Style: Language Variation and Identity
Abstract
Style refers to ways of speaking - how speakers use the resource of language variation to make meaning in social encounters. This 2007 book develops a coherent theoretical approach to style in sociolinguistics, illustrated with copious examples. It explains how speakers project different social identities and create different social relationships through their style choices, and how speech-style and social context inter-relate. Style therefore refers to the wide range of strategic actions and performances that speakers engage in, to construct themselves and their social lives. Coupland draws on and integrates a wide variety of contemporary sociolinguistic research as well as his own extensive research in this field. The emphasis is on how social meanings are made locally, in specific relationships, genres, groups and cultures, and on studying language variation as part of the analysis of spoken discourse.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Longer distances between lexically dependent words in a sentence signal a more complex linguistic structure.
“The general idea behind these methods is that longer lexical dependency distances within a sentence indicate a more complex linguistic structure, as the speaker and listener must remember more information about the dependencies between words in a sentence.”
From A Review of Automated Speech and Language Features for Assessment of Cognitive and Thought Disorders (2020) · cites this paper as [79]
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The N Word: Its History and Use in the African American Community
Rahman, J. (2012) · Journal of English Linguistics · doi:10.1177/0075424211414807 · Cited by 142 · see citing works
A Review of Automated Speech and Language Features for Assessment of Cognitive and Thought Disorders
Voleti, R., Liss, J. M., & Berisha, V. (2020) · IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing · doi:10.1109/jstsp.2019.2952087 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
- Authors
- Coupland, N.
- Affiliations
- Cardiff University (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Coupland, Nikolas
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 2007-08-09
- OpenAlex
- W4237164157
- Cited by
- 1,310
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 65 · 2025: 69 · 2024: 62 · 2023: 48 · 2022: 73 · 2021: 132 · 2020: 141 · 2019: 138 · 2018: 126 · 2017: 90 · 2016: 60 · 2015: 59 · 2014: 100 · 2013: 42 · 2012: 18
- FWCI
- 29.34
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Linguistic Variation and Morphology
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies
- Keywords
- style, speech style, language variation, social identity, interpersonal relationships, social environment, oral discourse, genre, strategic action, sociolinguistic theory
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
