Austrian dialect as a metonymic device: A cognitive sociolinguistic investigation of Speaker Design and its perceptual implications

Situated at the nexus of variationist, interactional, and cognitive sociolinguistics, the present article discusses the phenomenon of ‘Speaker Design’, or the strategic use of linguistic varieties in interaction to achieve certain communicative effects (e.g. identity projections). Speaker Design is seen as essentially grounded in processes of conversational ‘contextualization’; these processes are outlined from an interactional and from a cognitive perspective in turn. Then, the phenomenon is illustrated in data from an Austrian TV show in which a speaker arguably performs a strategic shift from standard Austrian German into Bavarian-Austrian dialect to create a negative alignment with an opponent. Based on the claim that any such communicative effects of Speaker Design are contingent upon listeners’ inferencing of respective interpretations, which in turn requires a respective ‘perceptual competence’ (perceiving the contrastiveness of the linguistic cues at hand, associating different social meanings with them), the paper then presents two empirical tests (one speech perception elicitation test, one speaker evaluation experiment) to derive evidence for such perceptual competence in an Austrian TV audience regarding standard and dialect usage. It is argued that adducing such empirical evidence is ultimately a prerequisite for any claims regarding the interactional workings of Speaker Design.