Introduction

Abstract

We take as our starting point the notion of sociopragmatics as focusing ‘primarily on the social rules of speaking, those expectations about interactional discourse held by members of a speech community as appropriate and “normal” behaviour’ (Locastro 2012: 159). Sociopragmatics focuses on the ‘relationship between linguistic action and social structure’ (Martinez-Flor and Uso-Juan 2010: 6) and is concerned with the influence of socio-contextual factors in language as social action. The concepts of ‘context’ and ‘action’ are seen as central to pragmatics (Locastro 2012: 19), while the notion of language as ‘social action’ may be viewed as the outcomes or ‘action accomplished through language use’ (Compernolle 2014: 42). Indeed recent models of pragmatics as mediated action (Compernolle 2014: 42) emphasize the ‘primacy of the sociopragmatic domain in the mediated action framework’, where the sociopragmatic domain mediates the pragmalingistic domain, which in turn mediates social action. The ways in which linguistic forms vary according to context and how these relate to social action are complex and highly variable across individuals as well as across larger populations. It is this complexity which motivated the choice of the term ‘variability’ rather than ‘variation’ in the title of the volume: the selection of particular linguistic forms in different situations is dynamic, not fixed and immutable.