Miriam Meyerhoff
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 167961 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Miriam Meyerhoff |
| NOMBRES | Miriam |
| APELLIDO | Meyerhoff |
| FIRMA | MEYERHOFF M |
| AFILIACIONES | Victoria University of Wellington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2599-1870 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 289 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 54 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1993 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Politeness strategies in doctor-patient communication on weight loss
General practitioners (GPs) are encouraged to offer weight loss advice whenever appropriate to patients living with obesity in primary care. However, conversations on weight present interactional difficulties for both GPs and patients and hold the potential to reinforce weight stigma. Existing guidance offers little support on how clinicians can use language strategically to navigate the interactional difficulties of discussing weight opportunist…
Maori–English contact in New Zealand
Pragmatics of second person address variation in New Zealand Sign Language
Two hands are powerful”. Handedness variation and genre in New Zealand Sign Language
Navigating epistemic challenges
Focussing and Levelling in the Auckland Voices Project
Levelling and focussing are well-documented processes, central to the emergence of new dialects, including to the emergence of New Zealand English as a distinct variety in the last hundred and fifty years. We draw on recent recordings from three areas in Auckland to examine the extent to which levelling and focussing continue to be relevant today. Most work on NZ English as a new dialect has concentrated on phonology; we extend the analysis to sy…
Humour and the stretchy temporality of peer conflict in a group early childhood setting
While research on children’s humour is growing, few investigations have focused on how children use humour in conflict interactions, and specifically in group early childhood settings. Using data extracts from a project that investigated children’s naturally occurring conflict interactions in a multi-ethnic early childhood setting, we use interactional sociolinguistics to analyse how children used humour at unexpected moments during conflict situ…
Responses to CAT at 50
Communication accommodation theory (CAT) has shown remarkable staying power. To what can we attribute this? I suggest several reasons: first, the general phenomenon of accommodation has been long recognised by researchers and skilled practitioners of language, hence a systematic approach predicated on clear principles and experimental methods was attractive to the fields of linguistics, social psychology of language and communication. Second, CAT…
Complementation and the creole continuum in the Eastern Caribbean
This article examines complement clauses in the Caribbean English spoken in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines). Despite a small population (about 5,000), physical proximity and pervasive kinship ties across villages, Bequia English is characterised by considerable inter‐group differentiation, suggesting the existence of a (post‐)creole continuum. We analyse variation in the complementisers used to introduce finite ( that , zero) and non‐finit…
Aesthetics in Styles and Variation
Speaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to…
Special issue Variation in the Pacific
Special issue Variation in the Pacific
The voice of Polan[t]
We use the methods of variationist sociolinguistics to explore the acquisition of variable deletion of the final stop in /-Cd/ and /-Ct/ clusters in English. Our speakers are Polish teenagers who migrated to Edinburgh (UK). We compare the frequency of (t,d) deletion in Edinburgh- and Polish-born teens, and compare the constraints on variable (t,d) deletion. We find evidence that the Poles’ acquisition of (t,d) deletion is shaped by phonetic unive…
The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Lee Australia and the South West Pacific - Felicity Meakins The contact Varieties of Japan and the North-West Pacific - Kazuko Matsumoto & David Britain North America and Hawai'i - Sarah Roberts Caribbean, South and Central America - Bettina Migge The Atlantic - Kofi Yakpo & Norval Smith Pidgins and Creoles in Eurasia: The Consolation of Philology - Anthony P. Grant Part II: Usage, Function and Power Creole Arts and Music - Kathe Managan The Rise…
Pivots of the Caribbean? Low-back vowels in eastern Caribbean English
Resolving the convergence of low-back vowels in English constitutes a pivot with repercussions for the rest of the vowel system. We consider how speakers on an eastern Caribbean island co-opt the inherent variability of vowel systems to differentiate themselves. Examining the vowels of Bequia English (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) shows the main source of variation to lie in the position and duration of four low back vowels (cloth, lot, palm, t…
Language, Gender, and Sexuality
