Description: The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation in spoken language. The book discusses key approaches to stylistic variation, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology.
Brief description: Bernard Spolsky is Emeritus Professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Senior Associate, the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland.
Review Quotes: "It is one of the virtues of this book that what one author suggests or asserts may be supplemented or argued with by another. Reading these papers is therefore not unlike attending a thoughtful debate carried on by experts...it is a rigorous and well-referenced (there is a 32-page bibliography) exploration of style from a variety of perspectives. In addition, the work provides fascinating critiques of the many viewpoints presented during the workshop." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development