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International Conference on Language
Variation in Europe
Book of Abstracts
Malaga, 06 June-09 June 2017
INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
LOCAL ORGANISERS
Peter Auer (University of Freiburg)
Isabelle Buchstaller (University of Leipzig)
Frans Hinskens (Meertens Instituut & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Paul Kerswill (University of York)
Tore Kristiansen (University of Copenhagen)
Beat Siebenhaar (Universiy of Leipzig)
Eivind Torgersen (Sør-Trøndelag University College)
Stavroula Tsiplakou (University of Cyprus)
Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda (University of Malaga)
Lena Wenner (Institute for Language and Folklore)
Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. Chair. (Lingüística General)
Francisco Díaz-Montesinos (Lengua Española)
Antonio Manuel Ávila-Muñoz (Lingüística General)
Matilde Ángeles Vida-Castro (Lingüística General)
Gloria Guerrero-Ramos (Lingüística General)
Manuel Fernando Pérez-Lagos (Lingüística General)
María Clara von Essen. Secretary
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Invited Lectures
Panels
Papers
Posters
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Invited Lectures
Frans
Hinskens
(Meertens
Instituut & Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam).
Mapping
the expanding universe of the study of sound change. Towards an
integrated theory.
The study of sound change has evolved from a heuristic tool for 19th century comparative
historical reconstruction into the backbone of the rigid approach to language change
developed by the Neogrammarians. In the course of the 20th and early 21st century it has
become the main meeting point for a range of subdisciplines of linguistics (historical linguistics,
dialectology, sociolinguistics, phonology,
phonetics
and
cognitivist
approaches
to
phonetic
variation).
In this talk I will sketch some of the main aspects of the approaches to sound change taken in
the various corners of the field. By way of a synthesis I will outline a theory in which three
approaches to sound change dovetail to account for the huge and seemingly chaotic body of
insights into the phenomenon. Empirical studies of instances of both historical and ongoing sound
change in specific varieties of Dutch will serve to illustrate parts of the theory.
Bortoni-Ricardo, Stella-Maris (Universidade de Brasília).
Sociolinguistic Teaching and Learning: the case of Brazil.
Approaches
to
Sociolinguistics as an interdisciplinary field emerged from the 20th Century Saussurean Linguistics but
rejected the distinction between language as a social fact and speech. Moreover it emphasized the
principle of cultural relativism and posited the search for orderly regularities in the province of
speech, marked by the inherent heterogeneity. The Sociolinguistic tradition started in the 1970’s when
the United States was experiencing the claims for the civil rights. This philosophical trend can
explain why Sociolinguistics was born with a main interest
for the variety spoken by the AfricanAmerican minority population.
This was the Sociolinguistics that was brought to Brazil in the
same decade and that experienced here
a fertile development due to the historical diversities of
Brazilian Portuguese, which reflect social inequalities. Based on these sociolinguistics roots, this paper
deals with three assumptions that should be considered in the teaching and learning of Sociolinguistics in
Brazil: 1) Always go from the use to the theory; 2) Always go from the oral to the written, and finally 3)
be committed to enlarging the students’ world view from the local to the universal.
Manuel Almeida (Universidad de La Laguna). Hybridism in
society: structure and function of interdialectal forms in Canarian Spanish.
language
and
Studies on dialects contact in Europe have shown that, independently of some geographical or
historical specific circumstances, most of them share similar trends. Following the proposals by the
Communication Accommodation Theory, dialectologists have described two main kinds of
processes: convergence and divergence. Convergence processes usually happen among local
varieties, That can end up in a greater dialect levelling and the formation of koines in more extreme
circumstances. But convergence can also happen between regional and standard varieties, what can lead
either to a greater or lesser dialect standardisation or to a standard dialectalisation. On the contrary,
divergence processes imply either the preservation of traditional dialect forms, that have their
own internal evolution (that are normally interpreted as sign of language loyalty), or the arising of
interdialectal forms and structures, built up from features, forms and structures that previously
existed in the dialects in contact. Scholars have devoted important analyses to levelling and
standardisation processes, as well as to the maintenance of traditional forms. However, and with a
few exceptions, they have devoted less attention to interdialectal or hybrid forms.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the structure and sociocultural meaning of two phonetic interdialectal
forms in Canarian Spanish. Both of them have been built from a vernacular and a standard pronunciation:
[c] (vernacular) and [tʃ] (standard) on the one hand (in words as chino 'Chinese', coche 'car') and [h]
(vernacular) and [x] (standard) on the other (in words as gente 'people', caja 'box'). The acoustical analysis
shows that both intermediate forms have a different structure, being the former closer to the vernacular
sound and the latter to the standard one. The different structure of both forms can be related with different
social meanings, so that the intermediate form in the case of the plosives consonants may have arisen as a
consequence of imperfect learning of a second dialect (the standard one), whereas the intermediate form in
the fricative consonants can be viewed as a voluntary decision of individuals of expressing approval to two
cultures, the local and the national one.
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INDEX
PANELS
DIALECTS AND MIGRATION IN EUROPE....................................................24
Auer, P. and Røyneland, U.
INTRODUCTION TO THE PANEL ......................................................................................26
Auer, P. and Røyneland, U.
THE MULTIFARIOUSNESS OF “THE THIRD POSITION”: IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
AND DIALECT ACQUISITION AMONG IMMIGRANTS IN RURAL AREAS .......................27
Ekberg, L. and Östman, J-O.
REGIONAL DIALECT AND MULTIETHNIC YOUTH STYLES IN THE THREE LARGEST
CITIES OF DENMARK .......................................................................................................29
Quist, P.
DIALECT ACQUISITION AND MIGRATION IN NORWAY ..................................................31
Røyneland, U.
DIALECT USE BY MIGRANTS IN THE DUTCH PROVINCE OF LIMBURG (THE
NETHERLANDS) ................................................................................................................33
Cornips, L.
«IT SOUNDS LIKE THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY THOSE LIVING AROUND THE
SEASIDE». LANGUAGE ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE LOCAL ITALO-ROMANCE
VARIETY AMONG GHANAIAN IMMIGRANTS IN BERGAMO...........................................34
Guerini, F.
DIALECT ACQUISITION (OR ITS ABSENCE) IN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES COMES IN
VERY DIFFERENT SHADES IN QUADRILINGUAL SWITZERLAND................................35
Berthele, R.
THE ACQUISITION OF SWISS GERMAN DIALECTS BY FIRST AND SECOND
GENERATION IMMIGRANTS.............................................................................................36
Schmid, S.
LINGUISTIC SEGREGATION IN THE CITY: ETHNIC BOUNDARIES AND THE RURAL/
URBAN DISTINCTION IN SOUTHWEST GERMANY........................................................38
Auer, P.
DISCUSSION......................................................................................................................39
Kerswill, P.
REVISITING MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN STANDARD AND
PRIMARY DIALECTS
IN GALLO-ROMANCE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE – PART 2:
MORPHOSYNTACTIC FEATURES ..............................................................40
Avanzi, M. and Thibault, A.
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CLITIC INCREMENT IN 16TH-CENTURY POITOU FRENCH,
A SUBSTRATE EFFECT?...................................................................................................43
Morin, Y. C.
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN VARIETIES IN GALLO-ROMANCE LORRAINE AND VERB
MORPHOLOGY..................................................................................................................44
Duval, M.
THE 'Y' NEUTRAL ACCUSATIVE PRONOUN IN FRANCOPROVENÇAL DIALECTS AND
REGIONAL FRENCH..........................................................................................................46
Avanzi, M.
FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW WORLD:
MORPHOSYNTACTIC FEATURES IN 18TH AND 19TH C. QUEBEC FRENCH ..............48
Martineau, F.
OPTIONAL NEGATIVE CONCORD IN QUEBEC FRENCH AND PICARD:
ONE SUBSTRATE, DIFFERENT PATHS? .........................................................................49
Dagnac, A.
