Studies in Language Variation
<p>This book series deals with language variation, defined as either variation across related varieties of a language (‘dialect variation’, ‘microvariation’ or ‘intersystemic’ variation) or ‘inherent’, quantitative variation (‘intrasystemic’ variation). This pertains to variation in any relevant language component: phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. <br /> <br />Topics for the series include: variation as well as change at the speech community level (‘Labovian’ sociolinguistics); levelling between standard and regional varieties and between regional varieties; dialect supralocalisation – the loss of distinctiveness at the local level; dialect contact – causes; linguistic effects, such as koineisation; dialect divergence; language variation and identity; social psychology and variation; empirical basis for speech community models, e.g., standard–regional standard–dialect, and changes in these alignments; variation and change in standard varieties; varieties and social styles making use of nonstandard variants; standardization / destandardization; typological differences between related language varieties.<br /> <br />The series aims to include empirical studies of linguistic variation as well as its description, explanation and interpretation in structural, social and cognitive terms. The series will cover any relevant subdiscipline: sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, dialectology, historical linguistics, theory-driven approaches, anthropology/anthropological linguistics. The emphasis will be on linguistic aspects and on the interaction between linguistic and extralinguistic aspects — <em>not</em> on extralinguistic aspects (including language ideology, policy etc.) <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">as such</em>.<br /> <br />Work published in the series can be either relatively descriptive/data-oriented or more theory oriented (both formal and functional). Both contemporary and historical variation will be included; with respect to historical variation, the emphasis will be on processes of language change, rather than on the outcomes of such processes. Studies which convincingly combine different perspectives will be especially welcomed.</p> <p> This peer reviewed series will include monographs, thematic collections of articles, and reference works in the relevant areas.</p>
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Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation
More LessThe study of how linguistic variation is acquired is considered a nascent field in both psycho- and sociolinguistics. Within that research context, this book aims at two objectives. First, it wants to help bridging the gap between researchers working on acquisition from different theoretical backgrounds. The book therefore includes contributions by both psycho- and sociolinguists, and by representatives of further relevant sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics and dialectology. Second, in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book brings together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.
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Advances in Sociophonetics
More LessSociophonetics 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.
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Aspect in Grammatical Variation
More LessThe articles in this edited volume represent a range of approaches to studying the role of verbal aspect in grammatical variation. Issues addressed include: defining the variable context; operationalizing aspectual distinctions as factors conditioning linguistic variation; and the appropriate number of aspectual distinctions and levels. Apart from bringing to light various methodological and analytical issues, this volume gathers together a unique collection of original research, based on spoken- and written-language corpora, of an array of languages and linguistic varieties: African American Vernacular English, Caribbean English and English-based creole, Indian English, Newfoundland English, Canadian French, Brazilian Portuguese, Ecuadorian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, and Peninsular Spanish. This volume should not only benefit research on grammatical variation but also be of interest more generally to the study of verbal aspect.
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The Continuity of Linguistic Change
More LessThe Continuity of Linguistic Change presents a collection of selected papers in honour of Professor Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. The essays revolve around the study of linguistic variation and the mechanisms and processes associated with linguistic change, a field to which Villena-Ponsoda has dedicated so many years of research. The authors are researchers of renowned international prestige who have made significant contributions in this field. The chapters cover a range of related topics and provide modern theoretical and methodological perspectives, addressing the structural, cognitive, historical and social factors that underlie and promote linguistic change in varieties of Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. The reader will find contributions that explore topics such as phonology, acoustic phonetics and processes deriving from the contact between languages or linguistic varieties, specifically levelling, koineisation, standardisation and the emergence of ethnolects.
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The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation
More LessVariability is characteristic of any living language. This volume approaches the ‘life cycle’ of linguistic variability in English using data sources that range from electronic corpora to the internet. In the spirit of the 1968 Weinreich, Labov and Herzog classic, the fifteen contributions divide into three sections, each highlighting different stages in the dynamics of English across time and space. They show, first, how increase in variability can be initiated by processes that give rise to new patterns of discourse, which can ultimately crystallize into new grammatical elements. The next phase is the spread of linguistic features and patterns of discourse, both new and well established, through the social and regional varieties of English. The final phase in this ebb and flow of linguistic variability consists of processes promoting some variable features over others across registers and regional and social varieties, thus resulting in reduced variation and increased linguistic homogeneity.
