Abstract
The paper discusses the relation between direct/indirect methods and explicit/implicit attitudes against the background of how the issue of consciousness (or awareness) is understood and treated in a great deal of research. We focus on the use of techniques that purport to probe the implicit language attitudes held by respondents, and discuss some recent suggestions to modifications of traditional indirect methods. Our main point is that the use of indirect methods does not per se tap into implicit language attitudes in the sense of unconscious language attitudes. In that regard, aspects of how the indirect elicitation is designed and conducted are of pivotal importance. Our insistence on adding the consciousness perspective to the methods-and-attitudes issue derives from our experiences with describing and explaining the recent radical linguistic transformation (homogenization) of the Danish language and speech community. We have found unconscious attitudes – or what we prefer to call subconsciously offered attitudes – to have been a main driving force in that transformation. In investigations with other research interests than sociolinguistic change, an insistence on the importance of securing subconsciously offered attitudes in addition to the consciously offered ones may be of less relevance.
References
Babel, Molly. 2010. Dialect convergence and divergence in New Zealand English. Language in Society 39(4). 437–456.10.1017/S0047404510000400Search in Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2010. New directions in sociolinguistic cognition. Selected papers from NWAV 37, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2). 31–39.Search in Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2013. Connecting attitudes and language behavior via implicit sociolinguistic cognition. In Tore Kristiansen & Stefan Grondelaers (eds.), Language (De)standardization in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies, 307–330. Oslo: Novus Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gawronski, Bertram & Galen V. Bodenhausen. 2006. Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin 132(5). 692–731.10.1037/0033-2909.132.5.692Search in Google Scholar
Gawronski, Bertram, Wilhelm Hofmann & Christopher J. Wilbur. 2006. Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious? Consciousness and Cognition 15. 485–499.10.1016/j.concog.2005.11.007Search in Google Scholar
Giles, Howard. 1970. Evaluative reactions to accents. Educational Review 22. 211–227.10.1080/0013191700220301Search in Google Scholar
Greenwald, Anthony G., Debbie E. McGhee & Jordan L. K. Schwartz. 1998. Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(6). 1461–1480.10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464Search in Google Scholar
Greenwald, Anthony G. & Brian A. Nosek. 2008. Attitudinal dissociation: What does it mean? In Petty, R. E., Fazio, R. H., & Briñol, P. (eds.), Attitudes: Insights from the new implicit measures, 65–82. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Search in Google Scholar
Kristiansen, Tore. 2009. The macro-level social meanings of late-modern Danish accents. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41. 167–192.10.1080/03740460903364219Search in Google Scholar
Kristiansen, Tore. 2010. Conscious and subconscious attitudes towards English imports in the Nordic countries: Evidence for two levels of language ideology. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 204. 59–95.10.1515/ijsl.2010.031Search in Google Scholar
Kristiansen, Tore. 2011. Attitudes, ideology and awareness. In Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone & Paul Kerswill (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 265–278. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: SAGE.10.4135/9781446200957.n20Search in Google Scholar
Kristiansen, Tore. 2015. The primary relevance of subconsciously offered attitudes: Focusing the language ideological aspect of sociolinguistic change. In Alexei Prikhodkine & Dennis R. Preston (eds.), Responses to Language Varieties. Variability, Processes and Outcomes, 87–116. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/impact.39.04kriSearch in Google Scholar
Kristiansen, Tore & Stefan Grondelaers (eds.). 2013. Language (De)standardization in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies. Oslo: Novus. (accessible at http://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/research/slice/publications-and-news-letters/publications/).Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, Maya Ravindranath, Tracey Weldom, Maciej Baranowski & Naomi Nagy. 2011. Properties of the sociolinguistic monitor. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(4). 431–463.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00504.xSearch in Google Scholar
Lambert, Wallace, Richard Hodgson, Robert Gardner & Stanley Fillenbaum. 1960. Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60. 44–51.10.1037/h0044430Search in Google Scholar
Maegaard, Marie, Torben J. Jensen, Tore Kristiansen & J. N. Jørgensen. 2013. Diffusion of language change: Accommodation to a moving target. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17(1). 3–36.10.1111/josl.12002Search in Google Scholar
McKenzie, Robert M. & Erin Carrie. 2018. Implicit-explicit attitudinal discrepancy and the investigation of language attitude change in progress. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 39(9). 830–844.10.1080/01434632.2018.1445744Search in Google Scholar
Soukup, Barbara. 2013. On matching speaker (dis)guises – revisiting a methodological tradition. In Tore Kristiansen & Stefan Grondelaers (eds.), Language (De)standardization in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies, 267–286. Oslo: Novus Press.Search in Google Scholar
Tamminga, Meredith. 2017. Matched guise effects can be robust to speech style. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142(1). Express Letters 18–23.10.1121/1.4990399Search in Google Scholar
©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