TREND AND PANEL STUDIES: WHAT CAN THEY REALLY TELL US
ABOUT LANGUAGE CHANGE? ..................................................................51
Beaman, K. V.; Guy, G. R. and Hinskens, F.
TYPES OF VARIABLES, LEVELS OF LANGUAGE AND RATES OF CHANGE ...............55
Gregersen, F.; Jensen, T. J.; Maegaard, M. and Pharao, N.
A REAL-TIME STUDY IN ESKILSTUNA: COMPARISONS BETWEEN A PANEL AND A
TREND STUDY...................................................................................................................58
Sundgren, E.
DOWN TO A (T): EXPLORING THE COMPLEX CONDITIONING EFFECTS ON TGLOTTALING ACROSS THE LIFE-SPAN ..........................................................................60
Buchstaller, I. and Mearns, A.
BEYOND THE PEAK: EVIDENCE FOR ADOLESCENT INCREMENTATION IN TREND
AND PANEL STUDIES .......................................................................................................62
Tagliamonte, S. and Denis, D.
VIRTUAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS: RADIO AND HISTORICAL ARCHIVAL SOURCES FOR
TRACING
LINGUISTIC
CHANGE
AS
TIME-MACHINE
LONGITUDINAL
APPROACHES ................................................................................................................... 64
Hernández Campoy and J. M. García-Vidal, T.
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PANEL AND TREND STUDIES: THE CASE OF PORTUGUESE
IN RIO DE JANEIRO...........................................................................................................66
De Paiva, M. C. and Duarte, M. E. L.
COMPLEMENTARY METHODOLOGIES FOR STUDYING LANGUAGE CHANGE: NULL
SUBJECTS IN EUROPEAN AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE..........................................68
Guy, G. R.
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ADVANCES IN RURAL DIALECTOLOGY AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN
EUROPEAN IBERO-ROMANCE...................................................................70
Bouzouita, M. and Pato, E.
THE LINGUISTIC DOCUMENTATION OF THE SPANISH-PORTUGUESE BORDER
VARIETIES: ASSESSMENT OF THE PILOT PHASE AND NEW CHALLENGES FOR THE
FUTURE .............................................................................................................................73
Álvarez Pérez, X. A.
TESOURO DO LÉXICO PATRIMONIAL GALEGO E PORTUGUÉS [‘THE GALICIAN AND
PORTUGUESE WORD BANK’]: CHARACTERISTICS, METHODOLOGY, APPLICATIONS
AND USES..........................................................................................................................75
Álvarez, R.
THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CORPUS ORAL Y SONORO DEL ESPAÑOL
RURAL (COSER)................................................................................................................76
Fernández-Ordóñez, I.
PERCEPTIONS AND LINGUISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE RESULTS OF SURVEYS
CARRIED OUT IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY ON CATALAN DIALECTS ....................77
Perea, M. P.
FILLED PAUSES IN RURAL SPANISH CONVERSATIONS ..............................................78
Pato, E. and Casanova, V.
RE-ANALYZING TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL CHANGES IN THE RURAL GALICIAN AREA
OF THE RIBEIRO DISTRICT..............................................................................................80
Louredo Rodríguez, E.
THE POSITION OF POSSESSIVES IN EUROPEAN SPANISH: INSIGHTS FROM RURAL
VARIETIES..........................................................................................................................81
De Benito Moreno, C.; Bouzouita, M. and León, O.
EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES IN THE REALM OF LANGUAGE
VARIATION – NEW PERSPECTIVES ON DATA ACQUISITION OF
LINGUISTIC VARIATION AND ITS PERCEPTION.......................................83
Breuer, L. M. and Bülow, L.
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................86
Breuer, L. M. and Bülow, L.
PHONEME CHANGE AND COGNITION: A NEUROLINGUISTIC APPROACH ON
CROSS-DIALECTAL COMPREHENSION..........................................................................88
Lanwermeyer, M.
THE LAB SITUATION:
ARTICULATORY-ACOUSTIC VS. ACOUSTIC EXPERIMENTS ........................................90
Moosmüller, S. and Pucher, M.
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GRASPING URBAN LANGUAGE – SETTING UP A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING
VARIATION IN CITIES AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS.................................................92
Herbert, K. and Edler, S.
AUSTRIAN GERMAN IN THE MINDS OF THEIR SPEAKERS:
PERSPECTIVES – CHALLENGES – EMPIRICAL APPROACHES ...................................94
Fuchs, E. and Koppensteiner, W.
VERTICAL VARIETY SPECTRA IN RURAL AUSTRIA: AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH
TO THE COLLECTION OF MORPHOLOGICAL DATA ALONG THE DIALECT-STANDARD
AXIS....................................................................................................................................96
Korecky-Kröll, K.
DIALECT AND STANDARD IN ROMANCE.
CONVERGENCE, DIVERGENCE AND STABILITY ......................................98
Cerruti, M.
REGIONAL VARIETIES AND STANDARD IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE:
ISSUES FROM THE ANGLE OF SYNTACTIC VARIATION ..............................................101
Carrilho, E. and Pereira, S.
VARIATION, IDENTITY, COHERENCE AND INDEXICALITY IN SOUTHERN SPANISH:
ON THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW VARIETY IN URBAN ANDALUSIA ...........................103
Villena Ponsoda, J. and Vida-Castro, M.
STANDARDISATION AND LEVELLING IN FRENCH........................................................104
Armstrong, N.
A TIME FOR FOCUSING AND A TIME FOR DIFFUSION:
STANDARD AND “DIALECTS” IN ITALOROMANCE........................................................105
Regis, R.
THERE'S A NORTHERN WIND, BLOWIN'UP A SOUTHERN CHANGE:
ON THE SPREAD OF NORTHERN ITALIAN FRICATIVES IN SOUTHERN ITALIAN
SPEECH ............................................................................................................................106
Crocco, C. and Marzo, S.
THE CONTINUITY IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND THE CASE OF ROMANIAN..108
Krefeld, T. and Prifti, E.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS AND PROCESSES OF CONVERGENCE/
DIVERGENCE IN SPANISH IN AMERICA AND SPAIN ACCORDING TO
PRESEEA DATA...........................................................................................110
Cestero Mancera, A. M.; Molina Martos, I. and Paredes García, F.
LEXICAL SOCIOLINGUISTIC IDIOSYNCRATIC PATTERNS (SINGULARITIES) IN
MEXICAN SPANISH.........................................................................................................113
Flores Treviño, M. E. and González Salinas, A.
LINGUISTIC VARIATION IN CENTRAL-EASTERN SPANISH IN SPAIN.........................115
Gómez Molina, J. R. and Albelda Marco, M.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS OF CHILEAN SPANISH ...............................................117
Guerrero, S.
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SPANISH SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS OF VENEZUELA..........................................118
Malaver, I.
THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF MADRID: CONVERGENCY AND DIVERGENCY
TOWARDS SOUTHERN AND NORTHERN CASTILIAN SPEECH..................................119
Molina Martos, I. and Paredes García, F.
PATTERNS OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE IN THE ANDALUSIAN .......................................120
Moya Corral, J. A. and Tejada Giráldez, M. S.
CONVERGENT AND DIVERGENT PATTERNS BETWEEN THE SPEECH COMMUNITY
OF LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA AND OTHER SPANISH MAINLAND AND
AMERICAN VARIETIES....................................................................................................121
Samper Padilla, J. A.; Samper Hernández, M. and Hernández Cabrera, C. E.
THE MYSTERIES OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER IN GERMANIC*: WHY IS
PRECISELY GENDER USED FOR IDENTITY PURPOSES? .....................122
Cornips, L. and Gregersen, F.
