Penelope Eckert
Biographic Data
| ID | 134377 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Penelope Eckert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Penelope |
| FAMILY NAME | Eckert |
| SIGNATURE | ECKERT P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1918-4041 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1390 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Meaning is change
William (Bill) Labov (1927-2024)
Social meaning
In recent decades, semanticists moving beyond truth conditional meaning and sociolinguists moving beyond correlations with social structural categories have developed a shared interest in what is commonly called social meaning. This raises the possibility of a comprehensive theory of meaning, moving away from the exclusively propositional model of grammar, and treating language not just as structure but as practice. The paper briefly traces the e…
Gender and the Third Wave of variation study
In the past thirty years, the study of sociolinguistic variation has moved its focus ‘inside’ the speaker – from macrosocial categories to local categories, to the personae that inhabit categories and to the stylistic practice in which personae entangle themselves in the social landscape. This latter stage has commonly been called the Third Wave and is indeed inspired by third wave feminism, as the focus has turned from the gender binary to the r…
Wrestling with Tradition: Reconstructing Jewish Community through Negotiating Shared Purpose
This article analyzes how congregants in a lay-led Reconstructionist synagogue discursively contest and perform sharedness through active engagement, interpretation, and public disagreements about how to create and sustain Jewish community. I argue that such ‘wrestling with tradition’—that is, questioning, negotiating, and (re)creating traditions in the context of countercultural and eclectic Jewish community—is achieved through collaborative and…
Discourses, Bodies, and Questions of Sharedness in Kenya’s Wellness Communities
This article contemplates the construction of sharedness that underlies the success of alternative lifestyle communities in Eastern Africa. In Kenya, a new tourism niche market that focuses on yoga, mindfulness, and alternative medicine is flourishing. Tourists travel to East Africa to practice yoga, but also to introduce local communities to ‘alternative lifestyles’. By considering Western and Kenyan practitioners’ discourses about the benefits …
Affect and iconicity in phonological variation
The study of iconic properties of language has been marginalized in linguistics, with the assumption that iconicity, linked with expressivity, is external to the grammar. Yet iconicity plays an essential role in sociolinguistic variation. At a basic level, repetition and phonetic intensification can intensify the indexicality of variables. Iconicity plays a further role in variation in the form of sound symbolism, linking properties of sounds wit…
The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority
g language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal withmeaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This articlepresents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasingperformativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performative extreme. The meaning potentialof sociolinguistic variables in turn is based in their form and th…
The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority
The structural focus of linguistics has led to a static and modular treatment of meaning. Viewing language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal with meaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This article presents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasing performativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performati…
Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics
Part I. Beginnings and Gascon: 1. The paradox of national language movements 2. Diglossia: separate and unequal 3. Back home Part II. Jocks, Burnouts and the Second Wave: 4. Clothing and geography in a suburban high school 5. Sound change and adolescent social structure 6. The local and the extra-local 7. Variation and a sense of place 8. On the outs 9. Communities of practice 10. Liberated by gender 11. The whole woman: sex and gender difference…
Phonetics, phonology and social meaning
Linguistic variation has consistently been found to have social meaning in its association with the status and stance of speakers in the context of interaction. This indexical function of variation can contribute to the advancement of ongoing linguistic change. Style shifting in individual sociolinguistic interviews is an indirect indication of social meaning, but the clearest demonstrations are found in studies of speakers in a range of social c…
Introduction
1. introduction in 2012, a group of Western U.S. sociolinguists came together for an informal meeting at Stanford University to discuss current research on Western U.S. English dialects. The initiative was an attempt to find ways to align our research interests and encourage more work on the vastly understudied English dialects of this American region. As a result of this meeting, several participants began discussing how to synthesize our work o…
The Low Vowels in California's Central Valley
Research Article| December 01 2016 2. THE LOW VOWELS IN California's CENTRAL VALLEY Annette D'Onofrio; Annette D'Onofrio Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Penelope Eckert; Penelope Eckert Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Robert J. Podesva; Robert J. Podesva Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Teresa Pratt; Teresa Pratt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Goo…
Cans and cants: Computational potentials for multimodality with a case study in head position
As the study of embodiment and multimodality in interaction grows in importance, there is a need for novel methodological approaches to understand how multimodal variables pattern together along social and contextual lines, and how they systematically coalesce in communicative meanings. In this work, we propose to adopt computational tools to generate replicable annotations of bodily variables: these can be examined statistically to understand th…
