Journal articles: 'Variationist linguistics'

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Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. "Register in variationist linguistics." Register Studies 1, no. 1 (April 26, 2019): 76–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/rs.18006.szm.

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Abstract Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Professor of Linguistics in the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics research group at the Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven, writes this article exploring the connections between register and variationist linguistics. He is involved with various large-scale research projects in areas such as probabilistic grammar, variationist sociolinguistic research, linguistic complexity, and dialectology/dialectometry. Szmrecsanyi’s books include Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects: A Study in Corpus-based Dialectometry (2013, Cambridge) and Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis: Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech (Szmrecsanyi & Wälchli 2014, Mouton de Gruyter). He is currently a principal investigator on a major grant-funded research project titled ‘The register-specificity of probabilistic grammatical knowledge in English and Dutch’, a project aimed at exploring the question of whether register differences lead to differences in the processes of making linguistic choices. In sharp contrast to the status quo in variationist linguistics, where register is often ignored entirely, much of Szmrecsanyi’s variationist research treats register as a variable of primary importance. The findings from these studies have led Benedikt Szmrecsanyi to state that “we need more empirical/variationist work to explore the differences that register makes” (Szmrecsanyi 2017: 696).

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Chambers, J. K., Sarah Cummins, and Jeff Tennant. "Louis Gauchat — Patriarch of Variationist Linguistics." Historiographia Linguistica 35, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 213–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.35.1.18cha.

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BAYLEY, R. "SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND VARIATIONIST LINGUISTICS." American Speech 75, no. 3 (September 1, 2000): 288–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-75-3-288.

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Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. "Variationist sociolinguistics and corpus-based variationist linguistics: overlap and cross-pollination potential." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62, no. 4 (June 20, 2017): 685–701. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2017.34.

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AbstractThe paper surveys overlap between corpus linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics. Corpus linguistics is customarily defined as a methodology that bases claims about language on usage patterns in collections of naturalistic, authentic speech or text. Because this is what is typically done in variationist sociolinguistics work, I argue that variationist sociolinguists are by definition corpus linguists, though of course the reverse is not true: the variationist method entails more than merely analyzing usage data, and not all corpus analysts are interested in variation. But that being said, a considerable and arguably increasing number of corpus linguists not formally trained in variationist sociolinguistics are explicitly concerned with variation and engage in what I callcorpus-based variationist linguistics(CVL). I first discuss what unites or divides work in CVL and in variationist sociolinguistics. In a plea to cross subdisciplinary boundaries, I subsequently identify three research areas where variationist sociolinguists may draw inspiration from work in CVL: conducting multi-variable research, paying more attention to probabilistic grammars, and taking more seriously the register-sensitivity of variation patterns.

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Preston, Dennis R. "Variation linguistics and SLA." Second Language Research 9, no. 2 (June 1993): 153–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/026765839300900205.

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Sociolinguistics (here called variationist linguistics) has been misunderstood and misrepresented in second language acquistion (SLA) research. In spite of that, several productive studies (many of which use the VARBRUL statistical program) have made significant contributions to our understandings of variation in SLA data, contributions which touch on the linguistic and not the social concerns of such data. The failure of SLA researchers who belong to the so-called 'dominant paradigm' (or Chomskyan or Universal Grammar (UG) research programme) to realize that belief in a so-called variable competence is not a prerequisite to variation studies has been particularly harmful. On the other hand, the failure of sociolinguists to take psycholinguistic matters seriously has been another serious drawback to interfield co-operation; a summary of a plausible variationist psycholinguistics (within an SLA setting and allowing UG interpretation) is provided.

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Mor, Uri. "Two Case Studies of Linguistic Variation in Mishnaic Hebrew." Journal of Semitic Studies 65, no. 1 (2020): 117–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgz043.

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Abstract Mishnaic Hebrew shows considerable linguistic variation, which may be narrowed down to three phases: the original living language, its literary crystallization, and its written and oral transmission. While scholars of Mishnaic Hebrew are well aware of this fact, they generally do not explore it and neglect to utilize tools of variationist linguistics and historical sociolinguistics in order to enhance their understanding of the language and the motivations of its users. This paper calls for a careful integration of variationist and sociolinguistic methods into the research on Mishnaic Hebrew and offers two case studies that demonstrate the advantages of this approach. The first case study con-cerns the distribution of the two feminine singular demonstrative pronouns and , for which I argue for a variationist rather than structuralist analysis. The second case study concerns a metalinguistic discussion in tractate ‘Eruvin of the Babylonian Talmud, which is claimed here to demonstrate the ideological nature of rabbinic litera-ture and its linguistic implications.

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Chambers, J. K., Sarah Cummins, and Jeff Tennant. "Louis Gauchat (1866-1942), Patriarch of Variationist Linguistics." Historiographia Linguistica 35, no. 1-2 (March 7, 2008): 213–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.35.1-2.18cha.