WEIGHING PSYCHOLINGUISTIC AND SOCIAL EXPLANATIONS FOR SEMANTIC
GENDER IN DUTCH.........................................................................................................124
De Vogelaer, G.; De Vos, L. and De Sutter, G.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER IN VARIETIES OF NORWEGIAN ...........................125
Lohndal, T. and Westergaard, M.
THE ACQUISITION OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER OF THE (IN)DEFINITE DETERMINER
IN DANISH AND DUTCH BY MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN .................126
Gregersen, G. and Cornips, L.
DEAD, BUT WON’T LIE DOWN? – GRAMMATICAL GENDER AMONG YOUNG
NORWEGIANS .................................................................................................................128
Opsahl, T.
GRAMMATICAL GENDER FROM A COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE CONTACT
PERSPECTIVE .................................................................................................................129
Aalberse, S. and Hoekstra, M.
EXTENDING THE SCOPE OF LECTOMETRY I:
FROM DIALECTS TO GLOBAL VARIETIES ..............................................131
Daems, J.; Franco, K.; Rosseel, L. and Röthlisberger, M.
GENERALIZED ADDITIVE MODELING AS A USEFUL TOOL FOR DIALECTOMETRY..136
Wieling, M.
A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO SWISS GERMAN DIALECT SYNTAX......................137
Scherrer, Y. and Stoeckle, P.
MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF DIALECT/STANDARD REPERTOIRES: ON THE USE
OF SOCIOLECTOMETRIC METHODS............................................................................139
Ghyselen, A. S.
MEASURING LANGUAGE CONTACT IN GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE ..............................140
Sousa, X.
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SE CONSTRUCTIONS IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE
AND THE CLITIC LOSS, MAINTENANCE AND INSERTION: A CORPUS-BASED
SOCIOLECTOMETRIC AND SOCIOCOGNITIVE ANALYSIS..........................................142
Soares da Silva, A. and Palú, D.
INVESTIGATING GEOGRAPHIC AND REGISTER VARIATION IN WORLD
ENGLISHES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 145
Bohmann, A.
EXTENDING THE SCOPE OF LECTOMETRY II:
NEW METHODS AND FEATURES .............................................................147
Daems, J.; Franco, K.; Rosseel, L. and Röthlisberger, M.
A CORPUS- AND PROFILE-BASED LECTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF EMOTION
CONCEPTS IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE ............152
Soares da Silva, A.
APPLIED LECTOMETRY: USING A MULTIVARIATE SPATIAL ANALYSIS TO IDENTIFY
CULTURAL REGIONS......................................................................................................155
Grieve, J.
THE SOCIOLECTOMETRY OF FLEMISH ONLINE TEENAGE TALK:
SOCIAL AND MEDIUM-RELATED VARIATION IN THE USE OF EXPRESSIVE MARKERS
..........................................................................................................................................156
Hilte, L.; Vandekerckhove, R. and Daelemans, W.
LECTOMETRY AND LATENT VARIABLES ......................................................................158
Plevoets, K.
CHARACTERIZING DIALECT GROUPS: CORRELATION AND INFORMATIVENESS
ASSOCIATED WITH LINGUISTIC FORMS......................................................................160
Aurrekoetxea, G.; Clua, E.; Iglesias, A.; Usobiaga, I. and Salicrú, M.
DISCUSSION....................................................................................................................162
Dirk, G.
IS SYNTACTIC VARIATION SPECIAL?......................................................163
Lenz, A. N.
IS SYNTAX SPECIAL? AN INTRODUCTION...................................................................166
Lenz, A. N.
VARIETY-KNOWLEDGE EFFECTS ON SYNTACTIC SALIENCY...................................167
Ahlers, T.
SYNTACTIC VARIATION AND THE CITY: COMPUTER SUPPORTED LANGUAGE
PRODUCTION TESTS FOR ELICITING TUN-PERIPHRASIS IN VIENNESE
GERMAN.......................................................................................................................... 169
Breuer, L. M.
SYNTACTIC VARIATION IN NON-STANDARD SWEDISH – A CASE FOR SYNTACTIC
VERNACULAR UNIVERSALS IN GERMANIC?...............................................................170
Rosenkvist, H.
STRUCTURAL DIALECTOLOGY OF THE DUTCH LANGUAGE AREA..........................172
Barbiers, S.
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DISCUSSION ...................................................................................................................174
Chesire, J.
R E V I S I T I N G H A U G E N . A LT E R N AT I V E H I S T O R I E S O F
STANDARDIZATION. ..................................................................................175
Rutten, G. and Vosters, R.
HAUGEN 2.0: TOWARDS NEW MODELS OF STANDARDIZATION ..............................178
Rutten, G.; Puttaert, J. and Vosters, R.
HOW TO SELECT SPELLING VARIANTS .......................................................................179
Voeste, A.
RE-EXAMINING CODIFICATION .....................................................................................180
Hickey, R.
HOMOGENEITY THROUGH TEACHING
THE IMPLEMENTATION OF STANDARD DUTCH IN EDUCATION, 1750-1850.............182
Schoemaker, B.
ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF DATA FOR STANDARDIZATION HISTORIES IN A VIEW
‘FROM BELOW’................................................................................................................184
Elspaß, S.
THE NATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE AND HAUGEN´S THEORY OF LINGUISTIC
STANDARDIZATION.........................................................................................................186
del Valle, J.
REVISITING HAUGEN’S MODEL OF STANDARDIZATION: CODIFICATION AND
PRESCRIPTION...............................................................................................................188
Ayres-Bennett, W.
REVISITING MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN STANDARD AND
PRIMARY DIALECTS IN GALLO-ROMANCE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE – PART 1: LEXICAL
FEATURES .................................................................................................190
Thibault, A. and Avanzi, M.
THE DIFFUSION OF LITERARY LANGUAGE IN THE MIDDLE-AGES:
FRENCH AND FRANCOPROVENÇAL ............................................................................193
Greub, Y.
TESTING LINGUISTIC PURITY MYTH WITH FIELD SURVEYS ....................................194
Baiwir, E.
DID ‘DIAGLOSSIA’ EXIST IN THE HISTORY OF GALLO-ROMANCE? ..........................196
Bergeron-Maguyre, M.
FINAL CONSONANT DELETION AND RESTITUTION:
MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN FRENCH AND GALLO-ROMANCE........................197
Thibault, A.
GALLO-ROMANCE DIALECTS AND THE ORIGINS OF QUÉBÉCOIS FRENCH:
EUROPEAN DIALECTOLOGY THROUGH THE EYES OF THE SOCIÉTÉ DU PARLER
FRANÇAIS AU CANADA ..................................................................................................199
Remysen, W.
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PAPERS
VARIATION IN COPULA CHOICE AMONG ROMANI-SPANISH BILINGUALS IN MEXICO
.........................................................................................................................................201
Adamou, E.; Padure, C. and de Pascale, S.
SPANISH RELATIVE PRONOUNS VARIATION: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDY .........204
Álvarez, E.; Igoa, J. M. and Gutiérrez, S.
LANGUAGE REGISTER IN THE STATE-OF-THE-NATION ADRESSES OF POST
MARTIAL LAW PHILIPPINE PRESIDENTS .....................................................................206
Amora, M. G.
DIALECT AND OTHER EXPLANATORY FACTORS IN SUBCONSCIOUS VERBAL GUISE
TESTS ..............................................................................................................................207
Anderson, R. L. and Bugge, E.
USING THE SOCIAL NETWORK THEORY TO UNFOLD VARIATION WITHIN AND
ACROSS LINGUISTIC COMMUNITIES: THE CASE OF ROMEIKA AMONG A GROUP OF
TURKISH CYPRIOTS IN CYPRUS ..................................................................................209
Armostis, S.; Christodoulou, C.; Ioannidou, E. and Neokleous, T.
