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Article published In: Interactional Linguistics
Vol. 2:2 (2022) ► pp.137–164

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Variation and change in the sociophonetic variable ing in format ties

ORCiD logo with link | Universität Duisburg-Essen
 | Universität Duisburg-Essen
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Duisburg-Essen.

Published online: 15 December 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/il.22003.eis
Abstract
Format ties, “partial repetitions of prior talk” (Goodwin, M. H., & Goodwin, C. (1987). Children’s arguing. In S. U. Philips, S. Steele, & C. Tanz (Eds.), Language, gender, and sex in comparative perspective (pp. 200–248). Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, p. 207), are interesting from an interactional perspective with respect to their functions relating to, for example, (dis-) agreement/alignment or humour, and for scholars of Language Variation and Change because they offer uniquely comparable phonological contexts in naturalistic speech. The present paper investigates the distribution of the sociolinguistic variable ing in format ties in a set of dyadic interviews of six speakers from the North-East of England who were recorded two or three times throughout their twenties – those career-building years during which we often see a change from the predominant use of the alveolar variant (“in’”) to the velar (“ing”).
The analysis offers possible interactional and stylistic explanations for the community-level stability and the speaker-level variation and change of ing by focusing on contexts in which speakers format tie. It shows that the use of the highly frequent and thus less marked alveolar variant tends to occur in aligning contexts, while the few velar cases occur in moments where speakers disalign on some level. This argument contributes to work combining interactional and variationist endeavours, in particular with respect to the variable ing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Format ties
    • 1.2The variable ing
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Data preparation and coding
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1ing variation overall
    • 3.2ing in format ties
      • 3.2.1Alveolar-alveolar format ties
      • 3.2.2Alveolar-velar format ties
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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