Introduction: Change, Accommodation and Conflict

Abstract

The concepts of change, accommodation and conflict that are our focus in this volume are not new to the older traditional disciplines of sociology, social psychology and religion where they are experiential social phenomena that both characterize and define the relationships between two states of being, contexts or persons/groups. While change frames discussions of the transition between and into states, contexts and selves, conflict and accommodation are probable responses to such changes, one resisting and diverging the other embracing and converging. As a hybrid discipline, sociolinguistics had inherited these concepts but confined the experiential to language behaviour as we find when accounting for variation in different fields of linguistic analysis — phonology, lexis, morphology, syntax, pragmatics and discourse. Giles and Powesland refer to the ‘individual speaker’s diversity of speech possibilities’ which warrant choice-making and modification aimed at ‘controlling the way in which he is perceived by the listener’ (1975: vi). They say that we accommodate in speech through speed of delivery, pitch range, phonological variables and vocabulary. These are all micro-level linguistic measures. The underlying thought then is the pursuit and preservation of harmony in society by managing the potential impact of social demarcations and difference based on speech performance. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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