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Kim, Agnes, and Ludwig M. Breuer. "On the Development of an Interdisciplinary Annotation and Classification System for Language Varieties – Challenges and Solutions." Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis 68, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 191–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jazcas-2017-0029.

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Abstract The Special Research Programme (SFB) ‘German in Austria: Variation – Contact – Perception’ is a project financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF F60). Its nine project parts are collaboratively conducting research on the variation and change of the German language in Austria. The SFB explores the use and the subjective perception of the German language in Austria as well as its contact with other languages. Methodologically and theoretically, most SFB project parts are situated within variationist linguistics, others in contact linguistics and perceptionist linguistics. This paper gives an insight into the conception of a framework for the annotation and ultimately also classification of language varieties, which is being developed within the SFB. It outlines the requirements of the various project parts and reviews, whether and how standardised language codes (ISO 639) and language tags (following BCP 47) can be utilised for the annotation of language varieties in variationist linguistic projects.

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MEYERHOFF, MIRIAM. "Linguistic change, sociohistorical context, and theory-building in variationist linguistics: new-dialect formation in New Zealand." English Language and Linguistics 10, no. 1 (May 2006): 173–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674306001833.

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Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, and Peter Trudgill, 2004. New Zealand English: its origins and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0 521 64292 2. Hb £55.00, US$85.00.Peter Trudgill, 2004. New-dialect formation: the inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0 7486 1876 7. Hb £45.00.

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ADGER, DAVID, and GRAEME TROUSDALE. "Variation in English syntax: theoretical implications." English Language and Linguistics 11, no. 2 (July 2007): 261–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674307002250.

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This article provides an overview of the relationship between studies of syntactic variation in dialects of English and theoretical accounts of language structure. In the first section of the article, we provide a discussion of the place of syntactic variation within various subdisciplines of linguistic enquiry: we address issues such as I- and E-language, the place of Standard English in linguistic theory, and interfaces between traditional dialectology, variationist sociolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics. These interfaces suggest the need for a clarification of the nature and status of the (morpho)syntactic variable, which we provide in section 3; and in section 4, we examine the way in which (morpho)syntactic variation is treated within a number of theoretical models – for instance, Principles and Parameters theory, HPSG, OT, and cognitive linguistics (including Word Grammar and Construction Grammar) – all of which feature in the other articles in this special issue.

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Dodsworth, Robin. "Modeling Socioeconomic Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics." Language and Linguistics Compass 3, no. 5 (August 31, 2009): 1314–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818x.2009.00167.x.

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Croft, William. "Syntax is more diverse, and evolutionary linguistics is already here." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, no. 5 (October 2009): 453–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x09990653.

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AbstractEvans & Levinson (E&L) perform a major service for cognitive science. The assumption of Chomskyan generative linguistics – that there are absolute unrestricted universals of grammatical structure – is empirically untenable. However, E&L are too reluctant to abandon word classes and grammatical relations in syntax. Also, a cognitive scientist can already draw on a substantial linguistics literature on variationist, evolutionary models of language.

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RUPP, LAURA. "Constraints on nonstandard -s in expletive there sentences: a generative–variationist perspective." English Language and Linguistics 9, no. 2 (October 31, 2005): 225–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674305001656.

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This article examines grammatical conditioning of the use of nonstandard -s in expletive there sentences. The discussion is based on data from a Midlands variety of English (UK). In negative constructions, speakers tend to allow for nonstandard -s with no and constituent not, but not to use it with n't or clausal not. Further, nonstandard -s is admitted in declarative existentials, but disfavoured in interrogatives. By comparison, occurrences of nonstandard -s in nonexistential structures did not seem to demonstrate these constraints. Investigating such constraints is instructive in several respects. First, they help to identify the nature of nonstandard -s. Second, they provide new evidence for the generative inquiry into issues relating to subject–verb agreement. Third, they delimit variable contexts for variationist analyses. In this way generative and variationist objectives meet. I will argue that researching syntactic variation necessitates combining generative and variationist methodology.

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Bleortu, Cristina, and Miguel Cuevas-Alonso. "Sali A. Tagliamonte: Variationist sociolinguistics. Change, observation, interpretation." Onomázein Revista de lingüística, filología y traducción 28 (December 5, 2013): 42–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.7764/onomazein.28.6.

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Torbert, B. "DEDIC ATEDLY VARIATIONIST: Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social Significance." American Speech 81, no. 3 (September 1, 2006): 314–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2006-020.

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Penry Williams, Cara, and Minna Korhonen. "A sociolinguistic perspective on the (quasi-)modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English." English World-Wide 41, no. 3 (November 9, 2020): 267–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.00051.pen.

