Dennis R Preston
Biographic Data
| ID | 114128 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dennis R Preston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dennis R |
| FAMILY NAME | Preston |
| SIGNATURE | PRESTON D R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9949-0211 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 230 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Mapping Perceptions Diachronically: A Restudy of Mental Maps in Michigan
This research takes a diachronic approach to perceptual dialectology and uses data collected in 2016–17 to replicate work done in Michigan in 1985–87 by Dennis Preston to examine possible changes in perceptions. The frequency of identification of regions and their spatial distributions were analyzed in 148 newly collected hand-drawn maps. The rates of regional identification in these are generally similar to the earlier ones, with the exception o…
Historical Folk Sociolinguistics
This paper shows how the canonical definition of historical sociolinguistics as the study of language use fails to consider independent evidence for language attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies (i.e., language regard).[1] One approach to avoiding this limited understanding of use might lie in a historical folk sociolinguistics, in which particular attention is paid to the nonasserted (i.e., indirect, presuppositional, implicational, perlocutionary…
Needed Research in Language Regard
Research Article| December 01 2023 13. Needed Research in Language Regard Betsy E. Evans; Betsy E. Evans betsy e. evans is associate professor of linguistics at the University of Washington. Her research concentrates on linguistic variation and how that relates to the function of language in marking identity, status, group solidarity, and cultural values and draws heavily on perceptions and attitudes to language variation. Email: [email protected]. …
Métodos em Linguística Popular (aplicada): O que pensa o povo? (Methods in (applied) folk linguistics: getting into the minds of the folk)
Este artigo trata da coleta e interpretação de dados em linguística popular, mas, como o título entre parênteses sugere, não se limita a qualquer noção pré-concebida de quais abordagens ou técnicas podem ser mais relevantes para a ampla variedade de preocupações no âmbito da linguística aplicada. Vou conceber a linguística popular amplamente aqui, incluindo não apenas os comentários que os não linguistas fazem sobre os tópicos linguísticos, mas t…
Language Prejudice
Language prejudice has been studied in several overlapping traditions that focus on experimental, task‐oriented, and conversational means of uncovering negative attitudes to entire languages and even minor structural features of them. In many if not most cases, so‐called language prejudices appear to be associations between language facts themselves and attitudes toward the social groups who use them
How to trick respondents into revealing implicit attitudes – talk to them
This paper outlines the cognitive processing involved in cases of language regard and shifts the focus from receivers/hearers to producers/speakers. Investigation of the latter by means of established pragmatic and discourse techniques can uncover features of language use (e.g. implicature, presupposition) that just as surely reveal implicit characteristics of a speaker’s beliefs and regard for language and variety as any of the long-standing (e.…
Panel discussion: Language awareness vs. folk linguistics vs. applied linguistics
Changing Research on the Changing Perceptions of Southern U.S. English
Recent work on internal and external perceptions of Southern United States English generally confirms long-standing accounts: it still awakens both negative and positive judgments in both outsiders (redneck but hospitable) and insiders (insecurity but local/regional pride). Differences lie in the details of recent research that focuses on the specific elements of these response types and emerge from two sources: (1) up-to-date experimental work, …
The South: Still Different
Language as plants: Ecology from the inside out
The influence of regard on language variation and change
Methods in (applied) folk linguistics: Getting into the minds of the folk
This paper deals with data gathering and interpretation in folk linguistics, but, as the parenthetical title suggests, it is not limited to any prejudged notion of what approaches or techniques might be most relevant to the wide variety of concerns encompassed by applied linguistics
Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages
Indigenous minority languages have played crucial roles in many areas of linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, typology, and the ethnography of communication. Such languages have, however, received comparatively little attention from quantitative or variationist sociolinguistics. Without the diverse perspectives that underrepresented language communities can provide, our understanding of language variation and change will be inc…
Folk Linguistics
Variation and Second Language Grammars
Using sociolinguistic methods, variationists have successfully modeled many of the numerous factors that constrain L2 speakers’ use of variable linguistic forms. However, variationists have been less successful in developing a psycholinguistic model to account for variation in the grammar. In this paper we first describe early studies of L2 variation. Then, using examples from L1 English and L2 and bilingual Spanish, we present a three level psyc…
Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics: A Psycholinguistic Perspective
