Sociolinguistics vs pragmatics

Abstract

Abstract Sociolinguists describe the linguistic resources available in speech communities, and provide a systematic account of how social variables influence linguistic choices from among those resources. Pragmatics explains how individuals use linguistic resources to produce and interpret meaning in interaction, and sometimes to change relationships. Certain aspects of each discipline are generally recognized as distinct, but there are also areas of overlap. Using workplace discourse to explore the constraints of egalitarianism and gender in New Zealand society, I illustrate the advantage of drawing on both disciplines, and demonstrate how macro-level (societal) and meso-level (eg. workplace teams, communities of practice) sociolinguistic norms may act as sociopragmatic constraints or as a focus for contestation in interaction at the micro-level in face-to-face workplace interaction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.