The Problem with Binaries: Coding for Gender and Sexuality
Gender has emerged as the primary social constraint in variation, but the complexities of correlations with a gender binary make it clear that gender must be examined as it interacts with other social constraints (e.g. class). Recent interest in sexuality as a social variable has emerged similarly to that found in studies of gender, with a problematic focus on a binary based on gender choice of sexual partner. This paper examines the problems wit…
Language and Gender
Language and Gender is an introduction to the study of the relation between gender and language use, written by two leading experts in the field. This new edition, thoroughly updated and restructured, brings out more strongly an emphasis on practice and change, while retaining the broad scope of its predecessor and its accessible introductions which explain the key concepts in a non-technical way. The authors integrate issues of sexuality more th…
Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation
The treatment of social meaning in sociolinguistic variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macrosociological categories of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In bot…
Sociophonetics and Sexuality: Toward a Symbiosis of Sociolinguistics and Laboratory Phonology
Language and Power in the Preadolescent Heterosexual Market
This article locates variation in the social practice of a preadolescent cohort as it establishes an integrated status system in the move toward adolescence. Based in an emerging heterosexual market, the status system links gender with heterosexuality and power. It is argued that the emergence of the common female lead in sound change is located in this social moment, as the heterosexual market transforms gender relations, redefining gender aroun…
Ethnography and the Study of Variation
Style and Sociolinguistic Variation
Where do ethnolects stop
The paper discusses the complex role of ethnicity in the construction of a peer-based social order in preadolescence, and argues that the indexical value of “ethnic” variables is constructed among, rather than simply within, ethnic groups, and hence incorporates concerns that span ethnic boundaries. In Northern California, white Anglo speech is showing a split in /ae/ as it raises before nasals and backs elsewhere, while Chicano speakers commonly…
Variation and the indexical field 1
This paper argues for a focus on the social meaning of variation, based in a study of stylistic practice. It is common in the study of variation to interpret variables as reflections of speakers' membership in social categories. Others have argued more recently that variables are associated not with the categories themselves, but with stances and characteristics that constitute those categories. The paper reviews some variation studies that show …
Putting communities of practice in their place
The study of language, gender, and sexuality has enthusiastically embraced the concept community of practice. Now the field needs to take the concept further in two directions: (1) The comparative direction examines different but similar kinds of communities of practice to explore generalizations about how practice contributes to the linguistic construction of gender and sexuality; (2) The relational direction locates communities of practice in r…
Communities of practice in sociolinguistics: What is the role of power in sociolinguistic variation
Variation and the indexical field 1
This paper argues for a focus on the social meaning of variation, based in a study of stylistic practice. It is common in the study of variation to interpret variables as reflections of speakers' membership in social categories. Others have argued more recently that variables are associated not with the categories themselves, but with stances and characteristics that constitute those categories. The paper reviews some variation studies that show …
Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation
The treatment of social meaning in sociolinguistic variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macrosociological categories of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In bot…
The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation
Speaker's sex has emerged as one of the most important social factors in the quantitative study of phonological variation. However, sex does not have a uniform effect on variables or even on variables that represent sound change in progress. This is because sex is not directly related to linguistic behavior but reflects complex social practice. The correlations of sex with linguistic variables are only a reflection of the effects on linguistic be…
Linguistic variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of identity in Belten High
New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research
Gendered linguistic practices emerge as people engage in social practices that construct them not only as girls or boys, women or men – but also as, e.g., Asian American or heterosexually active. Adequate generalizations about gendered language use and explanations of such generalizations require understanding the place of particular linguistic practices in the life of what Lave & Wenger 1991 and Wenger 1998 call a Community of Practice: a group …
Adolescent social structure and the spread of linguistic change
Detailed participant observation among Detroit area adolescents provides explanations for the mechanisms of the spread of sound change outward from urban areas and upward through the socioeconomic hierarchy. The use of local phonological variables in adolescence is determined by a social structure within the age cohort, dominated by two opposed, and frequently polarized, school-based social categories. These categories, called "Jocks" and "Burnou…
Elephants in the room
Phonetics, phonology and social meaning
Linguistic variation has consistently been found to have social meaning in its association with the status and stance of speakers in the context of interaction. This indexical function of variation can contribute to the advancement of ongoing linguistic change. Style shifting in individual sociolinguistic interviews is an indirect indication of social meaning, but the clearest demonstrations are found in studies of speakers in a range of social c…