No account of sociolinguistics—certainly not one that I hope to make more sophisticated along psycholinguistic lines—can even get off the ground without a characterization of the field’s limits. But perhaps no subarea of linguistics is more difficult to delimit, and I will not even try to characterize everything that many might want to put under the sociolinguistic umbrella. For me, the first difficulty comes from the fact that one of the several…
Katakana representation of English loanwords: Mora conservation and variable learner strategies
In Japanese, English CVC monosyllables usually show consonant gemination after obligatory vowel epenthesis (e.g. ‘put’ becomes ‘putto’). The katakana syllabary, which is a good reflection of pronunciation, allows us to study very quickly how a number of native speakers and learners at various levels handle novel loanwords. We show that, while learners do not geminate at as high a rate as native speakers do, they improve over years of study. More …
Presidential Address
Research Article| August 01 2003 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Where Are the Dialects of American English at Anyhow DENNIS R. PRESTON DENNIS R. PRESTON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2003) 78 (3): 235–254. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-78-3-235 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation DENNIS R. PRESTON; PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Where Are the Dialects of American English at Anyho…
Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology: Volume 2
Folk Linguistics. Trends in Linguistics
Folk Linguistics
"Folk knowledge of language has not engaged linguists very often in the history of that field. Introductory texts often disparage folkbelief in contrast to 'scientific truth'. In fact, language is a ubiquitous topic of discussion and general concern of the folk. They talk about grammar, pronunciation, first and second language learning, language disabilities, dialects, gender and language, and a host of other topics. This book approaches such bel…
Some Plain Facts About Americans and Their Language
Research Article| November 01 2000 SOME PLAIN FACTS ABOUT AMERICANS AND THEIR LANGUAGE DENNIS R. PRESTON DENNIS R. PRESTON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2000) 75 (4): 398–401. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-75-4-398 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation DENNIS R. PRESTON; SOME PLAIN FACTS ABOUT AMERICANS AND THEIR LANGUAGE. American Speech 1 November 2000; 75 (4): …
Mowr and mowr bayud spellin: Confessions of a sociolinguist
Although the literature has characterized how apparently innocent respellings of respondent data (in attempts to capture either the 'flavor' or authenticity of performance) inevitably demote assessments of the speaker's status and intelligence (and in some cases actually mar intelligibility of the transcript), more recent work shows how variation in spelling, like other levels of language variety, reflects social practices in speech communities. …
Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology: Volume 1
Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Variation
Whaddayaknow: The modes of folk linguistic awareness1
A common approach to language awareness is through the contrast between folk and scientific knowledge, the former usually getting brief attention and being assigned little value. This paper argues that the folk awareness of language may be characterised in several different ways, having to do with a wide variety of linguistic characterisations (e.g. overt 'availability', 'degree of accuracy', ability to 'control' language varieties, and the level…
The Li'l Abner Syndrome: Written Representations of Speech
L INGUISTS, ESPECIALLY SOCIOLINGUISTS, have long been interested in measuring attitudes to spoken language. There is, however, a dearth of studies (outside literary analyses) of reader attitudes towards writing which reports speech. The concern here is with the inaccurate representation of informant status (or reporter's regard or estimate of that status) which arises from the use of misspellings in the WRITING OF SPEAKINGa practice common to lin…
The uses of folk linguistics
Folk linguistics seeks to discover non‐linguists’beliefs about language in general; the work reported here looks primarily at the employment of such beliefs in ongoing discussions of linguistic topics. Variety imitation tasks and perceptual dialectology studies briefly outlined here only began the task of uncovering what non‐specialists know about language but do not reveal how such beliefs are put to use. Content‐oriented approaches to conversat…
Methods in (applied) folk linguistics: Getting into the minds of the folk
This paper deals with data gathering and interpretation in folk linguistics, but, as the parenthetical title suggests, it is not limited to any prejudged notion of what approaches or techniques might be most relevant to the wide variety of concerns encompassed by applied linguistics
Ritin' Fowklower Daun 'Rong: Folklorists' Failures in Phonology
No CLEARER PRIEST-HOLY TEXT RELATIONSHIP exists in modern academe than that which obtains between the folklorist and the text. A text, in the parlance of the folklorist, represents the basic source, the pure stream, the inviolable document of the oral tradition. It comes from the lips of a speaker or singer and is set down with word to word exactness by a collector (Dorson 1964:1). This desire for accuracy is justifiable in spirit, but it has res…
Sorting out the Variables in Sociolinguistic Theory