Research on language and gender encompasses a variety of methods and focuses on many aspects of linguistic structure. This review traces the historical development of the field, explicating some of the major debates, including the need to move from a reductive focus on difference and dichotomous views of gender to more performative notions of identity. It explains how the field has come to include language, gender, and sexuality and how queer the…
In pursuit of social meaning
Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics is a collection of works published in a variety of edited collections, journals, and conference proceedings. It also includes one unpublished conference paper. The collection traces the (ongoing) development of the concept of social meaning in language variation in 11 different papers. These are contextualized with personal reflections on variationist sociolinguistics and the pr…
A case-study in historical sociolinguistics beyond Europe
A collection of traditional and ‘old life’ stories recorded in the late 1940s is used to reconstruct the sociolinguistic situation of the Enets community in Northern Siberia from the 1850s until the 1930s. The Enets had regular contacts with a number of neighbouring indigenous peoples (Nganasans, Tundra Nenets, Selkups, Evenkis, Dolgans) and later with Russian newcomers. The oral histories often comment on language use, and as a result we can rec…
Writing a linguistic symphony
Typically, a study of variation starts from the known and works its way into the unknown. But what happens when you are analyzing variation at the same time as you are grappling with the fundamental structure of the language? Whereas variationist methods often involve doing strategic violence to the data, isolating single variables, documentation tends to encourage a broader perspective. This article shows how documentation of Nkep (Central Easte…
Methods, innovations and extensions
Labov's ingenuity in devising methods for collecting and analysing 'the language used by ordinary people in their everyday affairs' (1972: 69) is unmatched. This paper considers the goals and underlying questions shaping the methods that Labov innovated for (1) collecting quantities of everyday speech, (2) approaching variation in language use scientifically, and (3) thinking interdisciplinarily. The first includes the sociolinguistic interview, …
An end of egalitarianism? Social evaluations of language difference in New Zealand
New Zealand has traditionally prided itself on an ethos of casual egalitarianism – a value system with positive and negative implications. The well-known linguistic homogeneity of the islands and general lack of regional dialect differences (Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) is consistent with this ethos but also clearly reflects the cultural homogeneity …
Extending Elan into variationist sociolinguistics
Prior to the implementation of ELAN ( tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan , Wittenburg et al. 2006), it was common for sociolinguists to use multiple software applications, and consequently multiple formats, along the route from recording participants to conducting statistical analyses of the data. We present a method which allows for transcription, extracting, coding, preparation for statistical analysis, calculation of some basic frequency statisti…
The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality
Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality
Unfolding the Moon
The Community of Practice
This article provides an introduction to this issue of Language in Society by exploring the relationship of the concept of Community of Practice (CofP) to related terms and theoretical frameworks. The criterial characteristics and constitutive features of a CofP are examined; the article points out how a CofP framework is distinguished from other sociolinguistic and social psychological frameworks, including social identity theory, speech communi…
The globalisation of vernacular variation
Work on variation and change in New Zealand English has identified a shift from older, more British‐like norms to newer, more American‐like ones in the last half century. The shift seems to affect lexical items, and phonological variables. This paper considers some general principles found, in the social sciences, to be associated with globalisation and considers what the theoretical and methodological implications are for the study of language v…
Replication, transfer, and calquing
Do the processes of replication, transfer, and calquing operate on speakers' mental organization of variables? Can the comparison of constraint rankings across languages provide evidence for (or against) the transfer of features in cases of long-term language contact? This article suggests yes to both questions. It undertakes a comparison of constraint rankings on null subjects and null objects in a corpus of Bislama and a corpus of Tamambo narra…
Sounds pretty ethnic, eh
A social dialect survey of a working-class suburb in New Zealand provides evidence thateh, a tag particle that is much stereotyped but evaluated negatively in NZ English, may persist in casual speech because it plays an important role as a positive politeness marker. It is used noticeably more by Maori men than by Maori women or Pakehas (British/European New Zealanders), and may function as an in-group signal of ethnic identity for these speakers…