The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority
The structural focus of linguistics has led to a static and modular treatment of meaning. Viewing language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal with meaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This article presents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasing performativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performati…
Communities of practice in sociolinguistics: What is the role of power in sociolinguistic variation
Cooperative competition in adolescent “girl talk”
Differences between male and female participation in speech events are based in differences in gender roles in society as a whole. Fruitful discussion of such differences, therefore, must account for the function of male and female interaction within a social theoretical framework. Such an approach is taken here to girl talk, a typically female speech event involving long and detailed personal discussions about people, norms, and beliefs. It is a…
Language and Power in the Preadolescent Heterosexual Market
This article locates variation in the social practice of a preadolescent cohort as it establishes an integrated status system in the move toward adolescence. Based in an emerging heterosexual market, the status system links gender with heterosexuality and power. It is argued that the emergence of the common female lead in sound change is located in this social moment, as the heterosexual market transforms gender relations, redefining gender aroun…
Putting communities of practice in their place
The study of language, gender, and sexuality has enthusiastically embraced the concept community of practice. Now the field needs to take the concept further in two directions: (1) The comparative direction examines different but similar kinds of communities of practice to explore generalizations about how practice contributes to the linguistic construction of gender and sexuality; (2) The relational direction locates communities of practice in r…
Language And Adolescent Peer Groups
This article focuses on the use of linguistic resources from the perspective of the creation and maintenance of adolescent groups and categories, and specifically on the use of aspects of verbal style in the creation and maintenance of distinctiveness. It explores the use of a variety of types of linguistic resources, phonological and grammatical variation, lexical innovation, language crossing, and interactive style. It shows how oppositions wit…
The paradox of national language movements
Diglossia: Separate and Unequal
The Problem with Binaries: Coding for Gender and Sexuality
Gender has emerged as the primary social constraint in variation, but the complexities of correlations with a gender binary make it clear that gender must be examined as it interacts with other social constraints (e.g. class). Recent interest in sexuality as a social variable has emerged similarly to that found in studies of gender, with a problematic focus on a binary based on gender choice of sexual partner. This paper examines the problems wit…
Affect and iconicity in phonological variation
The study of iconic properties of language has been marginalized in linguistics, with the assumption that iconicity, linked with expressivity, is external to the grammar. Yet iconicity plays an essential role in sociolinguistic variation. At a basic level, repetition and phonetic intensification can intensify the indexicality of variables. Iconicity plays a further role in variation in the form of sound symbolism, linking properties of sounds wit…
Sociophonetics and Sexuality: Toward a Symbiosis of Sociolinguistics and Laboratory Phonology
Cans and cants: Computational potentials for multimodality with a case study in head position
As the study of embodiment and multimodality in interaction grows in importance, there is a need for novel methodological approaches to understand how multimodal variables pattern together along social and contextual lines, and how they systematically coalesce in communicative meanings. In this work, we propose to adopt computational tools to generate replicable annotations of bodily variables: these can be examined statistically to understand th…
The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority
g language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal withmeaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This articlepresents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasingperformativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performative extreme. The meaning potentialof sociolinguistic variables in turn is based in their form and th…
Diglossia: Separate and Unequal
Dimensions of Sociolinguistics and Ethnolinguistics - R. A. Hudson, Sociolinguistics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. 250
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The paradox of national language movements
Adolescent social structure and the spread of linguistic change
Detailed participant observation among Detroit area adolescents provides explanations for the mechanisms of the spread of sound change outward from urban areas and upward through the socioeconomic hierarchy. The use of local phonological variables in adolescence is determined by a social structure within the age cohort, dominated by two opposed, and frequently polarized, school-based social categories. These categories, called "Jocks" and "Burnou…
Jocks and burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School
The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation
Speaker's sex has emerged as one of the most important social factors in the quantitative study of phonological variation. However, sex does not have a uniform effect on variables or even on variables that represent sound change in progress. This is because sex is not directly related to linguistic behavior but reflects complex social practice. The correlations of sex with linguistic variables are only a reflection of the effects on linguistic be…
Cooperative competition in adolescent “girl talk”
