Much of what we have looked at so far has concerned attitudes to ‘whole’ languages (e.g. the French and English languages in Canada) and to social and regional accents within a language. In places, findings showed that such attitudes can vary amongst people of different ages or from different regions, or depending on the situation in which language is used. Moreover, language also comprises more features than regional or social accents, and people have attitudes towards these too. It is also reasonable, as such a field of research develops, for people to ask ‘does it make any difference if X?’, or ‘surely it will depend on Y.’ Communication processes are complex. In this chapter, we look at evaluative reactions to some other components of communication, and to some of the relationships between, and relative potencies of, some of these components. Matched and verbal guise techniques, along with the use of scales enabling the use of inferential statistics, have been particularly prominent and productive in attempts to examine relationships in this area. While coverage cannot be exhaustive here, in this chapter I seek to give a reasonable overview of some of the main work regarding communication features, speaker variables, hearer variables and contextual variables.

COMMUNICATION FEATURES

Lexical provenance

Against the backdrop of research showing how people react evaluatively to the accent in which a message is delivered, Levin, Giles and Garrett (1994) compared the effects of the vocabulary used.