T HE RELATIONSHIP AMONG INFLUENCING FACTORS in variation studies is not a well-agreed-upon matter. Perhaps sharpest contrast may be found in views of Labov and Bickerton: the situation is most powerful determinant of verbal behavior (Labov 1972a, 212); if outputs are socially coded, grammar that generates them must be ... purely linguistic in its nature (Bickerton 1975, 185). This psycholinguistic puzzle for sociolinguistics may be summarized as …
Five visions of America
The study of dialect distribution has generally focused on the performance of speakers rather than on their perception of speech variation. The exceptions in so-called attitude studies do not further our understanding of where ordinary speakers believe dialect boundaries exist. Hand-drawn maps from five areas (Hawaii, southeastern Michigan, southern Indiana, western New York, and New York City) are converted into generalized maps of local percept…
Content-oriented discourse analysis and folk linguistics
The influence of regard on language variation and change
Presidential Address
Research Article| August 01 2003 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Where Are the Dialects of American English at Anyhow DENNIS R. PRESTON DENNIS R. PRESTON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2003) 78 (3): 235–254. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-78-3-235 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation DENNIS R. PRESTON; PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Where Are the Dialects of American English at Anyho…
Variation linguistics and SLA
Sociolinguistics (here called variationist linguistics) has been misunderstood and misrepresented in second language acquistion (SLA) research. In spite of that, several productive studies (many of which use the VARBRUL statistical program) have made significant contributions to our understandings of variation in SLA data, contributions which touch on the linguistic and not the social concerns of such data. The failure of SLA researchers who belo…
Changing Research on the Changing Perceptions of Southern U.S. English
Recent work on internal and external perceptions of Southern United States English generally confirms long-standing accounts: it still awakens both negative and positive judgments in both outsiders (redneck but hospitable) and insiders (insecurity but local/regional pride). Differences lie in the details of recent research that focuses on the specific elements of these response types and emerge from two sources: (1) up-to-date experimental work, …
Mowr and mowr bayud spellin: Confessions of a sociolinguist
Although the literature has characterized how apparently innocent respellings of respondent data (in attempts to capture either the 'flavor' or authenticity of performance) inevitably demote assessments of the speaker's status and intelligence (and in some cases actually mar intelligibility of the transcript), more recent work shows how variation in spelling, like other levels of language variety, reflects social practices in speech communities. …
Identity, Discourse, and Language Variation
Recent work in sociolinguistics has not taken advantage of the correlation between emerging features of a variety and the degree to which the individual identity of persons within the region where that variety is taking hold determines the rapidity with which such features are adopted. The authors examine the spread of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift into nonurban, northern Michigan and find that speakers who have less local loyalty, as expressed…
Mowr Bayud Spellin: A Reply to Fine
The Ethnography of Tesol
Almost all aspects of the teaching of English as a second language seem to be based on the performance of monolingual, native speakers. But there is considerable anecdotal and research evidence that successful bilingual have different grammatical and communicative representations of their second languages, and some research suggests that native speakers do not respond best to non-natives' use of native speaker forms. Erving Goffman has devised an…
Some Plain Facts About Americans and Their Language
Research Article| November 01 2000 SOME PLAIN FACTS ABOUT AMERICANS AND THEIR LANGUAGE DENNIS R. PRESTON DENNIS R. PRESTON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2000) 75 (4): 398–401. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-75-4-398 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation DENNIS R. PRESTON; SOME PLAIN FACTS ABOUT AMERICANS AND THEIR LANGUAGE. American Speech 1 November 2000; 75 (4): …
Take and Bring
"The Etymology and Current Status of "Boress
ONE OF THE FIRST essential items of college lore learned by freshmen at Indiana University is a new vocabulary item-boress. At present this word calls for four lexical explanations, and its etymology is obscured by the fact that it was spoken long before it was written and that it derives from that bore 'to weary by being dull or uninteresting' whose own etymology is uncertain. Although the word is no longer confined to the Indiana campus,' it ve…
English as a Second Language in Adult Basic Education Programs
ESL instruction in adult basic education (ABE) programs is receiving increasing attention, but there continues to be a reluctance on the part of ABE professionals to adopt modem foreign language-teaching methods. Many see a conflict between the strict methods of the audiolingual approach and the psychology of the learner being served by ABE centers. TESOL specialists must make sure that they understand the purposes of ABE and that ABE teachers un…
The Ethnography of Tesol
Almost all aspects of the teaching of English as a second language seem to be based on the performance of monolingual, native speakers. But there is considerable anecdotal and research evidence that successful bilingual have different grammatical and communicative representations of their second languages, and some research suggests that native speakers do not respond best to non-natives' use of native speaker forms. Erving Goffman has devised an…
