LING534

Sociolinguistic applications of social network theory

Handbook Guidelines

General suggestions (for all authors):

1. Formatting:

-- for consistency, I suggest we commonly title our sections as follows, for example:

"Chapter 1: The Origins of Social Network Theory and Modeling

(author)"

-- use 0, 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc. for numbering subheadings

-- Section 0 should be titled "Introduction" for everyone

2. Within your chapter, use section headings to highlight the organization of your chapter.

3. Collect endmatter into endnotes (not footnotes)

4. Citations and References section should follow APA style

Specific suggestions:

For those of you who do chapters focused on studies of particular speech communities, it would be good to follow a common organizational strategy in writing your handbook chapter, and use section headings constructed in parallel. We can decide this to some extent as a class. Here are some ideas to get us started:

1. Introduction

State the purpose of your chapter, set out the type of research you will survey, and the organization of your chapter.

2. possible subhead: "The social networks of <type of community here> speakers"

* Provide a description of the type of social network study(ies) examined in the works you read, for example:

--immigrant community in a host language setting (bilingual)

--immigrant community in a host language setting (monolingual with phonological

restructuring)

--established speech community where language is undergoing change

--inter-ethnic contact between two communities

--etc.

3. possible subhead: "Applications of network analysis techniques"

* What methods of social network analysis did the author(s) use? (e.g., journaling, participant-observation?)

* What kinds of network structures were examined? What did they quantify (e.g., whole networks? strong and weak ties? density? multiplexity?)

* Did authors use a network strength scale of some kind? How was it constructed?

Is there a way that she could have more fully or fruitfully made use of network methods in conducting this study?

* What kinds of linguistic variables were explored for correlations to network strength?

3. possible subhead: "Social network-theoretic findings"

* Were there any hypotheses formulated and tested by the author(s) that were grounded in the predictions made by social network theory? Could the author(s) have more fully explored the predictions made by the theory itself?

4. possible summary subhead: "Contributions to the sociolinguistic study of social networks"

* What "new" space did this study/these studies map out within variationist sociolinguistics? What were its(their) major contributions?

Question:

Do we want to include an appendix on software for calculating and visualizing networks?

Do we want to include graphics?