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Abstract This article examines the distribution and sociolinguistic patterning of (quasi-)modals which express strong obligation/necessity, namely must, have to, have got to, got to and need to, in Australian English. Variationist studies in other varieties of English have had contrasting findings in terms of distributions of root forms, as well as their conditioning by social and linguistic factors. The corpus analysis suggests real-time increased use of need to and decrease in have got to through comparison to earlier findings. The variationist analysis shows quasi-modals have to, have got to and got to as sensitive to speaker age and sex, and a recent increase of have to via apparent time modelling. Linguistic conditioning relating to the type of obligation and subject form is also found. The study contributes to sociolinguistic understanding of this large-scale change in English and the place of Australian English amongst other varieties.

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Kasstan, Jonathan. "New speakers: Challenges and opportunities for variationist sociolinguistics." Language and Linguistics Compass 11, no. 8 (August 2017): e12249. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12249.

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Roeper, Tom. "Grammar acquisition and grammar choice in the variationist model." Epistemological issue with keynote article “A Formalist Perspective on Language Acquisition” by Charles Yang 8, no. 6 (November 26, 2018): 758–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lab.18087.roe.

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Barreda, Santiago. "Perceptual validation of vowel normalization methods for variationist research." Language Variation and Change 33, no. 1 (March 2021): 27–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394521000016.

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AbstractThe evaluation of normalization methods sometimes focuses on the maximization of vowel-space similarity. This focus can lead to the adoption of methods that erase legitimate phonetic variation from our data, that is, overnormalization. First, a production corpus is presented that highlights three types of variation in formant patterns: uniform scaling, nonuniform scaling, and centralization. Then the results of two perceptual experiments are presented, both suggesting that listeners tend to ignore variation according to uniform scaling, while associating nonuniform scaling and centralization with phonetic differences. Overall, results suggest that normalization methods that remove variation not according to uniform scaling can remove legitimate phonetic variation from vowel formant data. As a result, although these methods can provide more similar vowel spaces, they do so by erasing phonetic variation from vowel data that may be socially and linguistically meaningful, including a potential male-female difference in the low vowels in our corpus.

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Nagy, Naomi. "Linguistic attitudes and contact effects in Toronto’s heritage languages: A variationist sociolinguistic investigation." International Journal of Bilingualism 22, no. 4 (March 29, 2018): 429–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367006918762160.

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Aims and objectives: I review several methods of constructing bridges between structural linguistic variation in language contact situations and linguistic attitudes and prestige. Methodology design: Data are examined for heritage varieties of Cantonese, Faetar, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian spoken in Toronto, Canada, and in the corresponding homeland varieties, in an effort to consider how the notions of ‘prestige’ and ‘attitude’ are best operationalized in heritage language studies and to seek associations between structural variation and prestige. Linguistic variation is explored via multivariate analysis of (linguistic and) social factors, in order to determine which factors best account for the selection of competing variants of selected sociolinguistic variables (primarily null subject variation and voice onset time) in spontaneous speech. The attitudinal or prestige aspect is explored in several ways: comparison of ethnolinguistic vitality, language status (in popular and academic media) and ethnic orientation. It is hypothesized that: • communities with a higher ethnolinguistic vitality will be more resistant to contact-induced variation; • varieties exhibiting more contact-induced variation will more likely have acquired a label distinct from the homeland variety; • within a generation, speakers with greater affinity for or more frequent use of English will show stronger contact effects; and • successive generations of speakers, with increasing contact with English, will show greater contact effects. Conclusions/originality/significance: These hypotheses are not supported by our data.

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Araujo, Gabriel Antunes de, and Nancy Mendes Torres Vieira. "The Diphthong in Variationist Studies of Brazilian Portuguese: A Systematic Literature Review." Languages 6, no. 2 (May 14, 2021): 87. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages6020087.

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This study presents a systematic literature review of the monophthongization of the diphthong <ei> in Brazilian Portuguese. Monophthongization is a sound change by which a diphthong becomes a single vowel. Thus, the output of, for example, the word beira (‘edge’) can be b[eɪ̯]ra or b[e]ra. Our primary sources, 10 Master’s theses that analyzed this phenomenon using quantitative sociolinguistic methodologies, focus on individually describing a region’s variety of Portuguese. However, the results were never systematically related to each other. Consequently, these works do not present a comprehensive overview of the production of <ei> in Brazilian Portuguese. Therefore, this systematic review gathers and unifies information dispersed in these studies, aiming to offer an overview of this optional phenomenon. The overall results demonstrate that the following context was the relevant linguistic variable, while the speaker’s educational level and dialect variation are the relevant non-linguistic variables for the application of the monophthongization rule.

