Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 232

the highest scores; the three other informants have been
placed between these two groups. But it is difficult to decide
on what features in the text the test persons have based their
evaluations. To judge from the table, it cannot be claimed
that pronunciation is a more important social arbiter than
articulation. When pronunciation and articulation have been
evaluated differently, the figure for profession in some cases
is more similar to the figure for pronunciation (K 2.2, K 3.6),
but in other cases it is more similar to the figure for articula-
tion (M 1.4, M 3.7). Even more difficult to interpret are the
figures for expression, which means the informant’s ability
at self-expression. These figures sometimes are obviously
higher than the figures for profession (K 2.2, K 3.6, K 4.8),
but in one case also considerably lower (M 2.7).
Theoretically, many explanations could be given for the
difficulty in obtaining any obvious correlation between lingu-
istic and social evaluations. Most important is perhaps the
fact that a listener does not base his social evaluations of the
speaker solely upon one of the suggested linguistic features
(articulation, pronunciation, expression) or on any combi-
nation of these features—rather on a more complex set of
phenomena, like content originality, cogent arguments,
authoritative appearance, and apparent lucidity. So a broader
view must be taken of the very complicated relationship
between speaker and audience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernstein, Basil. A Socio-Linguistic Approach to Socialisation: with some
reference to educability. London University, Institute of Education, 1968.
[Mimeographed].
Bowman, Elizabeth. The Minor and Fragmentary Sentences of a Corpus of
Spoken English. The Hague 1966.
Hannerz, Ulf. Soulside. Stockholm 1969.
Labov, William. The Social Stratification of English in New York City.
Washington, D.C., 1966.
—. On the Grammaticality of Every-day Speech. Linguistic Society of America
Meeting Handbook 1966.41. Washington, D.C., 1966.