THE PAST PERFECT IN CYPRIOT AND STANDARD GREEK:INNOVATION
IRRESPECTIVE OF CONTACT?......................................................................................211
Armostis, S.; Bella, S.; Michelioudakis, D.; Moser, A. and Tsiplakou, S.
VOWEL DELETION IN THE DIALECT OF LESVOS (NORTHERN GREECE) FROM AN
ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE ...........................................................................213
Asahi, Y. and Papazachariou, D.
DOCUMENTING REGIONAL VARIATION IN EUROPEAN FRENCH: SHEDING NEW
LIGHT ON THE HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL MEANING OF THE VIGESIMAL
CARDINAL SYSTEM ........................................................................................................215
Avanzi, M. and Thibault, A.
AMBITIOUS DANES AND HARD-WORKING POLES: EVALUATIONS OF FOREIGNACCENTED ICELANDIC ..................................................................................................217
Bade, S.
ITALIANO POPOLARE AND LINGUISTIC SIMPLIFICATION: EVIDENCE FROM A
CORPUS...........................................................................................................................219
Ballarè, S. and Goria, E.
A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF NOMINALIZATIONS AND TEXT-TYPES IN ENGLISH
SCIENTIFIC REGISTER IN THE LATE MODERN PERIOD ............................................221
Bello, I.
EVIDENCE OF LEVELLING PROCESSES IN BRITISH ENGLISH CROWDSOURCED
USING THE 'ENGLISH DIALECTS APP'..........................................................................223
Blaxter, T.; Britain, D.; Kolly, M. J. and Leemann, A.
SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE VARIATION AND VERBAL
INTERPRETATION VARIABLES ......................................................................................225
Boldyrev, N. N. and Dubrovskaya, O. G.
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MODAL COMBINATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN SCOTLAND: SYNTAX AND
FREQUENCY ...................................................................................................................227
Bour, A. R.
UNDERSTANDING THE DIACHRONIC DEVELOPMENT OF POLITE FORMS OF
ADDRESS IN DUTCH THROUGH IBERO-ROMANCE DIALECTOLOGY.......................229
Bouzouita, M.; Breitbarth, A. and Van Keymeulen, J.
LEXICAL CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN SPANISH L3 PRODUCTION ................230
Bozinovic, N. and Peric, B.
ROUTINISED MOBILITY AND VOWEL CHANGE IN THE NORTH EAST OF ENGLAND ....
...........................................................................................................................................232
Braun, A.; French, P.; Llamas, C.; Robertson, D. and Watt, D.
GALICIAN VERSUS PORTUGUESE VERSUS SPANISH: COMPARING DATA FROM
NAÏF AND NON-NAÏF APPROACHES .............................................................................233
Brissos, F.
KOINEIZATION IN MEDIEVAL ITALY ...............................................................................235
Brown, J.
RESULTS FROM A VERBAL GUISE TEST IN THE FAROE ISLANDS ...........................236
Bugge, E.
AGE ESTIMATION IN FOREIGN-ACCENTED SPEECH .................................................238
Bürkle , D. and Gnevsheva, K.
WHAT’S UP WITH WHATSAPP? THE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON DUTCH
CENTURY ENGLISH WOMEN’S PETITIONS..................................................................239
Calvo Cortés, N.
ITALIAN AND ITALO-ROMANCE DIALECTS:
A VARIATIONIST STUDY OF CONVERGENCE IN BILINGUAL SPEECH......................241
Cerruti, M.
͡ OR [TƩ]
͡ A NEW VARIABLE?
VARIATION IN MALAGA: IS (T) REALISED AS [T], [TH], [TS]
..........................................................................................................................................243
Chariatte, N.
OPTIONAL REALIZATION OF THE FRENCH NEGATIVE PARTICLE (NE) ON TWITTER:
CAN BIG DATA REVEAL NEW SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS? ..................................244
Chevrot, J. P.; Fleury, E.; Karsai, M.; Léo, Y.; Magué, J. P.; Mangold, P.; Nardy, A. and Peuvergne, J.
USES OF VAGUENESS IN YOUTH SPEECH. EPISTEMIC AND APPROXIMATING
EXPRESSIONS IN DANISH .............................................................................................246
Christensen, T. K.
THE HISTORICAL VARIATION OF THE PRAGMEME ‘GREETING’ IN ROMANIAN ......248
Constantinescu, M. V.
ARE DIALECT FEATURES LOST IN A STABLE ORDER? TESTING THE FIXED ROUTE
HYPOTHESIS...................................................................................................................250
Daniel, M.; Dobrushina, N.; Ignatenko, D.; Kazakova, P. and von Waldenfels, R.
13
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THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF TEACHER IDENTITIES: FLEMISH TEACHERS'
PERCEPTIONS OF STANDARD DUTCH ........................................................................254
Delarue, S. and Lybaert, C.
A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF LEXICAL UNIFORMITY IN THE STANDARDIZATION OF
ITALIAN.............................................................................................................................255
De Pascale, S.; Marzo, S. and Speelman, D.
LEXICAL CHANGE IN GERMAN-SPEAKING EUROPE: 1970 VS. 2015 ........................257
Derungs, C.; Grossenbacher, T. and Leemann, A.
VARIATION IN THE MIRROR OF ELICITATION, CORPUS AND EXPERIMENT ............260
Dobrushina, N.
ADDRESS TERMS IN GERMAN YOUTH SLANG: SOCIAL INTERACTION AND
INDEXICALITIES ..............................................................................................................262
Droste, P.
VERB PLACEMENT VARIATION AS A SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLE? NORWEGIAN
VERB SECOND IN THREE DIFFERENT CONTACT SITUATIONS ................................264
Eide, K. M. and Sollid, H.
MAPPING AND ANALYZING DATA WITH THE ONLINE APPLICATION REDE
SPRACHGIS.....................................................................................................................265
Engsterhold, R.; Fischer, H. and Limper, J.
SOCIO-PHONETIC VARIATION OF /R/ IN BASQUE DIALECT NAMED ZUBEROTAR..267
Etchebest, X.
RUSSIAN NATIVE SPEAKERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS NON-STANDARD SPEECH:
NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES AND PROBLEMS OF COMMUNICATION ........................268
Fedorova, K.
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CODE-SWITCHING IN THE PAST:
A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO GREEK/LATIN BILINGUALISM ............................270
Fedriani, C. and Napoli, M.
INDIVIDUAL, ACCOMMODATION, SYNCHRONISATION. THE USE OF EMOJIS IN
WHATSAPP COMMUNICATION ......................................................................................272
Felder, S. and Siebenhaar, B.
THE EXTENSION OF THE ANALYTIC PERFECT TENSE IN TIME AND SPACE –
GERMAN DIALECTS AND AND CROSSLINGUISTIC EVIDENCE.................................273
Fischer, H.
ATTITUDES TOWARD ACCENT AND REGIONAL STEREOTYPES IN SPAIN ..............274
Gallego, J. C.
TOW-ROADS AND TOLL ROADS: A DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE CHANGE
IN WEST SOMERSET FROM THE MID-20TH CENTURY TO PRESENT DAY ..............276
Garnett, V.
ASSESSING THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR MAPPING LEXICAL VARIATION IN
BRITISH ENGLISH ...........................................................................................................277
Grieve, J.; Montgomery, C. and Nini, A.
14
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ALL ACCENTS ARE EQUAL (IF THE LOW PRESTIGE ONES ARE NOT TOO BROAD).
THE SOCIAL MEANING OF ACCENT STRENGTH IN NETHERLANDIC STANDARD
DUTCH .............................................................................................................................280
Grondelaers, S.; van Gent, P. and van Hout, R.
REDEFINING (DE)STANDARDIZATION. EVIDENCE FROM BELGIAN AND
NETHERLANDIC DUTCH ...............................................................................................282
Grondelaers, S.; van Hout, R. and van Gent, P.