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Stewart, Miranda M. "Personally speaking … or not? The strategic value of on in face-to-face negotiation." Journal of French Language Studies 5, no. 2 (September 1995): 203–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269500002763.

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AbstractThe fact that the subject clitic on has such a wide range of referential values has been studied extensively, in particular from a variationist perspective. Quantitative methods have been used (e.g. Laberge and Sankoff, 1980) to establish correlations between, on the one hand, on and its paradigmatic ‘equivalents’ tu and vous and, on the other, a number of linguistic, discoursal and social variables. Indeed, pragmatic factors figure increasingly prominently amongst investigated constraints on use and interpretation. It is the aim of this paper to explore, from a broadly qualitative, non-variationist perspective, and within the context of Brown and Levinson's ‘Politeness Theory’ (1978, 1987), how speakers can exploit the indeterminacy of pronominal reference and in particular that of the French indeterminate pronoun on in the interests of face protection.

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Donaldson, Bryan. "Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated by e." Journal of Historical Linguistics 10, no. 3 (December 8, 2020): 389–426. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhl.19002.don.

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Abstract This paper offers a variationist analysis of object and adverbial clitic position in coordinated affirmative verb-first main declaratives introduced by e(t) “and” in Old Occitan. In this context, clitics occur in either preverbal (e·l vestit “and clothed him”) or postverbal position (e perdonet li “and pardoned him”). Following recent work on Medieval Romance coordination, I posit that proclitic and enclitic examples reflect different coordination structures at the underlying syntactic level. Data from complete analyses of five major 13th- and 14th-century texts, analyzed in a variationist approach using logistic regression, reveal that the choice between coordination structures – and hence, between proclisis and enclisis – is principled rather than random and depends on the degree of continuity or rupture/discontinuity between the conjuncts.

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Torres Cacoullos, Rena, and Catherine E. Travis. "Variationist typology: Shared probabilistic constraints across (non-)null subject languages." Linguistics 57, no. 3 (May 27, 2019): 653–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0011.

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Abstract A key parameter in received classifications of language types is the expression of pronominal subjects. Here we compare variation patterns in conversational data of English – considered a non-null-subject language – and Spanish – a well-studied null-subject language. English has a patently lower rate of expression (approximately 3% unexpressed 1sg and 3sg human subjects vs. 60% in Spanish). Despite the stark difference in rate of expression, the same probabilistic constraints are at work in the two languages. Contrary to popular belief, VP coordination is neither a discrete nor a distinguishing category of English. Instead, a shared constraint is linking with the preceding subject, a refinement of accessibility to include, alongside coreferentiality, measures of structural connectedness – both prosodic and syntactic. Other shared constraints on unexpressed subjects are coreferential subject priming (a tendency to repeat the form of the previous mention) and lexical aspect (reflecting the contribution of a temporal relationship to subject expression). Where the languages most differ is in the envelope of variation. In English, besides coreferential-subject verbs conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects are limited to prosodic initial-position in declarative main clauses, a restriction that is absent in Spanish. We propose that the locus of cross-language comparisons is the variable structure of each language, defined by the set of probabilistic constraints but also the delimitation of the variable context within which these are operative.

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Ashby, William J. "When does variation indicate linguistic change in progress?" Journal of French Language Studies 1, no. 1 (March 1991): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269500000776.

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AbstractIt is argued that two variables of Modern French (the negative particle ne and the consonant l of clitic pronouns such as il) are indeed indices of ongoing linguistic change, even though this change appears to be of long duration. This conclusion is based not only on the distribution of the variables in a corpus of natural French discourse, but also on independent linguistic evidence, together with the available historical record. In the absence of adequate ‘real-time’ data, variationist analysis yielding synchronic, “apparent-time” data provides a useful means of charting the drift of the language.

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Hibiya, Junko. "The velar nasal in Tokyo Japanese: A case of diffusion from above." Language Variation and Change 7, no. 2 (July 1995): 139–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000958.

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ABSTRACTThe present study is an attempt to investigate Japanese as it is spoken in Tokyo within the variationist framework, focusing on the variable (ng). The results of earlier research and observation have shown that this variable has been in the process of change. Speakers at younger age levels favor the newer variant [g], while those at older age levels favor the older variant [ŋ]. Results of quantitative analyses of the data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews with 62 native speakers of Tokyo Japanese allow us to establish the case under investigation as one of diffusion from above. The findings of the present investigation add to the body of research conducted within the variationist framework; they confirm the existence of inherent variation and orderly heterogeneity.

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BRITAIN, DAVID. "Paris: a sociolinguistic comparative perspective." Journal of French Language Studies 28, no. 2 (July 2018): 291–300. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269518000145.

