TALKING HEADS VERSUS SOCIAL INTERACTION

The principle of attention to speech – the explanatory idea that stylistic variation is a response to different amounts of attention paid by a speaker to his or her speech – theoretically complements the structuralist approach discussed in Chapter 2. As I suggested there, in a conceptual world of linear variables, a simple linear principle was needed to explain stylistic variation. This chapter examines an alternative approach – in fact two closely related approaches – which very largely supplanted the attention to speech explanation as the mainstream variationist approach to style. One of them, the audience design paradigm associated with Allan Bell's research, was very much a development within variationist sociolinguistics. The other approach, accommodation theory, associated with Howard Giles and his colleagues' research, was originally a perspective from social psychology, although the general idea of accommodation is a common one in modern sociolinguistics.

The main idea in each of these approaches, shared between them, is that variation in speech style can be explained as speakers/communicators designing their speech/communicative output in relation to their audiences. The principle of attention to speech implies a ‘talking heads’ perspective on language. Although William Labov certainly showed that speakers are connected into the social structures of their ‘speech communities’, he proposed explaining their stylistic shifts through speakers' internal perceptual processes, psycholinguistically. A psycholinguistic model fits well with the idea of style as intra-individual variation – variation ‘within a single speaker’, as opposed to variation between speakers and groups.