Introducing English Linguistics

participants; overhearers, people who are known by the speaker but not
participants; and eavesdroppers, who are neither known nor partici-
pants. Other influences on style shifting include the topics under dis-
cussion and the particular setting in which communication takes place.
Thus, when Teresa B. gives a report during a business meeting at the com-
pany where she works, she shifts her style primarily in response to her
department manager, her immediate supervisor; secondarily to her co-
workers; and minimally (if at all) to the department secretary taking
minutes, an individual playing no role at the meeting. The setting – a
meeting – and the topic (a formal report)  would cause Teresa to elevate
the formality of her speech even more than if she were speaking one-on-
one with her supervisor.
Stylistic variation is closely related to social variation, and when speakers
style-shift they are more likely to move up on the scale of formality than
down: Michael A. is more likely to insert post-vocalic /r/ in his speech in more
formal contexts; if Teresa B. were to travel to Boston, she would not be likely
to delete post-vocalic /r/ if she found herself in the company of people whose
speech lacked post-vocalic /r/. Allan Bell (1984: 152) comments that this “pat-
tern is remarkable in its consistency, appearing in study after study.” 
Summary
Communication is not simply the product of decoding the words in a
sentence or utterance and then determining their meaning. Any par-
ent knows that when a child utters Dad, I’m still hungry after finishing a
snack, the child is not simply making a declarative statement: he is
requesting more food. The parent reaches this conclusion on the basis
of information derived from the social context itself, not simply the
individual words of the utterance. And to correctly interpret the mean-
ing of this utterance, the parent has to understand the illocutionary
force of the child’s utterance: the child’s intentions in uttering the sen-
tence. In determining that the child is issuing a directive, the parent
draws upon a number of contextual clues, particularly the fact that he
has heard this very same utterance on many occasions after his son has
completed eating a snack.

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The social context of English
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