Style-Shifting and Audience Design
Style-shifting is the way a single speaker varies their language across situations, and audience design is the influential account that explains such shifting mainly as a response to the addressee and audience.
Definition
Style-shifting and audience design is the topic addressing how and why individual speakers vary their speech style across contexts, and the competing models, based on attention, audience, and identity, that explain this intraspeaker variation.
Scope
This topic covers intraspeaker (stylistic) variation, Labov's attention-to-speech model that ranks styles from casual to careful, and Bell's audience design framework in which speakers shift primarily in response to their audience, with referee design for absent reference groups. It includes the speaker-design view that treats style as proactive identity work. Interspeaker variation by class and group is treated in neighboring topics, and accommodation in interaction overlaps with interactional sociolinguistics.
Core questions
- What governs how a speaker shifts style across situations?
- How does the attention-to-speech model rank and elicit styles?
- How does audience design explain shifting as a response to listeners?
- Is style chiefly reactive to audience or proactive identity work?
Key concepts
- Intraspeaker (stylistic) variation
- Attention to speech
- Audience design and referee design
- Speaker design
Key theories
- Attention to speech
- Labov modeled stylistic variation as a function of how much attention speakers pay to their own speech, ranging from casual to careful styles elicited through reading and word lists.
- Audience design
- Bell argued that style-shifting is primarily a response to the audience, with speakers converging toward addressees and adjusting for auditors, overhearers, and absent referee groups.
History
Stylistic variation was first systematized in Labov's attention-to-speech model in the 1960s, reconceived as audience design by Bell in 1984, and later extended by speaker-design and third-wave approaches that emphasize style as active identity construction.
Debates
- Reactive audience design versus proactive speaker design
- Scholars debate whether style-shifting is mainly a reaction to the audience, as audience design holds, or a proactive resource speakers use to construct identity and stance.
Key figures
- William Labov
- Allan Bell
- Penelope Eckert
Related topics
Seminal works
- labov1972
- bell1984
Frequently asked questions
- Why do people change how they talk depending on who they are with?
- Audience design explains this as speakers adjusting their style chiefly in response to their listeners, while attention-to-speech and speaker-design accounts add the roles of self-monitoring and active identity construction.