Variation conditioned by social rather than linguistic factors is the focus of the discipline of sociolinguistics, an area of study which established itself in the Western canon in the 1960s. Since that time, we have discovered innumerable things about the social patterning of language, and about the intimate relationship between language and identity, at both a macro- and micro-level.
However, much of this work has been unformalised, with explanations often appealing to intuitive notions such as 'prestige', 'discourse', or 'speech community'. A lack of formalisation means a theory cannot be straightforwardly said to make predictions, potentially closes our minds to unexpected consequences, precludes the possibility of computational modelling, and makes interaction with other disciplines in cognitive science more difficult, since there is no shared vocabulary. This is not to say formalism is totally absent from sociolinguistics, however: over the years, a variety of tools have been developed and deployed, but it has only been recently that the tools of formal semantics and pragmatics have been seriously brought to bear on the problems of sociolinguistics.
In this course, we will survey the key findings in sociolinguistics with formalisation at the front of our minds: you will learn about the empirical generalisations which need to be captured as well as the formal tools which have been advanced to make sense of them. We will read a variety of papers from sociolinguistics, as well as from formal semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. The course will thus be of interest both to sociolinguists interested in thinking deeply about their discipline's formal foundations, and to more formally-minded linguists interested in applying their tools to a fascinating and rich area of linguistic inquiry.