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Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas
More LessIn recent years, ethnic ways of speaking by young people with migrant background have become an important research object in sociolinguistics; work on these ways of speaking has been prospering in many European countries. This work is continued in the present volume, with the aim of bringing together various research designs which explore the phenomenon from different perspectives: correlational methodology of sociolinguistic research, conversation analytical and interactional linguistic methodology, and an ethnographic perspective on language use and the construction of social identities and social relations. The aim of the volume is to explore the scope of these different methodologies and to provide a basis for the discussion and evaluation of the theories of language variation associated with them. All papers focus on the description of the linguistic characteristics that constitute the non-standard structures of ethnic styles of speaking, and look into their various functions in discourse.
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Germanic Heritage Languages in North America
More LessThis book presents new empirical findings about Germanic heritage varieties spoken in North America: Dutch, German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, West Frisian and Yiddish, and varieties of English spoken both by heritage speakers and in communities after language shift. The volume focuses on three critical issues underlying the notion of ‘heritage language’: acquisition, attrition and change. The book offers theoretically-informed discussions of heritage language processes across phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics and the lexicon, in addition to work on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and contact settings. With this, the volume also includes a variety of frameworks and approaches, synchronic and diachronic. Most European Germanic languages share some central linguistic features, such as V2, gender and agreement in the nominal system, and verb inflection. As minority languages faced with a majority language like English, similarities and differences emerge in patterns of variation and change in these heritage languages. These empirical findings shed new light on mechanisms and processes.
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Grammatical Variation across Space and Time
More LessInterrogative 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.
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Intermediate Language Varieties
More LessThe papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the ‘dialect-standard’ landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociolinguistic histories, as well as on previously unexplored sociolinguistic situations. The contributions all share the twin characteristics of (a) robust scrutiny of structural variation and its links to both structural-systemic parameters and extralinguistic variables and (b) nuanced approaches to macro- and micro- level categories, with the requisite theoretical and methodological fine-tuning. While focusing on different languages/language groups, the papers in this volume share the common foci of bringing together structural and sociolinguistic considerations and of the concomitant necessary revisiting of methodologies. The data and analyses presented yield a firmer and more nuanced understanding of the dynamic permutations of cross-dialectal and dialect-to-standard convergence and the formation of intermediate varieties in different yet comparable contexts.
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The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings
More LessThis volume is at the cross-roads between two research traditions dealing with language change: contact linguistics and language variation and change. It starts out from the notion that linguistic variation is still a little researched area in most contact-induced language change studies. Intending to fill this gap, it offers a rich panorama of case studies and approaches dealing with linguistic variation in contact settings. It concentrates both on monolingual data, tracing variation and contact beneath surface homogeneity, and on bilingual data such as code-switching and other forms of variation, to trace their underlying regularities. It investigates the relationship between variation and change in language contact settings.
The book will be relevant for students and researchers in contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, language variation and change, sociology of language, descriptive linguistics and linguistic typology.
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Language Variation - European Perspectives III
More LessLanguage 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.
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Language Variation - European Perspectives IV
More LessThe eighteen contributions in this volume are based on papers presented at the 6th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 6), which was held at the University of Freiburg, Germany, from June 29 to July 1, 2011. The volume includes plenaries by Sjef Barbiers (‘Where is syntactic variation?’) and Arnulf Deppermann/ Stefan Kleiner & Ralf Knöbl (‘Standard usage’: Towards a realistic conception of spoken standard German). In addition, the editors have selected 16 papers ranging over a wide field of languages/varieties and topics. The languages and varieties covered are Belarusian, British English, Catalan, Dutch, Gaelic, Gallo-Italic, Greek, Italian, Occitan, Rhaeto-Romance, Russian, Scottish English, Swedish, Turkish, and several varieties of German. The majority of the papers deal with phonetic and phonological variation (Caro Reina; Deppermann, Kleiner and Knöbl; Katerbow; Moosmüller and Scheutz; Schützler; Schleef; West; Zeller; Ziegler), but morphological variation (Cornips and Hulk; Dal Negro), morphosyntactic variation (Melissaropoulou, Themistocleous, Tsiplakou and Tsolakidis), and syntactic variation (Barbiers; Håkansson; Rothmayr) are also represented. Additional papers deal with code-switching.
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Language Variation - European Perspectives V
More LessLanguage 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.