Differences between male and female participation in speech events are based in differences in gender roles in society as a whole. Fruitful discussion of such differences, therefore, must account for the function of male and female interaction within a social theoretical framework. Such an approach is taken here to girl talk, a typically female speech event involving long and detailed personal discussions about people, norms, and beliefs. It is a…
Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
The Cornell Lectures: Women in the Linguistics Profession
U In June 1989, a two-day conference on women in linguistics was held at Cornell University. This volume, a collection of the papers given at that conference, transmits the energy, openness, struggles, yet hope of the conference and its participants. The contributors, both female and male, have a variety of research interests and positions in academe. The papers focus on the problems and complexities faced by women and others who do not fit the m…
New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change
The three dialects of English, W. Labov a test for mixed rules, D. Sankoff and P. Rousseau the development of ME i in England - a study in dynamic dialectology, M. Ogura, W. S. -Y. Wang and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza the socio-politics of literacy - new methods in old English dialectology, T. Toon changing realizations of A in (a)tion in relation to the front a back a opposition in Quebec French, W. Kemp and M. Yaeger-Dror burnouts vs. rednecks- the ef…
New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research
Gendered linguistic practices emerge as people engage in social practices that construct them not only as girls or boys, women or men – but also as, e.g., Asian American or heterosexually active. Adequate generalizations about gendered language use and explanations of such generalizations require understanding the place of particular linguistic practices in the life of what Lave & Wenger 1991 and Wenger 1998 call a Community of Practice: a group …
Linguistic variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of identity in Belten High
Language and Gender
Language and Gender is a 2003 introduction to the study of the relation between gender and language use, written by two of the leading experts in the field. It covers the main topics, beginning with a clear discussion of gender and of the resources that the linguistic system offers for the construction of social meaning. The body of the book offers broad and deep coverage of the interaction between language and social life, ranging from nuances o…
Social Variation in America
L'A. se penche sur les orientations des etudes concernant la variation sociale et sociolinguistique americaine dans les recherches de ces 20 dernieres annees. Il examine par exemple le recours a la notion de vernaculaire (opposee a la langue standard) pour etudier la variation et le changement, et l'emergence de nouvelles categories demographiques et sociales. Il montre que le tournant qui s'est opere vers l'analyse de la pratique dans les commun…
Elephants in the room
Language And Adolescent Peer Groups
This article focuses on the use of linguistic resources from the perspective of the creation and maintenance of adolescent groups and categories, and specifically on the use of aspects of verbal style in the creation and maintenance of distinctiveness. It explores the use of a variety of types of linguistic resources, phonological and grammatical variation, lexical innovation, language crossing, and interactive style. It shows how oppositions wit…
Variation and a Sense of Place
Ibegan my research career in linguistic geography, asking myself how change spread from person to person and village to village across Gascony. But the “across Gascony” part lived in maps and atlases—in isoglosses and areas—whereas the “person to person” part lived in the worldly relations among the inhabitants of the village of Soulan, sitting on the south side of the lovely Pyrenees. Linguistic geography and sociolinguistic variation have remai…
A Comparative Review of Four Books on Language and Gender
TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications relevant to TESOL professionals. Gender in the Language Classroom. Monika Chavez Language and Gender. Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis. Lita Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland (Eds.) Communicating Gender. Suzanne Romaine
Communities of practice in sociolinguistics: What is the role of power in sociolinguistic variation
Putting communities of practice in their place
The study of language, gender, and sexuality has enthusiastically embraced the concept community of practice. Now the field needs to take the concept further in two directions: (1) The comparative direction examines different but similar kinds of communities of practice to explore generalizations about how practice contributes to the linguistic construction of gender and sexuality; (2) The relational direction locates communities of practice in r…
Where do ethnolects stop
The paper discusses the complex role of ethnicity in the construction of a peer-based social order in preadolescence, and argues that the indexical value of “ethnic” variables is constructed among, rather than simply within, ethnic groups, and hence incorporates concerns that span ethnic boundaries. In Northern California, white Anglo speech is showing a split in /ae/ as it raises before nasals and backs elsewhere, while Chicano speakers commonly…
Variation and the indexical field 1
This paper argues for a focus on the social meaning of variation, based in a study of stylistic practice. It is common in the study of variation to interpret variables as reflections of speakers' membership in social categories. Others have argued more recently that variables are associated not with the categories themselves, but with stances and characteristics that constitute those categories. The paper reviews some variation studies that show …
Ethnography and the Study of Variation
Style and Sociolinguistic Variation
Sociophonetics and Sexuality: Toward a Symbiosis of Sociolinguistics and Laboratory Phonology
Linguistic Variation and Morphology (30 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Linguistics (25 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (22 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (15 works) · Gender Studies in Language (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Sociolinguistics (10 works)