ABSTRACT
The previous chapter ended with an emphasis on connections and consolidation, and this final chapter continues to focus on these two tasks. It will attempt to consolidate what we have covered in the preceding chapters, and it will also attempt to strengthen the connections that we have made between sociolinguistics and other fields of study. Each of the previous chapters has ended with a detailed summary of its content, so I will not cover that ground again. Instead, I will return to some of the material introduced in Chapter 2. The main points I will be picking up again are:
■ the centrality of spontaneous speech as sociolinguistic data, ■ the centrality of variation in the way speakers use language to the grammar of a speech
community, ■ the need for our analyses to draw on non-linguistic factors that are meaningful in the
particular communities being studied, and ■ the motivations we ascribe to speakers’ use of different forms in speech.
