Studies in Language Variation (vols. 1–18, 2006–2015)

Language Variation – European Perspectives V is based on papers presented at the Seventh International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 7), which was held in Trondheim, Norway from 26 to 28 June 2013. The 17 papers included in the book explore phonetic and phonological variation (Bitenc and Kenda-Jež; Hildenbrandt and Moosmüller; Jansen; Schaufuß; Schleef, Flynn and Ramsammy; Stuart-Smith, Rathcke, Sonderegger and Macdonald), morphology (Padilla-Moyano), syntax (Christensen and Juel Jensen; Jónsson, Brynjólfsdóttir and Sverrisdóttir), morphosyntax (Auger and Wycoff; Cerruti and Regis), language ideology, linguistic practices and language attitudes (Strand; Hall-Lew, Fairs and Lew; Dunmore and Smith-Christmas), code-switching (Amadou; Bucher) and language documentation (Kühl). The book is essential reading for scholars working on variation and change in European languages. The articles in the present volume investigate Romani, Turkish, Greek, Slovene, Picard, Swiss-German, Basque, Danish, Italian, English, Gaelic, Icelandic Sign Language, Faroe Danish and Norwegian.

Sociophonetics is a privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change. By combining theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis – both phonetic and statistical – it is possible to extrapolate the role of individual factors (socio-cultural, physiological, communicative-interactional, etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation.

This book investigates the fundamental relationship between speech variation and the social background of speakers from articulatory, acoustic, dialectological, and conversational perspectives, thus breaking new ground with respect to classical variationist and dialectological studies. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines – including phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics – will find innovative suggestions for multiple approaches to language variation. Although presuming some basic knowledge of experimental phonetics and sociolinguistics, the book is addressed to all readers with an interest in speech and language variation mechanisms in social interaction.

Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency, form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics, grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis, it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology, results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.

This volume presents a selection of French varieties representing the great diversity of this language along geographical, social, and stylistic dimensions. Twelve illustrations from regions as far removed as Western Canada and Central Africa represent widely divergent social contexts of language use. Each chapter is based on original surveys conducted within the framework of the Phonology of Contemporary French project, described in the Introduction. These surveys constitute an invaluable source of new data for researchers, as many of the varieties included are otherwise undocumented in any systematic way. The chapters follow a similar format: presentation of the survey(s) and the sociolinguistic dimensions of the variety studied; description of the phonological inventory of the system(s), principal allophonic realizations, phonotactic constraints, behavior of schwa, behavior of liaison consonants, and other notable characteristics. The book opens with an informative introduction and closes with a chapter providing a synthesis of the major findings by continent.

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 interpersonal identity construction and projection, making a significant contribution to our understanding of this aspect of sociolinguistic variation.

In this volume social constructivist approaches to style-shifting are further developed by bringing together research which suggests that people make stylistic choices aimed at conveying (and achieving) a particular social categorization, sociolinguistic meaning, and/or to project a specific positioning in society. Therefore, there is a need, we collectively argue, to adopt permeable and flexible multidimensional, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to speaker agency that take into consideration not only reactive but also proactive motivations for stylistic variation, and where individuals – rather than groups – and their strategies are the main focus when examining style-shifting in public.

This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the areas of sociolinguistics, dialectology, social psychology, anthropology and sociology.

Language Variation – European Perspectives III contains 18 selected papers from the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which took place in Copenhagen 2009. The volume includes plenaries by Penelope Eckert (‘Where does the social stop?’) and Brit Mæhlum (on how cities have been viewed by dialectologists, sociolinguists – and lay people). In between these two longer papers, the editors have selected 16 others ranging over a wide field of interest from phonetics (i.a. Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Alam) via syntax (Wiese) to information structure (Moore and Snell) and from cognitive semantics (Levshina, Geeraerts and Spelman) to the perceptual study of intonation (Feizollahi and Soukup). Several of the papers concern methodological questions within corpus based studies of variation (Buchstaller and Corrigan, Vangsnes and Johannessen, and Ruus and Duncker). Taken as a whole the papers demonstrate how wide the field of variation studies has become during the last two decades. It is now central to almost all linguistic subfields.

This volume contains a selection of papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), which was held at the University of Cyprus from June 17th–19th 2007. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives (from Generative Grammar, Word Grammar, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology to quantitative, Labovian and ethnographic approaches to variation and change, real and apparent time studies, phonetic analysis and metatheoretical papers on quantitative analysis), as well as the sheer number of linguistic varieties examined, attest both to the breadth and scope of the conference and to its status as a meeting-place for synchronic and diachronic linguistic description and theoretical exploration. One of the major themes running through the volume is the explicit concern with methodological refinement. Almost all the contributions address issues of methodology in various aspects of data collection and analysis, be they questionnaire surveys and interview data, spoken or written corpora, real- and apparent-time studies, dialect atlases and maps, statistical models or software. Alongside methodological issues, and especially with regard to the treatment of historical data, many of the papers in the volume explicitly address theoretical issues, for example the relative weighting of linguistic/systemic, cognitive and discourse factors in the exploration of language variation and change.

Interrogative clauses in French show abundant variation, especially with regard to the position of the subject vis-à-vis the finite verb, the placement of the wh-word, and the use of question markers such as est-ce que and ti/tu. This book presents a comprehensive study of the evolution and use of French interrogative constructions across a time span of approximately five hundred years by drawing on written sources (15th to 17th century) and oral data (19th and 20th century). Special attention is paid to the regional variation between European French and Quebec French. A variationist analysis reveals the relevant sociolinguistic factors conditioning variant choice. On the basis of the results obtained, the syntax of the different variants is modeled within the framework of generative grammar. In particular, the progressive diachronic decline and restriction of subject-verb inversion is argued to mirror the loss of verb movement. This book is of interest to anyone concerned with syntactic variation and change.

This volume presents 16 original studies of variation in languages representing the three main European language families, as well as in varieties of Greek and Hungarian. The studies concern variation in or across dialects or dialect groups, in standard varieties or in emerging regional varieties of the standard. Several studies investigate a specific linguistic element or structure, while others focus on areas of tension between variation and prescriptive standard norms, on regional standard varieties and regiolects, on problems of linguistic classification (from folk linguistic or dialect geographical perspectives) and the classification of speakers. Language acquisition plays a main role in three studies. The studies in this volume represent a range of methods, including ethnographic and 'interpretative' approaches, conversation analysis, analyses of the internal and geographical distribution of dialect features, the classification and quantitative analyses of socio-demographic speaker background data, quantitative analyses of both diachronic and synchronic language data, phonetic measurements, as well as (quasi-)experimental perception studies. The volume thus offers a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmos of world-wide research on variability in (originally) European languages at the beginning of the 21th century and the linguistic expression of cultural diversity.