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AbstractThis article assesses the sociolinguistic impact and importance of the other articles in this special issue on Paris, considering three main themes that are evoked. First, the contribution of the articles here to the development of work on language variation and change on Hexagonal French within the variationist paradigm. Second, I address what I see as the important contribution made to our understanding of the ‘city’ as a sociolinguistic site. Finally, I focus on ethnicity as a social construct in recent variationist work in cities and consider what the articles here, and in comparison with cities elsewhere, add to our understanding of the impact of immigration on local manifestations of language variability. In each case, I attempt to show how these articles foreground or even problematize these three issues, and provide a prospectus for further research that can address unresolved questions.

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Cameron, Deborah. "11. GENDER ISSUES IN LANGUAGE CHANGE." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 23 (March 2003): 187–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0267190503000266.

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It has long been apparent to scholars that gender exerts an influence on language change. Recently, however, the patterns of gender differentiation attested in empirical studies have been reinterpreted in the light of current social constructionist understandings of gender. Drawing on recent work in variationist sociolinguistics, sociology of language and linguistic anthropology, this chapter focuses on new approaches to explaining gender differentiated patterns of sound change and language shift, the success or failure of planned linguistic reforms, and changes in the social evaluation of gendered speech styles.

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Dixon, Sally. "Multilingual Repertoires at Play: Structure and Function in Reported Speech Utterances of Alyawarr Children." Languages 6, no. 2 (April 23, 2021): 79. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages6020079.

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While there is increasing international interest in approaching language analysis with the prism of repertoire, research on repertoire on the Australian continent is still very much in the shadow of “traditional” language-centric documentary work. This paper will explore the question of how users of Australian, English-lexified contact varieties exploit their multilingual repertoires to achieve local, conversation–organizational ends. Drawing upon a corpus of video recordings from Ipmangker, a Central Australian Aboriginal community, and using the analytical methods of interactional and comparative variationist linguistics, I examine the production of reported speech by four 6- to 7-year-old Alyawarr children in a play session at home. A set of prosodic, phonological, morphological and discourse-pragmatic features are shown to form a coherent set of linguistic elements with which these multilingual children can contrast reported speech from the surrounding talk. Moreover, the use of reported speech in play not only allows the children to organize their interaction, but responds to and constructs the epistemic landscape of play.

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van Oostendorp, Marc. "Review of Tagliamonte (2016): Making Waves. The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics." Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 5, no. 1 (June 27, 2016): 97–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dujal.5.1.05oos.

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Carrier, Julien. "The ergative-antipassive alternation in Inuktitut: Analyzed in a case of new-dialect formation." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62, no. 4 (June 27, 2017): 661–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2017.33.

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AbstractThis paper analyzes the ergative-antipassive alternation in Inuktitut using a variationist sociolinguistic approach. This alternation is not a typical linguistic variable, as these constructions are traditionally believed to have different syntactic functions. However, the nature of those functions remains controversial (e.g., Bittner 1987, Manga 1996), and they are undergoing changes in some dialects (e.g., Johns 2001, Carrier 2012), with the antipassive being increasingly used in place of the ergative. Thus, a variationist sociolinguistic approach is employed here to identify the significant functions of these constructions, and to find the specific context where they overlap and the language change is taking place. The study examines data collected in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, which presents a case of new-dialect formation due to the High Arctic relocation. The analysis reveals the functions of these constructions, describes the source of fading ergativity for the dialects considered in this study, and supports Trudgill's (2004) theory on new-dialect formation.

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Hernández-Campoy, J. M. "English in its socio-historical context." English Today 29, no. 3 (August 15, 2013): 58–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078413000217.

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Since Romaine's (1982) pioneering work, historical sociolinguistics has been studying the relationships between language and society in its socio-historical context by focusing on the study of language variation and change with the use of variationist methods. Work on this interdisciplinary sub-field subsisting on sociology, history and linguistics is expanding, as shown, for example, by Milroy (1992), Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (1996; 2003), Ammon, Mattheier & Nelde (1999), Jahr (1999), Kastovsky & Mettinger (2000), Bergs (2005), Conde-Silvestre (2007), Trudgill (2010), or Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre (2012). These works have been elucidating the theoretical limits of the discipline and applying the tenets and findings of contemporary sociolinguistic research to the interpretation of linguistic material from the past. Yet in the course of this development historical sociolinguistics has sometimes been criticised for lack of representativeness and its empirical validity has occasionally been questioned. Fortunately, in parallel to the development of electronic corpora, the assistance of corpus linguistics and social history has conferred ‘empirical’ ease and ‘historical’ confidence on the discipline.

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Levon, E. "TEASING APART TO BRING TOGETHER: GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN VARIATIONIST RESEARCH." American Speech 86, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 69–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-1277519.

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Trudgill, Peter. "Norsified English or Anglicized Norse?" Language Dynamics and Change 6, no. 1 (2016): 46–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00601011.