Teenagers’ acquisition of variation
In recent years, the UK has experienced unparalleled numbers of migrants from Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. Many migrants came with their families. We examined variation in the English spoken by adolescent Polish migrants in Edinburgh and London. We asked: to what extent are teenage Polish migrants acquiring the patterns of variation typical of their local peer group? We compare the results for the well-known variable (ing) in the speech o…
The persistence of variation in individual grammars
Recent work on phonological variation largely supports the apparent‐time construct, though some change across an individual's lifespan is possible. But how much change is possible in an individual's grammar ? How much is grammar affected by extended absence in a new, urban speech community? Social dialect surveys traditionally exclude individuals who have left their community for an extended period of time, under the assumption that dialect conta…
Sorry in the Pacific
This article examines the distribution of speech acts based on the word sore 'sorry' in Bislama, the creole language spoken in Vanuatu. Three functions of these "apology" routines are identified and analyzed within the framework of politeness theory. Women are shown to use sore more frequently over all than men; they are also found to use sore to express empathy with the referent/addressee. Empathy is expressed in men's speech in other ways. The …
Significant or random
Preview this article: Significant or random?: A critical review of sociolinguistic generalisations based on large corpora, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ijcl.19.1.01bre-1.gif
The emergence of creole subject–verb agreement and the licensing of null subjects
A corpus of conversational Bislama (a Melanesian creole spoken in Vanuatu, related to Tok Pisin and Solomon Islands Pijin) suggests that during the 20th century the creole has developed a set of regular inflectional morphemes on the verb that agree in person and number with the subject of the finite clause. It is shown that, where the agreement paradigm is referentially richest, the language is also beginning to grammaticize a tendency towards ph…
Formal and cultural constraints on optional objects in Bislama
Bislama allows phonetically overt and phonetically null noun phrases (NPs) in argument positions. This article explores constraints on the occurrence of null NPs in direct object position. Discourse factors (given/new status of referent, antecedent's form) and syntactic factors (antecedent's grammatical role, identification by a transitive suffix) are investigated. Morphosyntactic and semantic features that might transfer from substrate languages…
Forty years of language change on Martha's Vineyard
This short report presents results from a replication of Labov's study of language variation and language change in progress on Martha's Vineyard (MV). The original paper was revolutionary in many respects: it established that the relationship between social and linguistic variables could be systematically studied, and put forward the construct of apparent time as a means of inferring diachronic change in progress based on synchronic patterns. By…
Zero Copula in the Eastern Caribbean
Zero copula is a feature of English-based creoles which has figured in the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) origins debate. While much attention has been paid to the effects of the following grammatical category, the lack of a comparative base highlights the need for more quantitative studies in the Caribbean. We analyze zero copula on the eastern Caribbean island of Bequia, where a mesolectal creole variety coexists with a nonstandard …
Accommodating your data
Resistance to creolization
Talking power
Language, Gender, and Sexuality
Research on language and gender encompasses a variety of methods and focuses on many aspects of linguistic structure. This review traces the historical development of the field, explicating some of the major debates, including the need to move from a reductive focus on difference and dichotomous views of gender to more performative notions of identity. It explains how the field has come to include language, gender, and sexuality and how queer the…
Lexical Shift in Working Class New Zealnd English
Preview this article: Lexical Shift in Working Class New Zealnd English: Variation in the Use of Lexical Pairs, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/eww.14.2.04mey-1.gif
The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Lee Australia and the South West Pacific - Felicity Meakins The contact Varieties of Japan and the North-West Pacific - Kazuko Matsumoto & David Britain North America and Hawai'i - Sarah Roberts Caribbean, South and Central America - Bettina Migge The Atlantic - Kofi Yakpo & Norval Smith Pidgins and Creoles in Eurasia: The Consolation of Philology - Anthony P. Grant Part II: Usage, Function and Power Creole Arts and Music - Kathe Managan The Rise…
Methods, innovations and extensions