AN ACOUSTIC DESCRIPTION OF THE VOWELS OF YOUNG URBAN GOTHENBURG
SWEDISH .........................................................................................................................284
Gross, J. and Leinonen, T.
THE SOCIO- AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS OF A CONSONANT MERGER: SESEO IN
SEVILLE, SPAIN...............................................................................................................286
Gylfadottir, D.
COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND HISTORICAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS: THE EVIDENCE OF
SPELLING IN MEDIEVAL AUTHOGRAPHS ....................................................................288
Häcker, M.
THE RHOTIC PRODUCTION OF ANGLO-ENGLISH AND PUNJABI-ENGLISH
BILINGUAL SPEAKERS IN WEST YORKSHIRE.............................................................289
Hall, C. P.
THE PERCEPTION OF THE /Æ/-/Ɛ/ VOWEL CONTINUUM IN BRITISH AND UNITED
STATES ENGLISH SPEAKERS .......................................................................................294
Hall, C. P.
VOWEL SPACE, SPEECH RATE AND LANGUAGE SPACE...........................................298
Siebenhaar, B. and Hahn, M.
PHONOLOGICAL MERGING IN ARGENTINA DANISH IN THE LIGHT OF LINGUISTIC
ATTRITION .......................................................................................................................300
Hansen, G. F. and Petersen, J. H.
“BACK IN MY DAY, THE KING TAUGHT US ENGLISH”: THE DEVELOPMENT OF
ENGLISH ON THE COCOS (KEELING) ISLANDS ..........................................................301
Hedegard, H. J. B.
THE EFFECT OF WORD-FINAL /S/, /R/, AND /Ө/ DELETION ON PRECEDING VOWELS
IN EASTERN ANDALUSIAN SPEAKERS WITH AND WITHOUT SPEECH
DISORDERS.................................................................................................................... 302
Herrero de Haro, A.
QUOTATIVES IN SAIPANESE ENGLISH: BE LIKE ON THE MOVE ...............................304
Hess, D. B.
CROWD-SOURCING VARIATION IN MINORITY LANGUAGES: ILLUSTRATED WITH
FRISIAN............................................................................................................................306
Hilton, N. H.; Leemann, A. and Gooskens, C.
PRAGMATIC VARIATION AND MOOD ALTERNATION: FUTURE-FRAMED ADVERBIALS
IN RIOPLATENSE SPANISH ............................................................................................308
Hoff, M. R.
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UNCHAINED: STANCE, STYLE AND THE CHANGING SHORT VOWEL SYSTEM OF
SOUTHERN BRITISH ENGLISH......................................................................................310
Holmes-Elliot, S. and Levon, E.
ACQUISITION OF VERNACULAR VARIATION IN A NEW LANGUAGE: A MIXED
METHODS STUDY OF ROMA MIGRANTS IN MANCHESTER.......................................311
Howley, G.
STYLISTIC ORTHOGRAPHIC VARIATION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF AAVE IN
TWITTER ..........................................................................................................................313
Ilbury, C.
THE ACOUSTICS AND THE PATTERNED VARIATION OF CESEO IN MÁLAGA ..........315
Jaime Jiménez, E.
THE ACOUSTICS OF GERMAN FRICATIVES ................................................................316
Jannedy, S.; Kleber, F. and Weirich, M.
SEX EFFECTS IN THE VARIATION AND CHANGE OF THE HIGH BACK VOWEL .......318
Jansen, S.
VARIATION AND CHANGE IN AN L2: THE CASE OF LOSS OF RHOTICITY ................319
Jansen, S.
AUDIENCE EFFECTS ON THE PHONETIC REALISATION OF UPTALK RISES...........321
Jespersen, A.
THE USE OF LOCAL VARIETIES OF A MINORITY LANGUAGE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: A
LONGITUDINAL STUDY ..................................................................................................322
Jongbloed-Faber, I.; Cornips, L.; Klinkenberg, E. and Van de Velde, H.
HOW TO MEASURE FOREIGN-ACCENTEDNESS AND INTELLIGIBILTY IN AN
OBJECTIVE WAY .............................................................................................................324
Jurado-Bravo, M. A. and Kristiansen, G.
SCOUSE NURSE AND NORTHERN HAPPY: VOWEL CHANGE IN LIVERPOOL
ENGLISH ..........................................................................................................................326
Juskan, M.
VOWEL HARMONY PATTERNS IN GREEK DIALECTAL CHILD SPEECH ....................328
Kappa, I. and Tzakosta, M.
THE GERMAN /A̠ ɪ/͡ – ONE (?) PHONEME FROM A VARIATIONIST LINGUIST’S POINT
OF VIEW...........................................................................................................................330
Kehrein, R.
HOW DO LAY LINGUISTS PERCEIVE THE GERMAN-AUSTRIAN BORDER? .............332
Kleene, A.
THE “POSITIVE” EFFECT OF “NEGATIVE” QUESTIONS...............................................334
Klinkenberg, E.; Stefan, N. and Versloot, A.
EVOLUTION OF THE STATUS OF A MINORITY LANGUAGE AND IT’S THE EFFECT ON
DIALECT AREAS IN FRISIAN (1965 TO 2015)................................................................336
Klinkenberg, E. L. and Stefan, N.
F*CKING VOWELS...........................................................................................................337
Knooihuizen, R.; Seeberger, J. and Sekeres, H.
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SOCIAL, REGIONAL, AND INTER-INDIVIDUAL VARIATION IN GERMAN ADJECTIVE
GRADATION: EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ON PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF
COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES..........................................................................339
Korecky-Kröll, K.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO FORM A VARIETY? SOCIOLECTALITY VS IDIOLECTALITY IN
NORTH AMERICAN DANISH...........................................................................................341
Kühl, K. and Petersen, J. H.
PRESCRIPTIVISM IN PRESENT-DAY POLAND. THE NORMATIVE ATTITUDES OF THE
SPEAKERS OF POLISH ..................................................................................................342
Kułak, K.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE AMERICANIZED EDUCATION SYSTEM ON THE GUAM
DIALECT OF ENGLISH ....................................................................................................344
Kuske, E. A.
HERITAGE SPEAKERS AND LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY: PHONOLOGICAL REMARKS
ON SARDINIAN ................................................................................................................345
Lai, R.
STYLIZATION OF LOCAL DIALECT AMONG CONTEMPORARY RURAL YOUTH........347
Larsen, A.
ON THE VARIATION BETWEEN IF AND WHETHER IN BRITISH ENGLISH .................349
Lastres-López, C.
LANGUAGE VARIATION AND THE LOCAL SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS OF THE
POTTERIES......................................................................................................................350
Leach, H. M.
TRACKING CHANGE IN SOCIAL MEANING: THE INDEXICALITY OF [é:] IN RURAL AND
URBAN SWEDEN..............................................................................................................352
Leinonen, T.; Nilsson, J. and Wenner, L.
CONTACT AND EXPOSURE TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN KIRIBATI ACROSS
TIME .................................................................................................................................353
Leonhardt, T.
SAME DIFFERENCE:
THE PHONETIC SHAPE OF HIGH RISING TERMINALS IN LONDON ..........................355
Levon, E.
A VARIATIONIST LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE EMERGING ENGLISH IN KOSRAE,
MICRONESIA ...................................................................................................................357
Lynch, S.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PLACE: DIALECT AND STANDARDIZATION ACROSS THREE
GENERATIONS IN THREE DANISH DIALECT AREAS...................................................359
Maegaard, M. and Monka, M.
GENDER ASSIGNMENT IN REFERENCE TO FEMALE PERSONS IN
LUXEMBOURGISH BY NATIVE PORTUGUESE SPEAKERS ........................................361
Martin, S.
ON THE SPREAD OF URBAN VERNACULARS THROUGH MEDIA: EVIDENCE FROM A
TWITTER CORPUS..........................................................................................................363
Marzo, S.; Ruette, T.; Van De Velde, F. and Zenner, E.
