The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford

This comprehensive collection is the first full book-length volume to bring together writing focused around and inspired by the work of John Rickford and his role in sociolinguistic research over the last four decades. Featuring contributions from more than 40 leading scholars in the field, the volume integrates both historical and current perspectives on key topics in Rickford’s body of work at the intersection of language and society, highlighting the influence of his work from diverse fields such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, creole studies, and language and education.

The volume is organized around four sections, each representing one of the fundamental strands in Rickford’s scholarship over the course of his career, bookended by short vignettes that feature stories from the field to more broadly contextualize his intellectual legacy:

• Language contact from a sociolinguistic and sociohistorical point of view

• The political ramifications of linguistic heterogeneity

• The stylistic implications of language variation and change

• The educational implications of linguistic heterogeneity and social injustice

Taken together, The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford serves as a platform to showcase Rickford’s pioneering contributions to the field and, in turn, to socially reflective linguistic research more generally, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creole studies, language and style, and language and education.

Table of contents

2. Introduction

2. Introduction to the volume

3. Renée Blake and Isabelle Buchstaller

4. The makings of a linguist: John R. Rickford’s education in his native Guyana

Ewart Thomas

2. Exploring language contact from a sociolinguistic and socio-historical point of view

2. Introduction

3. John Victor Singler

4. In the Fisherman’s net: Language contact in a sociolinguistics context

5. Shelome Gooden

6. African- Indian- American South- and Caribbean worlds: connecting with John R. Rickford’s language contact research

7. Rajend Mesthrie

8. Ideophones in Guyanese speech: An inventory of depictive lexemes and implications for (de)creolization

9. Walter Edwards and Onjel Williams

10. Systemic linguistic discrimination and disenfranchisement in the Creolophone Caribbean: The case of the St. Lucian legal system

11. Ian Robertson and Sandra Evans

12. The English words in Sranan: From where, from whom and how?

13. André Sherriah, Hubert Devonish, Ewart Thomas, and Nicole Creanza

14. Another look at the creolist hypothesis of AAVE origins

15. Don Winford

16. Rickford’s list of African American English grammatical features: An update

17. Arthur Spears

18. The ‘aks’ of its day?: Revisiting invariant am in Early Black English

19. John McWhorter

20. Viewing ex-slave narratives from a different angle: Variation and discourse

21. Lisa Green and Ayana Whitmal

22. Race, class, and linguistic camouflage: Remote past BEEN and the divergence debate revisited

23. Tracey Weldon

24. The sociolinguistic ramifications of social injustice: The case of Black ASL

25. Robert Bayley, Ceil Lucas, Joseph Hill, and Carolyn McCaskill

26. Ethnolinguistic infusion at a Sephardic adventure camp

Sarah Bunin Benor

2. The political ramifications of linguistic heterogeneity

2. Introduction

3. Alicia Beckford Wassink

4. Giving voice to despair and defiance: Rickford in Guyana

5. William Labov

6. American mestizos in the Philippines: ‘Mongrelization’ and ‘mixedness’ in American colonial media discourse

7. Bonnie McElhinny

8. Family matters: Seminal Rickford contributions to Kinesics, Education, Linguistics, and Law

9. John Baugh

10. ‘Are you Soul Folk, Baby?’ Black English, struggle, and consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s

11. Russell J. Rickford

12. We should declare AAL a separate language, although there’s no scientific reason (not) to

13. Ralph Fasold

14. Where sociolinguistics and speech science meet: The physiological and acoustic consequences of underbite in a multilectal speaker of African American English

15. Alicia Beckford Wassink

16. Credibility without intelligibility: Implications for hearing vernacular speakers

17. Lauren Hall-Lew, Inês Paiva Couceiro and Amie Fars

18. Using pharyngeals out of context: Linguistic stereotypes in parodic performances of Mizrahi Hebrew speakers

19. Roey Gafter

20. Sociolinguists trying to make a difference: race, research and linguistic activism

21. Mary Bucholtz

22. Linguistic justice: Evaluating the speech of asylum claimants

23. Peter Patrick

24. Linguistics on trial, under arrest, and in prison: On sharing sociolinguistic and forensic linguistic knowledge with attorneys, law enforcement practitioners, and incarcerated persons

25. Natalie Schilling

26. Implicit sociolinguistic bias and social justice

27. Walt Wolfram and Karen Eisenhauer

28. Forging new ways of hearing diversity: The politics of linguistic heterogeneity in the work of John R. Rickford

29. Sharese King and Jonathan Rosa

    IV The stylistic implications of language variation and change

30. Introduction

31. Edward Finegan

32. Indexical obsolescence

33. Penelope Eckert

34. Age grading, style, and language change: A lifespan perspective

35. Gillian Sankoff

36. Style: The presentation of self in everyday life – to an empty theater?

37. Dennis Preston

38. Pidgin, pride and prejudice: Race, gender and stylistic codeswitching in Nigerian stand-up comedy

39. Rudolf Gaudio

40. ‘I’d better schedule an MRI’: The linguistic stylization of ‘white’ ethnicity in comedy Carmen Fought
42. The N word as an emblem of survival identity in African American comedy

43. Jacquelyn Rahman

44. Style in motion: Lectal focusing in an African American sermon

45. Devyani Sharma, Lars Hinrichs, Tracy Conner, and Andrea Kortenhoven

46. Topic-restricting as far as revisited

47. Robin Melnick and Thomas Wasow

48. Don’t neglect the situation – but don’t stop there either! On intra-individual variation

49. Frans Gregersen

    V. The educational implications of linguistic heterogeneity and social injustice

50. Introduction

51. Julie Sweetland and Angela Rickford

52. The Effects of culturally relevant texts and questions on the reading comprehension of students of color

53. Angela E. Rickford

54. Vernaculars – Symbols of solidarity and truth in literature

55. Hazel Simmons-McDonald

56. Transnationalism, social networks, and heterogeneous language practices: A case study of a New York-based Jamaican student

57. Shondel Nero

58. Vetting the Versatility Approach

59. Julie Sweetland

60. John Rickford and social justice for speakers of Vernacular English

61. Jeff Siegel

62. I, too, am America’: African American Language, #BlackLivesMatter, and Critical (Socio)Linguistics

63. Sonja Lanehart

64. A Pedagogy of Linguistic Justice: John Rickford in the classroom and the field

Django Paris

VI. Vignettes

John R. Rickford – back in the day

Gregory Guy

Tribute to a colleague

Tom Wasow

Putting the humanity into linguistics

Dan Jurafsky

Notes on mentorship

Isla Kristina Flores-Bayer

The Consummate Teacher

Sarah Roberts

Ode to John R. Rickford

Christine Théberge Rafal

Notes on crossdisciplinary mentorship

Janina Fenigsen

Tribute to a scholar

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Spoken Soul: Tribute to a seminal work

Geneva Smitherman and H. Samy Alim

John R. Rickford’s influence on language and practice

Toya Wyatt

Tribute from an educator

Noma LeMoine

Black Lives Matter

Michel DeGraff

Renée Blake is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, USA.

Isabelle Buchstaller is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.