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Sociolinguistic Interviewer Style Variation: Hyperconvergence in the Other Informant

One of the goals of this study is to reevaluate the significance of the sociolinguistic interview as an important linguistic register for extending and refining the discussion on style variation (theory). More specifically, I attempt to use the basic assumptions that can be made about the sociolinguistic interview to inform a variation analysis of a bidialectal interviewer who re-enters a familiar vernacular speech community to collect data. Thus, the sociolinguistic interview register functions not only as a well defined situation for its interlocutors, but for the interviewer, it functions as one of the contextual factors that shapes his/her style. SK is an African American graduate student who conducted several interviews in Robeson County, NC, for the North Carolina Language and Life Project. The data that I have compiled for this study suggest that he varies his speech style in order to accommodate informants within the sociolinguistic interview register. The purpose of my research has been to assess SK's sociolinguistic adjustments and subsequently move toward evaluating why an African American interviewer uses particular forms. It should also provide a window into the socio-psychological perspectives that might motivate the interviewer's behavior. Several types of linguistic variables should enable researchers to quantify style variation in a particular register for one speaker. For this study we selected word-final postvocalic r-lessness (e.g. remember, more) copula deletion (e.g. you ugly) and third person-s absence (e.g. he like him). I tentatively classify these variables as microstylistic because they can be readily subjected to small scale quantitative sociolinguistic analyses. The other variables including habitual be use (e.g. he be acting stupid), pseudo performance phrases (e.g. an AA VE speaker performing a stigmatized Lumbee English variant such as far for fire), and certain interview questions (e.g. How do blacks talk?) all operate predominately on a larger scaled qualitative level, conveying ethnic distinctiveness and/or social status; these I have classified as macrostylistic variables. The speech patterns of interviewers in the context of the interview yield suggestive information for the analysis of style variation in this (the S. L.) register. The interviewer linguistically negotiates his/herself into a casual conversational situation by employing different linguistic variants from her/his sociolinguistic interview register and by manipulating topical design. In Peter Trudgill's 1974 study he concluded (from empirical results) that he glottalized his t's in concert with his various informants from a speech community in Norwich. He integrates consciousness or awareness into his explanation of interviewer style variation and lists language change as a critical factor in his own results. Those features that are undergoing linguistic transformations become more recognizable to speakers and more distinctive for accommodation strategies (see summary of explanations, below). These factors become crucial instruments for determining the style variation in the register of the sociolinguistic interviewer who most often must approach or return to a community where his/her standardized speech will be an impediment to the casual atmosphere essential to the collection of data for vernacular analyses.