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ANALYSING THE DIAPHASIC DIMENSION OF DIALECT USE IN ITALY FROM THE
PERSPECTIVE OF LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY ..................................................................365
Matrisciano, S.
OLLEI I’M PICKY CHERRANG WITH A GIRL I LIKE CHERRANG: NATIVISATION OF A
NEWLY EMERGING POSTCOLONIAL ENGLISH VARIETY ...........................................367
Matsumoto, K.
LANGUAGE CONTACT PHENOMENA IN SOUTH TYROLEAN HIGH SCHOOL
GRADUATES:
THE USAGE OF REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS.....................................................................369
Leonardi, M. M. V. and Glück, A.
COLONIALISM, CAPITALISM AND CONSONANTS: THE EMERGENCE OF NAURUAN
ENGLISH ..........................................................................................................................371
Mettler, L.
THE NON-AGREEMENT USE OF THE SPANISH DATIVE CLITIC “LE” INSTEAD OF
“LESS” IN MÁLAGA .........................................................................................................373
Molina García, Á.
“I DON’T TALK PROPER NO MORE”: BEYOND THE SOCIAL STIGMA OF
MORPHOSYNTACTIC VARIATION..................................................................................375
Moore, E.
TUT-TUT: A SOCIOPHONETIC STUDY OF THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF CLICKS IN
THREE VARIETIES OF SCOTTISH ENGLISH ................................................................377
Moreno, J. and Stuart-Smith, J.
MOBILITY, SOCIAL PRACTICES AND REGIONAL DIALECT AMONG DANISH YOUTH ....
..........................................................................................................................................379
Mortensen, K. K.; Quist, P. and Madsen, C. B.
GRAMMAR SEQUENCING IN TEACHING SPANISH AS SECOND LANGUAGE ..........380
Muñoz-Garcés, A. and Jeon, Y. S.
SYBIES, TATTIES AND KILTIES: PROBLEMS CONCERNING THE FORM AND
DEVELOPMENT OF DIMINUTIVES IN SCOTS AND SCOTTISH STANDARD
ENGLISH...........................................................................................................................381
Murray, A.
REGIONAL VARIATION AND ENREGISTERMENT IN THE GERMAN STATE OF
BAVARIA...........................................................................................................................382
Niehaus, K.
WORD-FINAL /T/ AND "TOUGH" OR KNOWLEDGEABLE PERSONAE IN SPORT CLUB
INTERACTIONS ...............................................................................................................384
O’Dwyer, F.
LANGUAGE USE, STYLE AND AUTHENTICITY IN SWEDISH-LANGUAGE PUNK ROCK
AND HIP HOP...................................................................................................................386
Öqvist, J. K.
CARIBBEAN COLOMBIAN SPANISH IN NEW YORK CITY: A SUBJECT PRONOUN
EXPRESSION ANALYSIS ................................................................................................388
Orozco, R.
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DISTRIBUTION OF ARTICULATION RATE ACROSS ENGLAND – FINDINGS BASED ON
150 SPEAKERS................................................................................................................390
Parkinson, L. A. and Leemann, A.
GEOGRAPHIC VARIATION AS A WINDOW ON PROBABILISTIC INDIVIDUAL
GRAMMARS.....................................................................................................................393
Pijpops, D. and Van de Velde, F.
FULL MERGER IN PROGRESS: EVIDENCE FROM DUTCH LABIODENTAL FRICATIVES
..........................................................................................................................................395
Pinget, A. F.
VARIATION OF “TO MENSTRUATE” IN A SPANISH ONLINE FORUM FOR WOMEN...397
Pizarro Pedraza, A. and De Hertog, D.
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH TO THE USE OF COLLOQUIAL BELGIAN DUTCH
ON FLEMISH TELEVISION: FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE GRADUAL ACCEPTATION
OF NON-STANDARD DUTCH .........................................................................................399
Prieels, L. and De Sutter, G.
ARE UNACCUSATIVES A HOMOGENEOUS CLASS? PATTERNS OF SUBJECT
POSITION IN SPANISH UNACCUSATIVES ARE MOTIVATED BY FUNCTION AND
WEIGHT FACTORS..........................................................................................................401
Pulido-Azpiroz, M.
PRACTICES OF POWER AND THE POWER OF PRACTICE. ANALYZING VISUAL
MULTILINGUALISM AND SOCIETAL DYNAMICS WITH THE CITIZEN SCIENCE APP
“LINGSCAPE” ...................................................................................................................403
Purschke, C.
DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP ON HOLIDAY: AUXILIARY ALTERNATION IN SPOKEN
MONTRÉAL FRENCH (1971-2016)..................................................................................405
Rea, B.
DIALECT CONVERGENCE IN WESTERN ANDALUCÍA: THE DEMERGER OF CECEO....
..........................................................................................................................................407
Regan, B.
¿LE MOLESTA EL RUIDO O LA MOLESTA EL RUIDO? A STUDY OF VERBS WITH
ALTERNATION BETWEEN ACCUSATIVE AND DATIVE CASE-MARKING ....................409
Repede, D.
EXPLORING THE RELATIONAL RESPONDING TASK (RRT) AS A NEW MEASURE OF
LANGUAGE ATTITUDES .................................................................................................411
Rosseel, L.; Geeraerts, D. and Speelman, D.
YEÍSMO IN MAJORCAN SPANISH: PHONETIC VARIATION IN A BILINGUAL
CONTEXT........................................................................................................................ 413
Rost Bagudanch, A.
ABOUT CURRENT LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE OF AND ATTITUDES TOWARDS LOW
GERMAN ..........................................................................................................................415
Rothe, A. and Kleene, A.
A VARIATIONIST ACCOUNT OF FOCALIZATION STRATEGIES IN BASQUE...............416
Sainz-Maza Lecanda, L.
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SOCIETAL AND INTRAGROUP VARIATION – CORRELATING WITH TYPE OF
SOCIETY? ........................................................................................................................418
Sandøy, H.
ADDRESS FORMS IN ECUADORIAN SPANISH: LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES TOWARDS
PRONOUNS OF ADDRESS AND USE OF NOMINAL AND RITUAL ADDRESS
FORMULAE ......................................................................................................................420
Sancho Pascual, M. and Sáez Rivera, D. M.
SOCIAL AND LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON THE AVAILABLE LEXICON IN FOREIGN
LANGUAGE ......................................................................................................................421
Santos Díaz, I. C.
FACTORS AFFECTING PASSIVE VOCABULARY ..........................................................423
Santos Díaz, I. C.
A NEW CLASSIFICATION OF CENTRES OF INTEREST IN LEXICAL AVAILABILITY
STUDIES ..........................................................................................................................425
Santos Díaz, I. C.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC EVALUATIONS AND DIALECTAL IDENTIFICATIONS ABOUT
VARIETIES IN CONTACT WITH GALICIAN DIALECTS ..................................................427
Santos Raña, I.
TOWARDS AUTOMATIC GEOLOCALISATION OF SPEAKERS OF EUROPEAN FRENCH
..........................................................................................................................................429
Scherrer, Y. and Goldman, J. P.
SOCIAL MEANINGS OF DISCOURSE MARKERS AND DISFLUENT SPEECH ............431
Schleef, E.
U NÄR I SO, ES GEIT UME DIALÄKT HIE: QUOTATIVE VARIATION IN BERNESE
SWISS GERMAN..............................................................................................................433
Schneider, C.; Britain, D. and Grossenbacher, S.
LANGUAGE VARIATION IN BERNESE SWISS GERMAN..............................................435
Schneider, C.
SYNCHRONY AND DIACHRONY OF PAST PARTICIPLES IN EUROPEAN
PORTUGUESE.................................................................................................................437
Schwenter, S.; Christodulelis, E.; Civitello, A. D.; Hoff, M. and Pflum, C.
