Introduction: style-shifting revisited - J.M. Hernández-Campoy & J.A. Cutillas-Espinosa -- - Part I. - Style and Scoiolinguistic Variation in Political Discours - Speaker design strategies in political contexts of a dialectal community - J.M. Hernández-Campoy & J.A. Cutillas-Espinosa - Style-shifting in the U.S. Congress: the foreign (a) vowel in "Iraq(i)" - Lauren Hall-Lew, Rebecca L. Starr & Elizabeth Coppock - Condoleezza Rice and the sociophonetic construction of identity - Robert J. Podeson - Speaker design in Austrian TV political discussions - Barbara Soukup - Recency, resonance, and the structuring of phonological style in political speeches - Robert J. Podseva, Patrick Callier & Jermay Jamsu -- - Part II. - Style and Sociolinguistic Variation in Media Interaction - Parodic performances as indexical negatives of style - Jennifer Sclafani - Popular music singing as referee design - Andy Gibson & Allan Bell - Performing style: improvisation and the linguistic (re)production of cultural knowledge - Anna Marie Trester - Dialect as style in Norwegian mass media - Thea R. Strand - "Carry shopping through to the end": linguistic innovation in a Chinese television program - Qing Zhang
Language acts are acts of identity, and linguistic variation reflects the multifaceted construction of verbal alternatives for transmitting social meaning, where style-shifting represents our ability to take up different social positions due to its potential for linguistic performance, rhetorical stance-taking and identity projection. Traditional variationist conceptualizations of style-shifting as a primarily responsive phenomenon seem unable to account for all stylistic choices. In contrast, more recent formulations see stylistic variation as initiative, creative and strategic in personal and
