Developing and testing interaction-based coding schemes for the analysis of sociolinguistic variation

Abstract

Work on sociolinguistic variation increasingly considers interactional structures and phenomena as conditioning factors of variation. At the same time, scholars of talk-in-interaction have explored the potential of treating interactional phenomena as variables. However, these strands exist in isolation from each other. The present paper draws on both perspectives and proposes (1) three steps for developing an interactionally rooted variable definition and coding scheme based on the example of Listener Response, and (2) heuristics for testing how applicable the coding scheme is for a scholar of language variation without in-depth training in the analysis of talk-in-interaction. An analysis of inter-coder reliability shows high agreement for the proposed coding scheme. Small systematic disagreements are discussed and used to refine the coding scheme.