Dennis Preston

co-editor of "Responses to Language Varieties: Variability, processes and outcomes"

November 4, 2015

Dennis R. Preston is Regents Professor of Linguistics, Director of RODEO (Research on the Dialects of English in Oklahoma), and Co-Director of the Center for Oklahoma Studies, all at Oklahoma State University and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University. He has been a visiting professor at numerous US and overseas institutions and was Director of the 2003 Linguistic Society of America Institute. He was President of the American Dialect Society and has served on the Executive Boards of that society and many others. His work focuses on sociolinguistics and dialectology, and he has directed four recent NSF grants, two in folk linguistics and two in language variation and change. His most recent book-length publications are, with James Stanford, Variation in indigenous languages (2009); with Nancy Niedzielski, A reader in sociophonetics (2010), and with Alexei Prikhodkine, Language attitudes: Variation, processes, & outcomes (2015). He is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and holds the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic.

This book is about responses to language variety – their variability, shape, and content, as well as the variable cognitive and neural pathways underlying them. The chapters explore access to, processing of, and outcomes of that diversity and complexity. Many traditions are represented: from social psychology come classic experimental methods as well as more current discourse-based analyses; anthropology is represented in indexicality, iconization, recursivity, erasure, enregisterment, and ideologies; the sociolinguistic focus on specific rather than global elements that trigger responses is highlighted. The individual chapters address a variety of questions concerning language attitude, belief, and ideology, in some cases singly, in others with a more general focus, including attempts to relate one style of research to another. If we accept the fact that individuals house great variability in the underlying cognitive structures that inform responses, it follows that no single way of eliciting and studying them will do. This book provides a tour of the emerging tools that have been productive in such investigations.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2016-honorees/dennis-preston

Last Updated: 12 January 2022