Variation and change in the sociophonetic variable ing in format ties


 Format ties, “partial repetitions of prior talk” (Goodwin & Goodwin
 1987, p. 207), are interesting from an interactional perspective with respect to their functions relating to, for
 example, (dis-) agreement/alignment or humour, and for scholars of Language Variation and Change because they offer uniquely
 comparable phonological contexts in naturalistic speech. The present paper investigates the distribution of the sociolinguistic
 variable ing in format ties in a set of dyadic interviews of six speakers from the North-East of England who were
 recorded two or three times throughout their twenties – those career-building years during which we often see a change from the
 predominant use of the alveolar variant (“in’”) to the velar (“ing”).
 The analysis offers possible interactional and stylistic explanations for the community-level stability and the
 speaker-level variation and change of ing by focusing on contexts in which speakers format tie. It shows that the
 use of the highly frequent and thus less marked alveolar variant tends to occur in aligning contexts, while the few velar cases
 occur in moments where speakers disalign on some level. This argument contributes to work combining interactional and variationist
 endeavours, in particular with respect to the variable ing.