Ritin' Fowklower Daun 'Rong: Folklorists' Failures in Phonology
No CLEARER PRIEST-HOLY TEXT RELATIONSHIP exists in modern academe than that which obtains between the folklorist and the text. A text, in the parlance of the folklorist, represents the basic source, the pure stream, the inviolable document of the oral tradition. It comes from the lips of a speaker or singer and is set down with word to word exactness by a collector (Dorson 1964:1). This desire for accuracy is justifiable in spirit, but it has res…
Mowr Bayud Spellin: A Reply to Fine
Take and Bring
Mr. Urdang's Glupi Etymology
The Li'l Abner Syndrome: Written Representations of Speech
L INGUISTS, ESPECIALLY SOCIOLINGUISTS, have long been interested in measuring attitudes to spoken language. There is, however, a dearth of studies (outside literary analyses) of reader attitudes towards writing which reports speech. The concern here is with the inaccurate representation of informant status (or reporter's regard or estimate of that status) which arises from the use of misspellings in the WRITING OF SPEAKINGa practice common to lin…
Fifty some-odd categories of language variation
Five visions of America
The study of dialect distribution has generally focused on the performance of speakers rather than on their perception of speech variation. The exceptions in so-called attitude studies do not further our understanding of where ordinary speakers believe dialect boundaries exist. Hand-drawn maps from five areas (Hawaii, southeastern Michigan, southern Indiana, western New York, and New York City) are converted into generalized maps of local percept…
Perceptual Dialectology: Nonlinguists' Views of Areal Linguistics
Recent Publications in Sociolinguistics
Book reviewed in this article: Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition Dennis Preston. Dennis Preston. Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL Nessa Wolfson. Cambridge: Newbury House, 1989
Serendipitous Allegro Speech Homophony
In Pursuit of the Subjective Dialect Region
Sorting out the Variables in Sociolinguistic Theory
T HE RELATIONSHIP AMONG INFLUENCING FACTORS in variation studies is not a well-agreed-upon matter. Perhaps sharpest contrast may be found in views of Labov and Bickerton: the situation is most powerful determinant of verbal behavior (Labov 1972a, 212); if outputs are socially coded, grammar that generates them must be ... purely linguistic in its nature (Bickerton 1975, 185). This psycholinguistic puzzle for sociolinguistics may be summarized as …
Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition
The sociolinguistic background individual characteristics interactional factors the code and its realization sociolinguistics and the teaching and learning of second and foreign languages
The uses of folk linguistics
Folk linguistics seeks to discover non‐linguists’beliefs about language in general; the work reported here looks primarily at the employment of such beliefs in ongoing discussions of linguistic topics. Variety imitation tasks and perceptual dialectology studies briefly outlined here only began the task of uncovering what non‐specialists know about language but do not reveal how such beliefs are put to use. Content‐oriented approaches to conversat…
Variation linguistics and SLA
Sociolinguistics (here called variationist linguistics) has been misunderstood and misrepresented in second language acquistion (SLA) research. In spite of that, several productive studies (many of which use the VARBRUL statistical program) have made significant contributions to our understandings of variation in SLA data, contributions which touch on the linguistic and not the social concerns of such data. The failure of SLA researchers who belo…
Content-oriented discourse analysis and folk linguistics
Where the worst English is spoken
Whaddayaknow: The modes of folk linguistic awareness1
A common approach to language awareness is through the contrast between folk and scientific knowledge, the former usually getting brief attention and being assigned little value. This paper argues that the folk awareness of language may be characterised in several different ways, having to do with a wide variety of linguistic characterisations (e.g. overt 'availability', 'degree of accuracy', ability to 'control' language varieties, and the level…
Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Variation
Identity, Discourse, and Language Variation
Recent work in sociolinguistics has not taken advantage of the correlation between emerging features of a variety and the degree to which the individual identity of persons within the region where that variety is taking hold determines the rapidity with which such features are adopted. The authors examine the spread of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift into nonurban, northern Michigan and find that speakers who have less local loyalty, as expressed…
Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology: Volume 1
Folk Linguistics
"Folk knowledge of language has not engaged linguists very often in the history of that field. Introductory texts often disparage folkbelief in contrast to 'scientific truth'. In fact, language is a ubiquitous topic of discussion and general concern of the folk. They talk about grammar, pronunciation, first and second language learning, language disabilities, dialects, gender and language, and a host of other topics. This book approaches such bel…
Linguistics (38 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (30 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (11 works) · Sociolinguistics (9 works)