A B S T R A C TThis study investigates how linguistic variation carries social meaning, examining the impact of the English variable (ING) on perceptions of eight speakers from the U.S. West Coast and South. Thirty-two excerpts of spontaneous speech were digitally manipulated to vary only in tokens of (ING) and used to collect listener perceptions in group interviews (N ¼ 55) and an experiment (N ¼ 124). Interview data and experimental results show that (ING) impacts social perception variably, inhabiting an indexical field of related meanings (Eckert, Penelope. [2008]. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453-476). One of these meanings, intelligence/education, is explored in detail to understand how a given meaning is realized or not in a specific context. Speakers were heard as less educated/intelligent when they used -in, but this effect is driven by reactions to speakers heard as aregional and not as working-class. Some implications on our future understanding of the processing of socially laden variation are discussed.In recent years, variationist research has devoted increasing attention to the concept of social meaning, the idea that speakers and listeners use linguistic structures to carry social information and thus shape the situations and larger societal structures in which they participate. The link between social positioning and linguistic choices has been well established from early in the field (Labov, 1963), and our understanding of social meaning has expanded more recently. Still, little is known about how listeners realize social meaning, how they receive sociolinguistic cues, and what they do with them. The essence of the claim that variation carries social meaning is that it connects speaker and hearer in social communication, making sociolinguistic comprehension basic to an understanding of what exactly social meaning is and how it is constructed on a minute-to-minute basis.This article examines how listeners incorporate social information from a single variable into perceptions of speakers on the basis of brief but content-rich linguistic stimuli. I will present data from a matched guise study of the English variable (ING) (the alternation at the end of multisyllabic words between word-final [ɪn] or [ən], here referred to as -in and [ɪŋ], called -ing). This study manipulated (ING) in examples of spontaneous speech from eight speakers varied by gender and I would like to thank Penelope Eckert for her invaluable advice on the development of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Sociolinguistic styles tie linguistic resources together into clusters and link them to social contexts of times, groups, places, and activities. Perceptions of masculinity and sexual orientation represent a well-studied area on sociolinguistic perception, offering many variables with potentially relevant social meanings. This study examines social perceptions of guises created by intersecting three masculinity-relevant variables: pitch, /s/-fronting or backing, and (ING). First, 110 online respondents provided descriptions and naturalness ratings of speech samples that were digitially modified to include the different variants; next, 175 respondents rated the speakers on six-point scales based on the terms “smart,” “knowledgeable,” “masculine,” “gay,” “friendly,” “laid-back,” “country,” “educated,” and “confident.” The results showed that /s/-fronting carries strong social meaning across multiple speakers and other linguistic cues, making speakers sound less masculine, more gay and less competent. As documented elsewhere, use of the (ING) variants -ing and -in made speakers sound more or less competent, respectively. The combination of /s/-fronting and (ING), and, independently, /s/-backing, showed more complex effects, shifting relationships between multiple percepts. Taken together, these results provide some support for style-based sociolinguistic models, but also underline the need for more sophisticated statistical treatments of covariation in social perception.

Traditionally used as a "heuristic device" (Labov, 1978), the sociolinguistic variable has taken on a new role as a primitive of speaker/hearer mental models in third-wave variation work (Eckert, 2005(Eckert, , 2008. Results from a sociolinguistic perception study suggest that at least in some cases, variants of the same variable function independently as loci of indexically linked social meaning. Listener responses were collected to three matched guises of the English variable (ING): -in, -ing, and a neutral guise with no audible (ING) tokens. The results counter the study hypothesis that listener expectation, triggered by speaker regional accent, would shape (ING)'s impact. Instead, the two variants showed distinct social associations: the -ing guises were rated as more intelligent/educated, more articulate, and less likely to be a student than either the -in or neutral guises, which did not differ significantly. In contrast, -in guises made speakers sound less formal and less likely to be gay than the -ing and neutral guises, which did not differ. These results suggest that third-wave work needs to more closely examine the role of the variable in theorizing the relationship between linguistic and social structures.

This article examines divergent listener perceptions with an expanded form of the Matched Guise Technique, using 32 matched pairs of short recordings of natural speech. Social evaluations were collected in open-ended interviews (N = 55) and an online experiment (N = 124). Three speakers are described who prompted disagreement about the English variable (ING). One's -ing use is seen by some as more intelligent and by others as annoying, less intelligent, and trying to impress. Another's -in guise is seen as compassionate by some and as condescending by others, while a third, when using -in, is seen by some as annoying and less masculine, while others describe him as a masculine “jock.” These findings show that listeners shift their interpretations of a linguistic resource, highlighting the ambiguous role intention plays in social meaning and calling into question long-held assumptions about the need for conscious introspection in sociolinguistic perception.

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