Language and Society

This course consists in an overview of some major links between linguistics and other social sciences, in particular sociology and anthropology: it will review elements from a variety of research fields, among which interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, applied linguistics, media sociolinguistics, phonostylistics, discourse analysis, including critical approaches.
The course will provide an overview of the way in which the connections between language and society have been studied over the last decades since the emergence of the field of sociolinguistics, and focus on some of the major sociolinguistic factors that have been proved to impact language use, such as gender, age, social class, ethnicity, etc. Major concepts, that are often transversal to different research fields, such as context, indexicality, repertoires, or (trans)languaging, will be explained. Students will discover, or deepen their knowledge of some major theories, methods, frameworks, approaches and concepts at the crossroads of these fields. Indeed, the course will introduce students to different methods and tools, such as quantitative and qualitative research methods in the social sciences. It will also give a sense of the variety of corpus data that can be used in research on language and society. It will include the reading and discussion of academic papers, as well as invite students to envisage applications of the approaches covered in the course to new corpora.

Les objectifs principaux de ce cours sont :

- Connaître et comprendre les principales approches et cadres théoriques du thème étudié

- Développer ses compétences méthodologiques en recherche qualitative à l’interface de la linguistique et des sciences sociales

- Savoir appliquer des outils théoriques et méthodologiques à un corpus de données

- Se familiariser avec la lecture d’écrits académiques et scientifiques en anglais

SESSION 1

- Contrôle continu : moyenne d’une note d’oral (participation et/ou présentations en classe, 40 % de la note finale) et d’un partiel écrit final d’une durée de 2h (questions de cours et/ou application des outils théoriques et méthodologiques vus en cours, 60 % de la note finale) 

- Contrôle dérogatoire : épreuve écrite d’une durée de 2h (questions de cours et/ou application des outils théoriques et méthodologiques vus en cours)

SESSION 2 : épreuve écrite d’une durée de 2h (questions de cours et/ou application des outils théoriques et méthodologiques vus en cours)

Anglais C1, Français B2

García, O., N. Flores, M. Spotti (Eds.). (2021). The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society. Oxford University Press.
Meyerhoff, M. (2011). Introducing Sociolinguistics. 2nd edition. London & New York: Routledge.
Trudgill, P. (2000). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. 4th edition. London: Penguin.