SUSI LESTARI'S BLOG

       S ociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society. They are interested in explaining why we speak differently in different social contexts, and they are concerned with identifying the social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning. Examining the way people use language in different social contexts provides a wealth of information about the way language works, as well as about the social relationships in a community, and the way people convey and construct aspects of their social identity through their language.   Sociolinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and the context in which it is used. While dialect implies lexical, grammatical and/or pronunciation differences, accent is restricted to pronunciation features alone. An accent affects only the phonological level of a linguistic variety. When we say that someone speaks with an accent (e.g. a foreign accent, a working-class accent,

1.      What is Discourse Analysis   Discourse Analysisis the investigation of knowledge about language beyond the word, clause, phrase and sentence levels . All of them are the basic building blocks of successful communication. In discourse analysis researchers have to infiltrate language as a whole beyond the micro level of words and sentences and look at the entire body of communication produced in a given / particular situation. Discourse analysis refers ‘to attempts to study the organization of language above the sentence , or above the clause, and therefore to studylarger linguistic units, such as conversationalexchanges or written texts’ (Stubbs 1983:1) . However, Michael Stubbs redefines Discourse in his later work as ‘ It is therefore more accurate to say that text and discourse analysis studies language in context : how words and phrases fit into both longer texts, and also social contexts of use’ (Stubbs 2001a:5). a.                 Relationship Between Language