Reflections on the relation between direct/indirect methods and explicit/implicit attitudes

Abstract

Abstract The paper discusses the relation between direct/indirect methods and explicit/implicit attitudes against the background of how the issue of consciousness (or awareness) is understood and treated in a great deal of research. We focus on the use of techniques that purport to probe the implicit language attitudes held by respondents, and discuss some recent suggestions to modifications of traditional indirect methods. Our main point is that the use of indirect methods does not per se tap into implicit language attitudes in the sense of unconscious language attitudes. In that regard, aspects of how the indirect elicitation is designed and conducted are of pivotal importance. Our insistence on adding the consciousness perspective to the methods-and-attitudes issue derives from our experiences with describing and explaining the recent radical linguistic transformation (homogenization) of the Danish language and speech community. We have found unconscious attitudes – or what we prefer to call subconsciously offered attitudes – to have been a main driving force in that transformation. In investigations with other research interests than sociolinguistic change, an insistence on the importance of securing subconsciously offered attitudes in addition to the consciously offered ones may be of less relevance.