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Emonds & Faarlund have brilliantly demonstrated that the syntax of English owes a great deal to the syntax of Old Norse, and more than has generally been thought. This is genuinely significant. But, from a variationist perspective, the difference of nomenclature—“North Germanic” rather than “West Germanic”—is not.

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Díaz-Campos, Manuel, Juan M. Escalona Torres, and Valentyna Filimonova. "Sociolinguistics of the Spanish-Speaking World." Annual Review of Linguistics 6, no. 1 (January 14, 2020): 363–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030547.

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This review provides a state-of-the-art overview of Spanish sociolinguistics and discusses several areas, including variationist sociolinguistics, bilingual and immigrant communities, and linguistic ethnography. We acknowledge many recent advances and the abundant research on several classic topics, such as phonology, morphosyntax, and discourse-pragmatics. We also highlight the need for research on understudied phenomena and emphasize the importance of combining both quantitative and ethnographic methodologies in sociolinguistic research. Much research on Spanish has shown that the language's wide variation across the globe is a reflection of Spanish-speaking communities’ rich sociohistorical and demographic diversity. Yet, there are many areas where research is needed, including bilingualism in indigenous communities, access to bilingual education, attitudes toward speakers of indigenous languages, and language maintenance and attrition. Language policy, ideology, and use in the legal and health care systems have also become important topics of sociolinguistics today as they relate to issues of human rights.

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Zhang, Jingwei, Yanyong Zhang, and Daming Xu. "A variationist approach to tone categorization in Cantonese." Chinese Language and Discourse 10, no. 1 (July 12, 2019): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cld.18008.zha.

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Abstract This study examines tone mergers in Hong Kong Cantonese from the perspective of variationist sociolinguistics. It approaches the issue of whether Cantonese has six or nine tones by focusing on two ongoing tone mergers: (1) the merger of yin qu T3 and yang qu T6, and (2) the merger of lower yin ru T8 and yang ru T9. Speech data from fifty native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong were collected and analyzed. The change routes and constraint patterns of the two mergers were compared and found to be similar. The results support the six-tone system for Hong Kong Cantonese. This study serves as an example of how the variationist approach can be used in phonological debates.

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Antieau, Lamont D. "Ascending kinship terminology in Middle Rocky Mountain English." English World-Wide 33, no. 2 (July 2, 2012): 185–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.33.2.04ant.

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This study uses the tools of corpus linguistics to investigate ascending kinship terminology in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, a collection of interviews gathered in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming as part of a dialectological survey of the American West. Relying in part on the framework of Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001), particularly with respect to their notion of a parental kin prototype, the study examines lexical and grammatical variation in the use of terms for parents and grandparents in different interviewing contexts in an effort to identify patterns in these distributions. The study finds important quantitative differences in the distribution of mother and father, as well as differences in the grammatical behavior of these and other kinship variants. While these results provide some support for a parental kin prototype, they also suggest the benefits that survey data collected within a variationist framework offer such a prototype, both with respect to the counterexamples to broad generalizations that such datasets inevitably include as well as the variable patterns that often emerge from such data that might go unobserved using formal methods.

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Kasstan, Jonathan R. "Emergent sociolinguistic variation in severe language endangerment." Language in Society 48, no. 5 (July 29, 2019): 685–720. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404519000472.

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ABSTRACTContrary to Labov's principle of style shifting, studies in language obsolescence portray speakers of dying languages as ‘monostylistic’, a characterization questioned here. Variationist methodology is adopted in a context of gradual language death. By combining quantitative and interactional analyses of data from older, younger, and new speakers of Francoprovençal in France and Switzerland, the article considers (a) to what extent variability in language obsolescence differs from that found in ‘healthy’ languages, and (b) how innovations might spread through communities speaking threatened languages characterized as ‘monostylistic’ and lacking overt normative infrastructure. It is argued that style variation (not monostylism) emerges from linguistic decay: among more fluent speakers, a categorical rule of /l/-palatalization before obstruents becomes underspecified, rendering palatalization available for strategic use. Among new speakers, novel palatal variants form part of an emergent sociolinguistic norm. The study offers fresh insights on the origins of sociolinguistic variation with implications for variationist theory. (Language obsolescence, language death, language variation and change, style variation, new speakers)*

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Cacoullos, Rena Torres, and James A. Walker. "On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: a variationist study of that." Linguistics 47, no. 1 (January 2009): 1–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling.2009.001.

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Canagarajah, Suresh. "Crossing borders, addressing diversity." Language Teaching 49, no. 3 (May 31, 2016): 438–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261444816000069.

