Austrian Listeners' Perceptions of Standard-Dialect Style-Shifting: An Empirical Approach

Barbara Soukup (1)

1 English and American Studies

Situated within the sociolinguistic study of intra-speaker variation, this article reports a 'speech perception elicitation test' aimed at eliciting on which linguistic basis Austrian listeners perceive style-shifts between standard Austrian German and Austrian dialect. Forty-two informants were asked to listen to twelve audio-excerpts from an Austrian TV discussion and to underline in standard transcripts any passages in which they heard dialectal speech being used, as opposed to standard. The outcome is a set of linguistic features that appear to be consensually used by Austrians as dialect 'diagnostics', and hence can be maintained to evoke this style when used in conversation. It is argued that establishing such a set of features on an empirical basis meets an important requirement for any claims about effects created via style-shifting in interaction (such as participant alignments), because such claims are predicated on the assumption that a respective shift be identified by listeners in inferencing meaning.

Mots clés: Social Sciences & Humanities

Barbara Soukup. Austrian Listeners' Perceptions of Standard-Dialect Style-Shifting: An Empirical Approach. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2011, 15 (3), pp.347. ⟨10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00500.x⟩. ⟨hal-00649463⟩