Selecting and coding independent variables

Each of my three dependent variables (not-/no-negation and negative concord; non-quantificational never and didn’t; negative tags) was analysed in relation to independent variables that were selected for their potential to affect the variation – both linguistic factors (section 2.5.1) and external factors (section 2.5.2). By including both types of factor in the same regression model (see section 2.7.2), we can establish their significance, direction of effect and strength relative to each other.

15 Examples from the three datasets are taken verbatim, followed by square brackets in which the pseudonym or code for the speaker is given (unless this is provided underneath the text itself, as is the case for longer extracts) along with indication of the dataset from which the example was taken (Glasgow, Tyneside or Salford). All names and other potential identifiers have been changed to preserve anonymity.

36 2.5.1. Linguistic factors

The linguistic factors chosen as independent variables in my analyses were primarily

identified through consultation and synthesis of previous linguistic literature. Factors such as verb type (see Chapter 3) and lexical aspect (see Chapter 5) were coded by closely inspecting each token in its immediate linguistic context. Coding discourse-pragmatic function of various types (see Chapters 3-6) required careful consideration of not only the immediate sentence context of a token, but much longer stretches of discourse. The qualitative methods involved in identifying and coding these functions are explained in section 2.6.

2.5.2. External factors

The first of three external factors analysed as potential predictors of my dependent variables is locality. As Britain (2012: 23) notes, ‘[i]n the public imagination, geographical origin is the primary differentiator of language variation’. Indeed, it is ‘one of the most frequently adduced correlates of linguistic variation’ (Johnstone 2004: 65). In comparing patterns of variation between communities that speak different dialects of the same national variety (in this case, British English), we gain insight into which constraints on the variation are consistent cross-dialectally and which are susceptible to localised effects, as well as ascertaining the progress of any ongoing change in different communities. Locality was coded as ‘Glasgow’,

‘Tyneside’ or ‘Salford’ corresponding to the corpus from which each token had been extracted.

The second independent variable featured in every analysis is speaker sex, a classic sociolinguistic variable included here given its propensity to correlate with linguistic

variation. Men tend to use more non-standard variants than women in cases of stable variation (Labov 1990, 2001: 266), in what is ‘perhaps the most strikingly consistent finding of all to emerge from sociolinguistic dialect studies in the industrialised western world’ (Chambers &

Trudgill 1998: 61). In cases of linguistic change, however, women often use incoming

variants more often than men (Labov 1990, 2001: 274, 292). These are tendencies rather than rules – as Labov (1990: 245) notes, ‘there is no way to predict in any given case whether men or women lead at the beginning of a linguistic change’. In this thesis, the variable of speaker sex was coded in a binary manner as ‘male’ vs. ‘female’. That is not to say that a binary classification of sex is suitable for all sociolinguistic studies; ethnographic sociolinguistic research has highlighted the importance of speakers’ self-imposed social categories in the

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analysis of language variation (Eckert 1989, 2000). Binary classifications of sex/gender have also received some criticism for masking differences within and similarities between male and female groups (Bucholtz 2002; McElhinny 2003). However, I use a binary classification of speaker sex in the present study, for three main reasons. Firstly, my study is based on data from pre-existing speech corpora, so it is not possible to take an ethnographic approach for in-depth exploration of social constructs in my analysis of linguistic variation. Secondly, my research is primarily quantitative, which requires the data to be classified into distinct groups.

Thirdly, previous quantitative variationist research that has used a binary classification of sex has found this construct to be a relevant factor in the use of many linguistic variables on various levels of structure including phonetic (e.g. Trudgill 1974), syntactic (e.g. Cheshire 1982) and discourse-pragmatic (e.g. Tagliamonte 2008; Pichler 2013).

The third external variable which is analysed with respect to all three dependent variables is speaker age, chosen because it enables the comparison of linguistic variation in the speech of people born at different points in time to see whether there is evidence of change (Labov [1966] 2006). Since my data is synchronic, my analysis uses the widely-implemented

‘apparent time’ construct (Bailey et al. 1991; Labov 1994; Cukor-Avila & Bailey 2013), under which ‘generational differences are compared at a single point and are used to make inferences about how a change may have taken place in the (recent) past’ (Tagliamonte &

D’Arcy 2009: 61). In my study, age was coded as ‘younger’ vs. ‘older’. As described in section 2.3, ‘younger’ consists of speakers aged 13-27 while ‘older’ consists of those aged 38-78. Though the use of two age groups does not allow for the investigation of potential age-grading (i.e. where speakers use non-standard variants to a lesser extent in middle age – see Sankoff & Laberge 1978: 241), this is a necessary compromise because of the nature of the corpus data, e.g. the Glasgow corpus containing only speakers aged 13-15 and 40-60 with no information about the individual speakers’ ages. Stability in the patterns between the

‘younger’ and ‘older’ groups in my data would suggest stable variation over time, whereas distinctive patterns between the two groups could suggest either stable aged-based

differentiation (potentially age-grading) or change in progress (see Labov 2001: 76). In this latter case, previous accounts of the variable in question and other lines of evidence from my own analyses will assist in interpreting the trends.

