296 Lynn Clark and Graeme Trousdale
such a process is a gradient phenomenon, where forms are located on a
cline of entrenchment.
Speakers are able to abstract from such exemplars to form phonological
categories which are more schematic. Thus speakers may observe a com-
monality across a set of phones, just as they may observe a commonality
across a set of speakers. As the phoneme /t/ is schematic for the alveolar tap
and the glottal stop (among other phones) in many varieties of British Eng-
lish, so the category ‘British’ is schematic for the category ‘Weegie’,
‘Scouse’ and ‘Geordie’^3 (among other British social types). Newness in a
system may be created by partial sanction, where an innovation shares only
part of the specifications of its sanctioning schema. Thus, in the case of a
dialect area in which only two instances of a given variable exist, say a
dental and a glottal fricative, the introduction of a new labio-dental variant
in a lexical set is an instance of partial sanction (where manner of articula-
tion is a shared specification, place of articulation is not shared); in terms of
social stereotyping, the concept of a male nurse is allowed for by partial
sanction (human is the shared specification, male gender is not shared). Full
sanction, at its most extreme, is what we presume to be the selection of the
prototype of any given category.
- The data
3.1. Methods in data collection
The data presented here were collected from a group of 54 speakers who
play together in two interrelated pipe bands in west Fife, Scotland, called
West Fife High Pipe Band (hereafter WFHPB). The geographical location
of WFHPB is shown in Figure 1. The data were collected by the first author
over a period of 30 months using the ethnographic technique of long-term
participant observation (Eckert 2000). Ethnography is the participation in
the daily lives of a community over an extended period of time. It has re-
cently been used as a research method in a number of sociolinguistic stud-
ies (e.g. see Mendoza-Denton 1997; Eckert 2000; Moore 2003) with the
intention of understanding “the sociolinguistic dynamics of the community
from the perspective of the community itself” (Wolfram and Schilling-
Estes 1996: 106). Crucially, this is often coupled with an analysis of the