This paper examines variation in vowel space area and its use in social meaning making. Among adolescents at a California high school, patterns of difference in vowel space correlate to social practices of exclusion in the partying scene, albeit alongside explicit discourses of high school social life as inclusive and fluid. I treat vowel space as a sociolinguistic sign, that is, a holistic semiotic resource at play in addition to (or in tandem with) individual segments. Though the semiotic potential of a given linguistic sign is no doubt shaped by large-scale patterns of variation, the particular manifestations of meaning making are best viewed at the community level alongside other day-to-day practices. Further, I suggest that linguistic practices of difference and discourses of sameness are not contradictory, but instead a feature of the semiotic landscape. I thus interpret this vowel space variation as stylistically meaningful within the context of social actors’ ideological orientation to social life.

中文翻译：

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作为社会语言学符号的元音空间

本文研究了元音空间区域的变化及其在社会意义构建中的应用。在加州一所高中的青少年中，元音空间的差异模式与聚会场景中的排斥社会实践相关，尽管高中社会生活的明确话语是包容性和流动性的。我将元音空间视为一种社会语言学符号，即除了单个片段之外（或与之协同）的整体符号资源。尽管特定语言符号的符号学潜力无疑是由大规模变异模式塑造的，但意义创造的特定表现最好在社区层面与其他日常实践一起看待。此外，我认为差异性的语言实践和同一性的话语并不矛盾，而是符号学景观的一个特征。因此，我将这种元音空间变化解释为在社会行动者对社会生活的意识形态取向的背景下具有风格意义。