Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 17:37:45 -0400

From: "Peter L. Patrick" PPATRICK[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU

Subject: Re: "uptalk"



Good points. I think there was just an effort in Cindie's work as in a

lot of other people's to show that the "meaning" of a feature isn't

necessarily (restricted to) some demographic category that applies to

the speaker, in the earlier sense of "sociolinguistic markers",

carelessly used. That doesn't mean that such factors are not relevant

to social identity! Her diss. is a nice demonstration of a range of

subtler functions and meanings such a feature can take on in a

particular social context. It's also suggested that intonational

contours differ from some other linguistic features in their potential

for symbolic and iconic uses (eg from segmental variants like th/t, or

syntactic ones like quotative "like").

--plp