Labov's ingenuity in devising methods for collecting and analysing 'the language used by ordinary people in their everyday affairs' (1972: 69) is unmatched. This paper considers the goals and underlying questions shaping the methods that Labov innovated for (1) collecting quantities of everyday speech, (2) approaching variation in language use scientifically, and (3) thinking interdisciplinarily. The first includes the sociolinguistic interview, …
An existential problem
Existential constructions in a corpus of spontaneous English from Bequia (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) are used to explore a linguistic problem (Is variation in verb form in existential constructions best viewed as grammatical or lexical?) and a sociolinguistic problem (What aspects of variation change over a lifetime?). We compare “urban sojourners” (Bequians who have been away) with their home village norms. We observe differences in the fre…
Biographies, agency and power1
A Vanishing Act
The story of the migrant labourers who came to Vanuatu in the first half of the 20th century is not well known. This paper examines the conditions of their indentured labour more closely. The paper draws on French recruiting contracts and details of the working conditions on the French-run plantations found in the rare manuscripts collection of Cornell University library, as well as materials in French including memoirs of a former migrant. It sh…
Two hands are powerful”. Handedness variation and genre in New Zealand Sign Language
Aesthetics in Styles and Variation
Speaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to…
Transitive marking in contact Englishes∗
The so‐called transitive suffix ‐IM in a sample of contact Englishes (CEs) occurs variably on main verbs in canonically transitive clauses. This paper considers whether ‐IM distribution can be accounted for if transitiveness is a range of syntactic‐semantic characteristics (Hopper & Thompson's (1980) ‘Transitivity'). This tests the universality of H&T's theory, and enriches our understanding of these CEs’ grammar. The interaction between ‐IM and …
Lexical Shift in Working Class New Zealnd English
Preview this article: Lexical Shift in Working Class New Zealnd English: Variation in the Use of Lexical Pairs, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/eww.14.2.04mey-1.gif
Talking power
Resistance to creolization
Sounds pretty ethnic, eh
A social dialect survey of a working-class suburb in New Zealand provides evidence thateh, a tag particle that is much stereotyped but evaluated negatively in NZ English, may persist in casual speech because it plays an important role as a positive politeness marker. It is used noticeably more by Maori men than by Maori women or Pakehas (British/European New Zealanders), and may function as an in-group signal of ethnic identity for these speakers…
Transitive marking in contact Englishes∗
The so‐called transitive suffix ‐IM in a sample of contact Englishes (CEs) occurs variably on main verbs in canonically transitive clauses. This paper considers whether ‐IM distribution can be accounted for if transitiveness is a range of syntactic‐semantic characteristics (Hopper & Thompson's (1980) ‘Transitivity'). This tests the universality of H&T's theory, and enriches our understanding of these CEs’ grammar. The interaction between ‐IM and …
Accommodating your data
Sorry in the Pacific
This article examines the distribution of speech acts based on the word sore 'sorry' in Bislama, the creole language spoken in Vanuatu. Three functions of these "apology" routines are identified and analyzed within the framework of politeness theory. Women are shown to use sore more frequently over all than men; they are also found to use sore to express empathy with the referent/addressee. Empathy is expressed in men's speech in other ways. The …
The Community of Practice
This article provides an introduction to this issue of Language in Society by exploring the relationship of the concept of Community of Practice (CofP) to related terms and theoretical frameworks. The criterial characteristics and constitutive features of a CofP are examined; the article points out how a CofP framework is distinguished from other sociolinguistic and social psychological frameworks, including social identity theory, speech communi…
The emergence of creole subject–verb agreement and the licensing of null subjects
A corpus of conversational Bislama (a Melanesian creole spoken in Vanuatu, related to Tok Pisin and Solomon Islands Pijin) suggests that during the 20th century the creole has developed a set of regular inflectional morphemes on the verb that agree in person and number with the subject of the finite clause. It is shown that, where the agreement paradigm is referentially richest, the language is also beginning to grammaticize a tendency towards ph…
Another Look at the Typology of Serial Verb Constructions
Miriam Meyerhoff, Another Look at the Typology of Serial Verb Constructions: The Grammaticalization of Temporal Relations in Bislama (Vanuatu), Oceanic Linguistics, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Dec., 2001), pp. 247-268
Formal and cultural constraints on optional objects in Bislama
