Skip to content
Home/ Linguistic Individual: Self-Expression in Language and Linguistics
Linguistic Individual: Self-Expression in Language and Linguistics

Linguistic Individual: Self-Expression in Language and Linguistics

by Johnstone, Barbara
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780195101850

Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though linguists acknowledge that no two individuals speak alike, few study individual variation and voice.

Barbara Johnstone makes a case for the individual's importance and idiosyncrasies in language and linguistics. Using theoretical arguments and discourse analysis, along with linguistic examples from a variety of speakers and settings, Johnstone illustrates how speakers draw on linguistic models associated with class, ethnicity, gender, and region, among others, to construct an individual voice. In doing so Johnstone shows that certain important questions in sociolinguistics and pragmatics can only be answered with reference to individual speakers. Johnstone's study is important both for the understanding of speech as expressive of self, and for the study of variation and mechanisms of linguistic choice and change.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateJun 27, 1996
ISBN-100195101855
ISBN-139780195101850
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-04-14 02:21
$162.00
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Monday, September 14, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Linguistics - Sociolinguistics
See all
Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language
Stavans, Ilan
$12.08
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Montell, Amanda
$21.09
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Montell, Amanda
$14.16
Like: A History of the World's Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word
Reynolds, Megan C
$19.70
Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics (Revised)
<p><i>Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, </i> <i>Second Edition </i>(COPE) is an authoritative single-volume reference resource comprehensively describing the discipline of pragmatics, an important branch of natural language study dealing with the study of language in it's entire user-related theoretical and practical complexity.</p> <p>As a derivative volume from <i>Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition</i>, it comprises contributions from the foremost scholars of semantics in their various specializations and draws on 20+ years of development in the parent work in a compact and affordable format. Principally intended for tertiary level inquiry and research, this will be invaluable as a reference work for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics inquiring into the study of meaning and meaning relations within languages. As pragmatics is a centrally important and inherently cross-cutting area within linguistics, it will therefore be relevant not just for meaning specialists, but for most linguistic audiences.</p>
$235.92
Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society
Trudgill, Peter
$11.39