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This paper presents a story of applied linguistics from my personal vantage point as a multilingual scholar whose career began outside the centers of research and scholarship. The article explains the assumptions and practices characterizing the foundation of the discipline in modernist discourses, and delineates the changes resulting from globalization towards postmodern discourses that question positivistic inquiry and homogeneity. As applied linguistics evolves to address diversity as the norm, the article identifies the different schools that have gradually moved the field in that direction – e.g., variationist applied linguistics (VAL), critical applied linguistics (CAL), postmodern hybridity, and translingual practice. Through these movements, the field has also evolved fromlinguistics applied (LA)to a more theoretically plural and, currently, to a more agentive relationship with other disciplines. Rather than simply borrowing from other disciplines, applied linguists have begun to make their own contributions to those disciplines on language-related issues.

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Koppensteiner, Wolfgang, and Alexandra Lenz. "Tracing a standard language in Austria using methodological microvariations of Verbal and Matched Guise Technique." Linguistik Online 102, no. 2 (May 25, 2020): 47–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.102.6816.

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Based on the key hypothesis, that there are heterogeneous conceptualizations of “standardness” within the German speaking countries, this paper both methodologically and empirically tangles main aspects on “standard in Austria” from the perspective of perceptual variationist linguistics. Two series of comprehensive listener judgment tests based on 536 informants, considering different sociolinguistic parameters and assumptions on model speakers, indicate shiftings away from competing (country-specific) conceptualizations towards heterogeneous dimensions of “standard in Austria” with complex evaluative patterns.

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Hilte, Lisa, Reinhild Vandekerckhove, and Walter Daelemans. "Adolescents’ social background and non-standard writing in online communication." Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 7, no. 1 (August 10, 2018): 2–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dujal.17018.hil.

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Abstract In a large corpus (2.9 million tokens) of chat conversations, we studied the impact of Flemish adolescents’ social background on non-standard writing. We found significant correlations between different aspects of social class (level of education, home language and profession of the parents) and all examined deviations from formal written standard Dutch. Clustering several social variables might not only lead to a better operationalization of the complex phenomenon of social class, it certainly allows for discriminating social groups with distinct linguistic practices: lower class teenagers used each of the non-standard features much more often and in some cases in a different way than their upper class peers. Possible explanations concern discrepancies in terms of both linguistic proficiency and linguistic attitudes. Our findings emphasize the importance of including social background as an independent variable in variationist studies on youngsters’ computer-mediated communication.

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Deshors, Sandra C. "Zooming in on Verbs in the Progressive: A Collostructional and Correspondence Analysis Approach." Journal of English Linguistics 45, no. 3 (August 16, 2017): 260–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424217717589.

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Quantitative corpus-linguistic approaches that are compatible with cognitive-constructional theories of language are on the increase in variationist English studies, but remain rare when it comes to study of the progressive aspect. The purpose of this study is therefore to road-test a two-step methodological approach in the investigation of over 6000 progressive constructions in five comparable corpora: the British, US, India, and Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), in addition to the recently released Corpus of Dutch English. Because the latter corpus followed the ICE design, it provides a valuable opportunity to investigate an as yet virtually unexplored population of non-native English users across seven different genres. First, successive covarying collexeme analyses were conducted of the variables verb and variety and then semantic domain and variety. The results confirmed several previous findings about, among other things, the strong association of progressive knowing with Indian English. Next, the results were fed into a correspondence analysis to explore, for the first time, the interactions between three variables in the use of progressive marking, semantic domain, variety and genre, revealing complex interplay between them. Ultimately, by contributing to the stock of methodological approaches used in variationist studies of the progressive aspect, the study provides a first step towards the development of detailed constructional profiles of the progressive across English varieties.

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Meyerhoff, Miriam. "Writing a linguistic symphony: Analyzing variation while doing language documentation." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62, no. 4 (June 13, 2017): 525–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2017.28.

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AbstractTypically, a study of variation starts from the known and works its way into the unknown. But what happens when you are analyzing variation at the same time as you are grappling with the fundamental structure of the language? Whereas variationist methods often involve doing strategic violence to the data, isolating single variables, documentation tends to encourage a broader perspective. This article shows how documentation of Nkep (Central Eastern Oceanic, Vanuatu) has progressed when guided by a focus on internal and social variation. Three variables are discussed (the near merger of two front vowels, lexical borrowing, and the expression of subject agreement) to highlight the rewards and challenges associated with drawing together two subdisciplines (variation and documentation) that have not traditionally had much to say to each other. Analyzing variation alongside documentation encourages us to write ‘symphonies of variation’, as opposed to ‘sonatas’ of individual variables.

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Jeszenszky, Péter, Yoshinobu Hikosaka, Satoshi Imamura, and Keiji Yano. "Japanese Lexical Variation Explained by Spatial Contact Patterns." ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 8, no. 9 (September 6, 2019): 400. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8090400.