Bislama allows phonetically overt and phonetically null noun phrases (NPs) in argument positions. This article explores constraints on the occurrence of null NPs in direct object position. Discourse factors (given/new status of referent, antecedent's form) and syntactic factors (antecedent's grammatical role, identification by a transitive suffix) are investigated. Morphosyntactic and semantic features that might transfer from substrate languages…
A Vanishing Act
The story of the migrant labourers who came to Vanuatu in the first half of the 20th century is not well known. This paper examines the conditions of their indentured labour more closely. The paper draws on French recruiting contracts and details of the working conditions on the French-run plantations found in the rare manuscripts collection of Cornell University library, as well as materials in French including memoirs of a former migrant. It sh…
Growing up with Tok Pisin
The author, Geoff P. Smith, provides an in-depth analysis of the status and development of Tok Pisin, or Melanesian Pidgin, amongst one group of the population of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Having lived in the country for 22 years, beginning in the early 1970s, he has been exposed to two decades of Tok Pisin, during which time he has noted its development and more common use, especially amongst the young people of PNG. As he rightly states, ‘Tok Pis…
The Handbook of Language and Gender
The handbook of language and gender
"The Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a detailed account of the numerous issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics, the area of linguistics most directly concerned with language change as well as past language states.". "The book begins with a comprehensive introduction by the editors that places the study of historical linguistics in its proper context both within the field of linguistics it…
The globalisation of vernacular variation
Work on variation and change in New Zealand English has identified a shift from older, more British‐like norms to newer, more American‐like ones in the last half century. The shift seems to affect lexical items, and phonological variables. This paper considers some general principles found, in the social sciences, to be associated with globalisation and considers what the theoretical and methodological implications are for the study of language v…
But is it linguistics
Book reviewed in this article: Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics
The Handbook of Language and Gender
Biographies, agency and power1
Introducing Sociolinguistics
'Here is a welcome introduction to sociolinguistics by a leading researcher in the field. Users will be inspired by the breadth and sweep of Meyerhoff's treatment.' – William Labov, University of Pennsylvania, USA 'Miriam Meyerhoff’s entertaining volume revels in the diversity that is the cornerstone of sociolinguistics – she takes us to every continent to provide contemporary, refreshing and engaging examples of the key concepts of the disciplin…
Zero Copula in the Eastern Caribbean
Zero copula is a feature of English-based creoles which has figured in the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) origins debate. While much attention has been paid to the effects of the following grammatical category, the lack of a comparative base highlights the need for more quantitative studies in the Caribbean. We analyze zero copula on the eastern Caribbean island of Bequia, where a mesolectal creole variety coexists with a nonstandard …
The persistence of variation in individual grammars
Recent work on phonological variation largely supports the apparent‐time construct, though some change across an individual's lifespan is possible. But how much change is possible in an individual's grammar ? How much is grammar affected by extended absence in a new, urban speech community? Social dialect surveys traditionally exclude individuals who have left their community for an extended period of time, under the assumption that dialect conta…
Forty years of language change on Martha's Vineyard
This short report presents results from a replication of Labov's study of language variation and language change in progress on Martha's Vineyard (MV). The original paper was revolutionary in many respects: it established that the relationship between social and linguistic variables could be systematically studied, and put forward the construct of apparent time as a means of inferring diachronic change in progress based on synchronic patterns. By…
Handbook of Language and Gender
Social lives in language
"This volume offers a synthetic approach to language variation and language ideologies in multilingual communities. Although the vast majority of the world's speech communities are multilingual, much of sociolinguistics ignores this internal diversity. This volume fills this gap, investigating social and linguistic dimensions of variation and change in multilingual communities. Drawing on research in a wide range of countries (Canada, USA, South …
Linguistics (47 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (41 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (34 obras) · Philosophy (33 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (26 obras) · Psychology (23 obras) · History (18 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras)