguistic study of multiethnolects. It presents an ethnographic study of variation in an ethnically diverse social housing neighborhood in Denmark. The chapter reports on and discusses analyses of variation in the use of multiethnolect features and the regional dialect (called Funen) with a particular focus on the supra-segmental features ‘multiethnolect staccato’ and ‘Funen intonation’, and the segmental variables (t) and (et). It is shown that multiethnolect features become locally meaningful in contrast to not only standard language, but also the regional dialect. The notion of ‘multiethnolect’ is discussed in a third-wave perspective, and it is argued that we need to look at relations between people, groups, and places, and between varieties and variables.

The first study reveals that GOAT exhibits a higher F2 when it occurs in the context of smiling, which suggests that some sound changes may be advancing during moments when the body is used to express heightened affect. The second study illustrates that the more durative embodied practice of maintaining an open-jaw setting has had lowering consequences across the vowel system of California English – even for GOAT, which is typically described as undergoing fronting rather than lowering.

How expansive are the social meanings inferred by a nonstandard syntactic variant, and how are these social meanings constructed? This chapter suggests that the social meanings of syntax lie at the nexus of pragmatics and social distribution. Furthermore, the analysis shows that certain social meanings are enriched when syntactic items co-occur with specific phonetic variants. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of adolescents, this chapter focuses on the social meanings of negative concord by exploring the correlation between social class, social practice, topic of talk, nonstandard phonetic variants and instances of negative concord. Negative concord increases across social groups in-line with their placement on a pro-/anti-school continuum, but a topic analysis suggests that this a consequence of different groups talking about different things: there is more negative concord in talk about delinquent behaviour than there is in talk about non-delinquent behaviour (irrespective of social group). In exploring why negative concord is a useful device for talking about delinquency, the pragmatics of the construction itself are examined, exposing a relationship between social distribution and pragmatic function. Finally, an analysis of the relationship between negative concord and co-occurring phonetic variants suggests that different levels of linguistic architecture work synergistically to create social meaning.

The proposal advanced in this chapter assumes that linguistic variation is meaningful, and that a non-trivial number of a linguistic variant’s social meanings derive from embodied practice. And crucially, meaning – some of it embodied – can initiate or influence the trajectory of change.

Propelled by the third wave of variationist sociolinguistics, the present work argues that pragmatic and variationist inquiry are mutually enriching and fundamentally united. Relying on both traditions, I develop a general principle of language use and interpretation – briefly: utterances are evaluated according to not only their own semiotic character but also what sets them apart from that of alternative utterances that appear to offer a favorable mix of costs and benefits in context. I demonstrate that these principles underlie a wide range of phenomena observed in third-wave and pragmatics literature, with particular focus on two cases of social meaning rooted in semantically based inferences: (i) John McCain’s reference to Barack Obama as ‘that one’ in a 2008 US presidential debate; and (ii) the tendency for phrases of the form the Xs (e.g. the Democrats) to depict the referents as a bloc separate from the speaker in a way that bare plurals (e.g Democrats) do not (Acton 2019). As I will show, the perspective developed in this work makes principled predictions and leads us to expect to find complex and varied interactions across and within multiple dimensions of meaning.

The third-wave approach treats linguistic variation as a semiotic system, with linguistic forms serving as components of sociolinguistic signs. In Peirce’s semiotic, a critical part of the sign is the interpretant, crucial to theories of indexicality that no sign exists independently of its construal. This chapter explores framing the interpretant as the cognitive processes involved in a listener’s recognition of a form-meaning link, and as the resulting mental representation of that link. A recognition memory paradigm tested the association between a Business Professional persona and backed TRAP vowels. Some participants were told the speaker was a BP and some were told nothing. Some listeners heard a linguistic variant congruent with the persona (backed TRAP), while others heard an incongruent variant (fronted TRAP). Listeners accurately remembered a word better when persona and linguistic feature were congruent, and were also more likely to falsely remember sociolinguistically congruent words. This suggests that a speaker’s social persona shapes how we remember – and mis-remember – a feature of that speaker’s linguistic style in ways that conform to our ideological expectations.

It is generally accepted that the body plays an important stylistic role, but few scholars embark on multimodal investigations of variation. In this chapter I discuss the results of two studies on the realization of the GOAT vowel to show that bodily practices occur alongside, and indeed can influence, linguistic behavior, both from moment to moment (through expressions of affect like smiling) and duratively (through facial postures like an open jaw). Study 1 reveals that GOAT exhibits a higher F2 when it occurs in the context of smiling, suggesting some sound changes may be advancing during moments when the body is used to express heightened affect. Study 2 illustrates that the more durative embodied practice of maintaining an open-jaw setting has had lowering consequences across the vowel system of California English – even for GOAT, which is typically described as undergoing fronting rather than lowering. The proposal advanced here assumes that linguistic variation is meaningful and that a non-trivial number of a linguistic variant’s social meanings derives from embodied practice. And crucially, meaning – some of it embodied – can initiate or influence the trajectory of change.

As work in sociolinguistics explores new variables and communities, linguistic phenomena whose wide range of social meanings pose a challenge for any first-wave (Eckert 2012) perspective are uncovered. I focus on the Hebrew pharyngeal consonants, which have a particularly unusual combination of ideological associations. They are stigmatized and associated with speakers that are underprivileged in Israeli society: Mizrahis (Jews of Middle Eastern descent) and Palestinians; nevertheless, since they are also an older prestige form, they are also seen as ‘correct’, unlike many stigmatized variants. Using data from sociolinguistic interviews and media, I argue that the patterns of stylistic variation show that although they may initially appear irreconcilable, the disparate meanings of the pharyngeals are not mutually exclusive: speakers can and do invoke the full set of indexical links in the same interaction. These data demonstrate the significance of Eckert’s (2008) indexical field, as its ability to include potentially conflicting associations captures an intuitive part of how speakers understand social meaning – a whole that is greater than the sum of its indexical parts.

The chapter discusses the indexical field in the light of results from a series of listener-experiments. It is a well-established finding that the same linguistic variant may be associated with different indexical features. In three studies focusing primarily on the social meanings associated with fronted (s) in different styles of Copenhagen Danish, we have used the matched-guise technique to investigate how the social meaning ascribed by listeners to a specific linguistic variant is influenced by (1) the prosodic context in which it occurs, (2) the co-occurrence of other segmental features in the stream of speech, and (3) the gender of the speaker. The three experiments illustrate different aspects of the indexicality of fronted (s) in Copenhagen Danish, and they are designed to highlight how different social meanings are evoked, and how the indexicalities of different features influence each other. We show how ascription of indexical value to linguistic variation is a dynamic process, and we argue that the concept of the indexical field can help us understand the way meaning-making takes place, not only in experiments like these, but also in everyday interaction.