Socio-syntax: Exploring the Social Life of Grammar

How  do we adapt our grammar to communicate social detail? Do all working  class people have a local dialect or are we free to use language in ways  that transcend our place in the social hierarchy? Seeking to answer  these questions, this pioneering book is the first to exclusively and  extensively address the relationship between social meaning and  grammatical variation. It demonstrates how we use grammar to communicate  alignments and stances and to construct our social style or social  identity. Based on an ethnographic study of high school girls in  Northern England, it also uses the author's own experiences as a  working-class student, to argue for change in how we conceive of grammar  and how grammar is taught in schools. Lively and engaging real life  examples from the study are included throughout, bringing to life new  contributions to debates in variationist sociolinguistic and linguistic  anthropology.