Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity

Various aspects of the expression of stylistic features are focused on, from language choice and linguistic variation in a narrow sense to practices of social categorization, pragmatics patterns, preferences for specific communicative genres, rhetorical practices including prosodic features, and aesthetic choices and preferences for specific forms of taste (looks, clothes, music, etc.). These various features of expression are connected to multimodal stylistic indices through talk; thus, styles emerge from discourse. Styles are adapted to changing contexts, and develop in the course of social processes.

The analytical perspective chosen proposes an alternative to current approaches to variability under the influence of the so-called variationist paradigm.