The analysis in Chapter 6 explores the effect of two additional independent variables in the Tyneside data (the interviewer-interviewee relationship and the interviewer’s variety of English) to examine whether having different interviewers conduct each of the recordings in

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DECTE impacts upon the interviewees’ realisations of negative tags as phonetically full, reduced and coalesced variants. Details of how these situational factors were coded are given in Chapter 6.

2.6. Qualitative analysis

As mentioned in section 2.5, analysing the discourse-pragmatic function of linguistic items necessitates close inspection of the discourse context. The starting point for such analyses is to consider how previous accounts of discourse-pragmatic function have characterised the variation. With the negative tags in particular (see Chapter 5), there is a large body of work emphasising the multifunctionality of these items. There are differences between the sets of functions that researchers have identified within each study, dependent on their theoretical disposition and data. However, these differences are typically rather superficial, concerning the terminology used and positing two separate functions as compared to one broader function (see Pichler 2013: 173). The previously attested functions therefore form a useful starting point for the analysis of discourse-pragmatic functions in my own data.

Limiting the analysis only to pre-existing categories could, however, result in the failure to identify other relevant functions of these items (see Pichler 2013: 173). I therefore analyse the tokens in my data on a one-by-one basis according to principles of Conversation Analysis, which is concerned with ‘the systematic analysis of the talk produced in everyday situations of human interaction: talk-in-interaction’ (Hutchby & Wooffitt 2008: 11). Developed from the work of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (e.g. Sacks et al. 1974;

Schegloff et al. 1977), CA uncovers how this talk-in-interaction is organised into units, e.g.

openings and closings, turns and repair sequences. A central assumption of CA is that talk is

‘always fitted to what has gone before, what a recipient is doing in the moment, and what can be anticipated from a recipient upon completion of a current turn’ (Maynard 2013: 25). The object of study is the talk in its immediate conversational context, with no enforcement of existing theoretical assumptions or external observations, e.g. about the social setting in which the talk is situated (Johnstone 2000: 80). Under this kind of approach taken in my analysis, if a given token did not appear to fit into any previously-defined function category, my set of functions was re-evaluated. As the analysis of negative tags in Chapter 5

demonstrates, some previous functions identified in the literature were re-defined slightly to account for their specific use in my data, or were removed because they were not present in my samples. In other cases, a token’s function cannot be identified unambiguously, so it was

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excluded from further analysis. This procedure strikes an appropriate balance between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ analysis, since it incorporates insights from prior research on discourse-pragmatic function but leaves room for re-defining the previously posited

categories based on qualitative analysis of the tokens in their discourse context (see Woods 2014: xi; Pichler & Hesson 2016).

The CA view is that function arises ‘only by virtue of its sequential arrangement with other parts of talk’ (Schiffrin 1994: 340). This reflects the overall focus of CA on the organisation of utterances in interaction, not linguistic structure (Sidnell 2015: 167). The sequencing of units of talk certainly is relevant to the expression of function, e.g. in turn-holding and topic closing (see Pichler 2013 on I DON’T KNOW). However, this view ignores the contribution of syntax and semantics, as well as prosodic features, to discourse-pragmatic function.

Sequential features (e.g. turn position), linguistic features (e.g. polarity) and prosodic features (e.g. tone) all contribute to the function of tags (Kimps et al. 2014), for example. As well as paying attention to the immediate utterance context, it was also necessary to attend to the broader turn unit and surrounding turn units. Having access to the audio files allowed for investigation of important prosodic features such as rising and falling intonation which contribute to discourse-pragmatic function (Cutler et al. 1997). Furthermore, prosody correlates with the position of linguistic items in the clause, as Dehé and Braun (2013) and Pichler (2016) demonstrate for tags. Access to the audio therefore assisted in establishing the clause position of the negative tags (Chapters 5-6) as well as not-/no-negation and negative concord (Chapter 3) and non-quantificational never and didn’t (Chapter 4). This was

important because all of the variable contexts are at least partly circumscribed with respect to their position in the clause (see the individual chapters for further details).