NORM AND IDENTITY. SPOKEN STANDARD GERMAN IN A MINORITY CONTEXT: THE CASE OF SOUTH
TYROL (ITALY) .................................................................................................................439
Schwarz, C.
SYNTACTIC VARIATION ACROSS THE SOCIAL SPECTRUM:
FIRST-PERSON
SINGULAR OBJECT USAGE...........................................................................................441
Serrano, M. J.
DIALECT LEVELLING OR SHIFT: LEXICAL OUTCOMES OF ŠTOKAVIAN-ČAKAVIAN
CONTACT IN CENTRAL DALMATIA ................................................................................442
Simicic, L. and Skevin, I.
EXCLUSION ATTITUDE LABELS IN SLAVIC MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARIES:
LEXICOGRAPHIC CONSTRUAL OF STANDARD: SUBSTANDARD VARIATION ..........443
Sipka, D.
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PULLING OUT ALL THE STOPS? CAREGIVER AND CHILD IN THE ACQUISITION
OF A STEREOTYPED BRITISH
VARIABLE.........................................................................................................................445
Smith, J. and Holmes-Elliot, S.
PROSODY AND CODE-SWITCHING AT THE COMPLEMENT CLAUSE........................447
Steuck, J. and Torres Cacoullos, R.
LEXICAL-SEMANTIC PERSISTENCE AND INNOVATION IN THE ROMANIAN
VOCABULARY OF AFFECTIVITY. CASE STUDY: /ENVY-JEALOUSY/..................................................................................449
Stoica, G.
TRACING A MODERN-DAY ISOGLOSS IN SOUTH SWEDEN .......................................451
Strandberg, M.
REGIOLECT OR STANDARD? HOW SOUTHERN GERMAN BASIC DIALECTS
DEVELOP. METHODOLOGICAL QUESTIONS AND SOME RESULTS ..........................452
Streckenbach, A.
PERCEPTUAL DIALECTOLOGY: FACTORS INFLUENCING GEOGRAPHICAL
PERCEPTIONS IN GALICIAN LANGUAGE .....................................................................453
Suárez Quintas, S.
STATIC VS. DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF VOICE QUALITY: A LONDON CASE STUDY ....455
Szakay, A. and Torgersen, E.
THE ZERO ADVERB IN BRITISH DIALECTS ..................................................................457
Tagliamonte, S. A.
VARIATION AND EXCLUSION IN THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF URBAN NICOSIA
(CYPRUS).........................................................................................................................458
Themistocleous, C.
DIASPORA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE: SOCIAL CLUBS AND THEIR ROLE IN
LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE...........................................................................................460
Tolimir-Hoelzl, N.
VARIATION AND CHANGE IN FUTURE TEMPORAL REFERENCE IN FRENCH..........462
Tristram, A.
APPARENT TIME VARIATION IN THE BASQUE LANGUAGE........................................463
Unamuno, L.
ONGOING LANGUAGE CHANGE IN THE CATALAN-SPEAKING COUNTIES OF LA
FRANJA, ARAGON (SPAIN).............................................................................................466
Valls, E.
STANDARD DUTCH IN THE SCHOOL LANGUAGE OF UPPER MIDDLE-CLASS
PUPILS: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY............................................................467
Van Lancker, I.
ISLEÑO SPANISH’S VOYAGE: FROM THE CANARY ISLANDS TO TODAY’S DIASPORA
ACROSS THE UNITED STATES......................................................................................469
Varela García, F.
WHAT’S UP WITH WHATSAPP? THE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON DUTCH
YOUTHS’ SCHOOL WRITINGS..................................................................................470
Verheijen, L.
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SPANISH VARIETIES IN CONTACT: ACCOMMODATION OF YOUNG AND ADULT
ARGENTINEAN IMMIGRANTS IN THE CITY OF MALAGA. ACOUSTIC,
MORPHOLOGICAL
AND
LEXICAL
ANALYSIS
OF
THEIR
LINGUISTIC
BEHAVIOUR ....................................................................................................................472
von Essen, M. C.
LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT AND NATIONALISM IN THE BALKAN PERIPHERY: THE
CASE OF THE VLASHKI/ZHEYANSKI-SPEAKING LINGUISTIC MINORITY IN
CROATIA ......................................................................................................................... 474
Vrzic, Z.
ANALYZING SIMULTANEOUS TALK IN THE UK’S TALK SHOWS: CONVERSANTS’
STATUSES AND STRATEGIES........................................................................................476
Wanphet, P.
DECLARED LANGUAGE BEHAVIOUR AMONG ETHNO-LINGUISTICALLY MIXED
FAMILIES IN ESTONIA ....................................................................................................478
Zabrodskaja, A.
GENDER, CLASS AND LANGUAGE VARIATION IN BEIJING........................................480
Zhao, H.
GEOGRAPHY VERSUS STYLE IN THE HISTORY OF CENTRAL BASQUE .................482
Zuloaga, E.
POSTERS
AUDIO MINING AND LANGUAGE CHANGE RESEARCH: DISCLOSURE OF A FRISIANDUTCH RADIO ARCHIVE ................................................................................................484
Dijkstra, J.; Van de Velde, H.; Yilmaz, E.; Kampstra, F.; Algra, J.; van den Heuvel, H. and van Leeuwen, D.
ANDALUSIAN PRONUNCIATION AND DICTATORSHIP: THE DISCOURSE OF
ANDALUSIAN FRANCOIST POLITICIANS......................................................................486
Cruz Ortiz, R.
INVESTIGATING PHONETIC CORRELATES OF UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY IN
URBAN SCOTTISH SPEECH ..........................................................................................488
Dickson, V.
THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF MÁLAGA: BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION AND LOCAL
IDENTITY..........................................................................................................................490
Esteba Ramos, D. and Sáez Rivera, D. M.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS ABOUT INTERVOCALIC -/D/- IN THE SPEECH OF
MERIDA´S REGION .........................................................................................................491
Fernández de Molina Ortés, E.
THE FUTURE OF EXTREMEÑO IN ITS ACCULTURATION PROCESS TO STANDARD
CASTILIAN .......................................................................................................................493
Ferrero, C.
SOCIAL VARIATION IN THE USE OF METAPHORS WE LIVE BY IN THE CORPUS
PRESEEA IN GRANADA..................................................................................................494
Martín García, L.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF -TO POSTPOSITIONAL
CLITIC FORMS IN ONE NORTH RUSSIAN DIALECT ....................................................496
Gerasimenko, E. and Vinyar, A.
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VARIATION IN BASQUE WORD ORDER: A DIACHRONIC STUDY ...............................498
Krajewska, D.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC FACTORS IN THE USE OF VERBAL PERIPHRASES
OF
OBLIGATION IN THE SPANISH OF GRANADA ..............................................................500
Manjón-Cabeza Cruz, A.
MORE OR LESS NORWEGIAN? - ATTITUDES TOWARDS FOREIGN ACCENTED
SPEECH ...........................................................................................................................502
Myklestu, K. and Johnsen, R. V.
DEFINITE ARTICLES IN (DUTCH) LOW SAXON AND NEIGHBORING VARIETIES .....503
Pheiff, J.
WHAT DOES MOOD VARIATION INDICATE? MEASURING THE PRODUCTIVITY OF
THE ITALIAN SUBJUNCTIVE IN ACTUAL USE...............................................................505
Pietropaolo, C.
STUDYING DIALECT ATTITUDES IN A NORTHERN NORWEGIAN CONTEXT ............507
Saetermo, M.
CHANGING SOCIAL ROLES ...........................................................................................508
Weirich, M. and Simpson, A. P.
THE ROLE-PLAYING VARIETY OF NORTHERN NORWEGIAN CHILDREN WITH
EMPHASIS ON NOMINAL SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY .............................................510
Strand, B. M. S.