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In this paper, we analyse spatial variation in the Japanese dialectal lexicon by assembling a set of methodologies using theories in variationist linguistics and GIScience, and tools used in historical GIS. Based on historical dialect atlas data, we calculate a linguistic distance matrix across survey localities. The linguistic variation expressed through this distance is contrasted with several measurements, based on spatial distance, utilised to estimate language contact potential across Japan, historically and at present. Further, administrative boundaries are tested for their separation effect. Measuring aggregate associations within linguistic variation can contrast previous notions of dialect area formation by detecting continua. Depending on local geographies in spatial subsets, great circle distance, travel distance and travel times explain a similar proportion of the variance in linguistic distance despite the limitations of the latter two. While they explain the majority, two further measurements estimating contact have lower explanatory power: least cost paths, modelling contact before the industrial revolution, based on DEM and sea navigation, and a linguistic influence index based on settlement hierarchy. Historical domain boundaries and present day prefecture boundaries are found to have a statistically significant effect on dialectal variation. However, the interplay of boundaries and distance is yet to be identified. We claim that a similar methodology can address spatial variation in other digital humanities, given a similar spatial and attribute granularity.

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Cardoso, Walcir. "The development of coda perception in second language phonology: A variationist perspective." Second Language Research 27, no. 4 (July 4, 2011): 433–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658311413540.

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Within a variationist approach for data collection and analysis, this study investigates the acquisition in perception of post-vocalic word-final stops (codas) by speakers of Brazilian Portuguese learning English as a foreign language in a classroom environment. Because codas are illicit in this variety of Portuguese, the hypothesis holds that learners will process this foreign structure as followed by an illusory epenthetic vowel, [i], a manifestation of ‘perceptual foreign accent’. In a forced-choice phone identification task, 51 participants listened to series of English pseudowords and then decided on whether each word ended in a consonant or in a vowel. The statistical results of the experiment indicate that codas are more likely to be perceived in the following cases: (1) in more advanced levels of proficiency, (2) in the context of segments that belong to the class of coronals [t d] and labials [p b], and (3) when the coda consonant is preceded by a lax vowel. The latter as well as the non-significant word size factor contradict the results established in the investigation of the production of this syllabic constituent. To some extent, the results obtained show a correlation between speech perception and production, and support the view that perception precedes production in the development of second language codas.

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Meechan, Marjory, and Michele Foley. "On resolving disagreement: Linguistic theory and variation – There's bridges." Language Variation and Change 6, no. 1 (March 1994): 63–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500001587.

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ABSTRACTStudies of concord variation in English have found subject-verb concord to be particularly low in existential sentences such as There's bridges. Noting that these sentences are unusual because the subject NP is postverbal and is generally indefinite, we hypothesized that the unusual concord variation pattern was a result of structural differences associated with the restriction on the type of determiners preceding the postverbal NP. Using variationist methodology, we analyzed natural speech data from 31 speakers of standard Canadian English and found an overwhelming preference for singular agreement in existentials. Contrary to our predictions, this was not linked to a determiner-based structural distinction, but rather to the form of the copula (i.e., full or clitic) and the speaker's level of education. Our findings have implications for those theoretical studies of existentials that assume concord, because the effect of education suggests that this assumption reflects the bias of the higher educational level of the researchers.

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TERESA TURELL JULIÀ, M. "THE “VARIATIONIST” VIEW-POINT OF VARIATION: EVIDENCE FROM CATALAN-SPEAKING COMMUNITIES." Catalan Review: Volume 9, Issue 2 9, no. 2 (January 1, 1995): 275–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/catr.9.2.14.

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GORDON, M. J. "A VARIATIONIST SAMPLER: Variation Past and Present: VARIENG Studies on English for Terttu Nevalainen." American Speech 80, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 87–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-80-1-87.

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Sanchez, Tara. "Accountability in morphological borrowing: Analyzing a linguistic subsystem as a sociolinguistic variable." Language Variation and Change 20, no. 2 (July 2008): 225–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394508000124.

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ABSTRACTPrinciples of structural borrowing have been proposed, relating to structures of the languages involved and sociodemographic circumstances of their respective societies. This article quantitatively evaluates the roles of both linguistic and social factors in structural borrowing via examination of language contact data from Aruba and Curaçao, where creole Papiamentu is in contact with Spanish, Dutch, and English. Variationist methods, rooted in Labov's Principle of Accountability, are applied in a novel way to the system of verbal morphology to flesh out factors promoting borrowing. Linguistic factors are found to be quantitatively stronger, and only one nonlinguistic factor was found to promote borrowing. Results are discussed in light of prevailing theories of language contact. Findings contribute to our understanding of the long-term consequences of language contact and the relationship of contact-induced change to a more general sociolinguistic theory of language variation and change.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Variationist linguistics'

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