Towards Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 3, No. 4

A new dimension may be added to the study and teaching of a second language by the development of contrastive sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is defined here as the study of how a person relates to another person in terms of language, and is concerned with relational utterances rather than factual statements. Relational utterances are those that assume the existence of a listener, to whom the speaker is relating himself. Such utterances vary in tone and style, depending on the variables of sex, age, status, and familiarity. These variables make it socially, not linguistically, obligatory for certain relational utterances to be selected over others. The necessity of teaching the differences in relational utterances is illustrated in the case of the Japanese, who cannot confortably use English imperatives or invectives because of the social restraint on such usage in Japanese. In addition to the contrastive difficulties between languages, factual statements and relational utterances vary grammatically within one language. Learning one type of utterance does not guarantee knowledge of the other; both must be taught if the student is to be able to generate both. (LG)