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Language Variation - European Perspectives VI
More LessLanguage Variation - European Perspectives VI showcases a selection of papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which was held in Leipzig in 2015. The volume includes plenaries by Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere (“The large and the small of it: Big issues with smaller samples in the study of language variation”), Martin Haspelmath and Susanne Maria Michaelis (“Analytic and synthetic: Typological change in varieties of European languages”) and Jürgen Erich Schmidt (“Dynamics, variation and the brain“). In addition, the editors have selected 11 papers which exemplify the breadth of research on European languages. The contributions to this volume encompass languages as varied as Swedish, Greek, Galician, Dutch, German, Swedish, English (including English-lexified contact varieties), French, Spanish, Croatian, Luxembourgish and Romani. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives and particularly the combination of different methods attests to the scope of research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages.
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Language Variation - European Perspectives VII
More LessThis volume contains a selection from papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), which was held at the University of Malaga (Spain), from June 6 to 9, 2017. The volume includes plenaries by Manuel Almeida (“Language hybridism: On the origin of interdialectal forms”) and Frans Hinskens (“Of clocks, clouds and sound change”). In addition, the editors have selected 13 papers encompassing different languages and language varieties — not only from large language families, such as Romance and Germanic, but also small language families, like Greek, or smaller languages, like Croatian — and covering a large range of topics on sociolinguistics and linguistic variation. The book displays a contemporary picture of the research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages. Readers interested in every field related to language and language use will enjoy a wide variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives on speech variation, historical sociolinguistics and foreign language acquisition and learning.
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Language Variation – European Perspectives
More LessThis 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.
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Language Variation – European perspectives II
More LessThis 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.
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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII
More LessThis volume contains a selection of papers from the 10th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), which was organized by the Fryske Akademy and held in Leeuwarden/Ljouwert (the Netherlands) in June 2019. The editors have selected thirteen papers on a wide range of language varieties, geographically ranging from Dutch-Frisian contact varieties in Leeuwarden to English in Sydney, Australia. The selection includes traditional quantitative and qualitative approaches to different types of linguistic variables, as well as state-of-the-art techniques for the analysis of speech sounds, new dialectometrical methods, covariation analysis, and a range of statistical methods. The papers are based on data from traditional sources such as sociolinguistic interviews, speech corpora and newspapers, but also on hip hop lyrics, historical private letters and administrative documents, as well as re-analyses of dialect atlas data and older dialect recordings. The reader will enjoy the vibrant diversity of language variation studies presented in this volume.
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The Middle Voice and Connected Constructions in Ibero-Romance
More LessThe reflexive constructions that are the focus of this book are the constructions broadly described with the term “middle”: i.e., those that can appear in all persons, and in which the reflexive marker (RM) cannot be understood as a full referential pronoun. One goal of this study is to provide a corpus-based typology of middle and related uses that allow us to compare the behaviour of the RM in these constructions with previous typological accounts, where competing models (based either on changes of diathesis or on the semantics of the verbal event) can be found. A second goal is to shed light on the evolution of the different functions of the RM, by exploring the factors that affect its productivity, with a specific focus on those verbs where reflexive marking is most variable, that is, anticausative verbs and verbs with no change of valency. These reflexive constructions show a notable difference in productivity in Spanish and Galician, although the languages are closely related and contiguous. The languages are thus good candidates for a contrastive and variationist analysis serving these two goals. The semantic class of the predicate, its aspectual properties and the animacy of the subject are some of the most relevant factors that are taken into account to understand the motivations behind the presence (or absence) of the RM. By relying on a corpus of interviews from rural communities across peninsular Spain (except Catalonia), space as a relevant extra-linguistic variable is taken into account, helping uncover previously unknown geographical patterns.
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More Support for More-Support
More LessThis book provides the most comprehensive account so far of novel and hitherto unexplained factors operative in the choice between synthetic (prouder) and analytic (more proud ) comparatives. It argues that the underlying motivation in using the analytic variant is to mitigate processing demands – a compensatory strategy referred to as more -support. The analytic variant is claimed to be better suited to environments of increased processing complexity – presumably owing to its ability to facilitate early phrase structure recognition, the more transparent one-to-one relation between form and function and possibly because the degree marker more can serve as a structural signal foreshadowing cognitive complexity. A bird’s eye view of 24 determinants reveals that the processing effort which triggers the analytic comparative emanates from structures that are phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, lexically, semantically or pragmatically complex. By bridging the gap between corpus-based variation research and psycholinguistic and typological approaches, the book breaks new ground in uncovering the functional motivation behind the continued variability of synthetic-analytic contrasts.
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