el Stylistic Patterns ‘On Air’: Intra-speaker Variation in Canarian Radio Presenters

Abstract

Social identities are created from the organisation of a series of coordinates that cross different areas in a community: the characteristics of the social group to which the individual belongs, the position that this individual has within the group, the social attitudes towards the own group and other groups, the type of activity that takes place (public or private), the linguistic policies existing in the community towards the different linguistic norms that coexist in it, etc. By incorporating all these (and other) aspects to the variationist analysis, we are admitting that neither the strictly structuralist nor the strictly interactional positions in Sociolinguistics allow us to properly explain the social dimension of language. The analysis of these relationships allows us to analyse with better criteria the different levels in which the sociocultural meaning that the forms of language acquire in specific social situations is organised. Within the framework of these ideas, this research analyses the way in which six radio broadcasters from the Canary Islands stylise their speech in order to achieve certain communicative purposes.