SPOCO, A SIMPLE YET EFFECTIVE INTERFACE FOR DIALECT CORPORA.............512
von Waldenfels, R. and Wózniak, M.
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DIALECTS AND MIGRATION IN EUROPE
ORGANISERS:
Peter Auer
University of Freiburg
Unn Røyneland
University of Oslo
Keywords: Ethnolects, migration, dialect acquisition.
Within Europe, there are huge differences in the way second and third generation
migrants adapt to and make use of the dialectal and regiolectal ways of speaking found
in the receiving societies. They range from (apparently) complete dialect acquisition in
places such as Sicily and southern Italy in general, Switzerland, or Norway, to an
outright rejection of dialects as spoken by the autochthonous population, as in some
parts of the Netherlands, northern Italy, or (at least parts of) Germany. In addition, new
ways of speaking that combine (multi-)ethnolectal and dialectal features may emerge,
and on the ideological level, attempts to define ethnolects as dialects (with the same
prestige and status as the latter) can be observed in some countries.
While these differences may be due to how speakers with an immigrant background
position themselves vis-à-vis the receiving societies, they may equally be a
consequence of social restrictions imposed on these choices by community norms and
by the “legitimate”, “entitled” users of dialects. Lack of acquisition may also be a
consequence of lack of dialect input due to factors like economic and social
segregation, ghettoization, access to education and work. In addition, the extent to
which migrants acquire dialects may also reflect the status of the dialects in the
societies of origin and the dialect ideology of the receiving society.
Dialect acquisition is therefore highly indicative of the social processes underlying
transformations of late modern European societies due to migration. Differences
between rural and urban geographies almost certainly play a role as well. In addition,
there may be significant developmental differentiation between early and later
generations of immigrants.
Although sociolinguists in various European countries have started to investigate the
issue, a comprehensive view and interesting sociolinguistic generalizations are only
possible once these single investigations are confronted with each other. The panel
aims at bringing together sociolinguists from various north, middle and south European
countries to develop such a perspective and to discuss different methodological
approaches to such studies.
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1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PANEL. Peter Auer. University of Freiburg. Unn
Røyneland. University of Oslo
2. THE MULTIFARIOUSNESS OF “THE THIRD POSITION”: IDENTITY
CONSTRUCTION AND DIALECT ACQUISITION AMONG IMMIGRANTS IN RURAL
AREAS. Lena Ekberg. University of Stockholm. Jan-Ola Östman. University of
Helsinki
3. REGIONAL DIALECT AND MULTIETHNIC YOUTH STYLES IN THE THREE
LARGEST CITIES OF DENMARK. Pia Quist. University of Copenhagen
4. DIALECT ACQUISITION AND MIGRATION IN NORWAY. Unn Røyneland.
University of Oslo
5. DIALECT USE BY MIGRANTS IN THE DUTCH PROVINCE OF LIMBURG (THE
NETHERLANDS). Leonie Cornips. Maastricht, Meertens Institute
6. «IT SOUNDS LIKE THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY THOSE LIVING AROUND THE
SEASIDE». LANGUAGE ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE LOCAL ITALO-ROMANCE
VARIETY AMONG GHANAIAN IMMIGRANTS IN BERGAMO. Federica Guerini.
University of Bergamo
7. DIALECT ACQUISITION (OR ITS ABSENCE) IN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES
COMES IN VERY DIFFERENT SHADES IN QUADRILINGUAL SWITZERLAND.
Raphael Berthele. University of Freiburg
8. THE ACQUISITION OF SWISS GERMAN DIALECTS BY FIRST AND SECOND
GENERATION IMMIGRANTS. Stephan Schmid. University of Zurich
9. LINGUISTIC SEGREGATION IN THE CITY: ETHNIC BOUNDARIES AND THE
RURAL/URBAN DISTINCTION IN SOUTHWEST GERMANY. Peter Auer. University
of Freiburg
10. DISCUSSION. Paul Kerswill. University of York
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INTRODUCTION TO THE PANEL
Peter Auer
University of Freiburg
Unn Røyneland
University of Oslo
In this introduction, we will outline the research questions and set the agenda for this
panel. We will present a number of scenarios how second and third generation
immigrants may position themselves vis-à-vis monolingual main stream society by
acquiring or not acquiring features of the local dialect(s) of the area in which they live.
We also describe some of the economic, social and sociolinguistic factors of the
receiving society that might influence these scenarios. Where local dialect features are
acquired, we outline how these features may assume indexical meanings different from
those in their original field.
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THE MULTIFARIOUSNESS OF “THE THIRD POSITION”: IDENTITY
CONSTRUCTION AND DIALECT ACQUISITION AMONG IMMIGRANTS IN RURAL
AREAS
Lena Ekberg
University of Stockholm
Jan-Ola Östman
University of Helsinki
The present study is part of a project investigating how immigrants outside the larger
cities, in the socio-political periphery in Finland and in Sweden, are integrated into local
communities and what role language and different language varieties play in the
integration process. For immigrants to Swedish-language rural areas on the west cost
of Finland it is not enough to learn the standard variety of Finland Swedish (Swedish
being a national, albeit minority language in Finland), they also need to acquire the
local dialect.
In previous studies (Östman & Ekberg 2016, Ekberg & Östman, submitted) we have
presented cases of variability and ambivalence in the way immigrants try to find their
place in a minority language community. We have found Bhabha’s (1994) notion of
identity as a “third position” to be a recurring incentive for understanding what is going
on in these conditions of contact. In this study we explicate the very nature of how the
third position is manifested in immigrant’s narratives (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou
2008; De Fina 2013) and how the various realizations are related to the attitude and
use of the local dialect.
We find that the third position is realized in at least three different manners, which are
not to be seen as fixed positions, but rather as clusters of experiences and attitudes in
a vaguely delimited space: (a) the immigrant is a mediator between the traditional local
population and immigrants, that is, the immigrant expresses solidarity to both groups;
(b) the immigrant is doubly marginalized, that is, the immigrant is positioned by others
as belonging neither to the local population nor to his/her “own” ethnic group. As a
response to being doubly marginalized, the immigrant may position him/herself in a
generic category of immigrants. And (c), for second generation immigrants the third
position may also be realized as an identification of oneself as emigrants, that is, they
position themselves together with other young people in the diaspora, who have grown
up in a country to which their parents have immigrated.
All the informants positioning themselves – or being positioned – in a third space
master the local dialect to a greater or lesser extent. Their attitudes toward the dialect
varies, however. For instance, even though the mediator expresses a positive attitude
to the dialect he/she does not want to get “stuck” in it and run the risk of being taken for
a “local”.
References:
Bamberg, M. and A. Georgakopoulou (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in
narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk 28, 377–396.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London and New York: Routledge.
De Fina, A. (2013). Positioning level 3. Connecting local identity displays to macro
social processes. Narrative Inquiry 23(1), 40–61.
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Ekberg, L. and J.-O. Östman (submitted). Medlare – eller dubbel marginalisering?
Identitetskonstruktion hos immigranter i Österbotten. Svenskans Beskrivning
35. Göteborg: University of Gothenburg.
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REGIONAL DIALECT AND MULTIETHNIC YOUTH STYLES IN THE THREE
LARGEST CITIES OF DENMARK
Pia Quist
University of Copenhagen
Several studies in Europe show that young people in ethnically diverse urban
neighborhoods develop their own non-standard ways of speaking (e.g. Auer 2003,
Appel & Schoonen 2005, Quist & Svendsen 2010). Some of these studies indicate that
a number of similar language features appear to recur across places and languages.
These include lexical loans from immigrant languages (most commonly from Turkish
and Arabic), simplifications of certain syntactic and morphological features plus
pronunciation that sounds ‘foreign’ and is associated with immigrant youth and
neighborhoods (cf. e.g. a comparative study of multiethnic youth language in
Scandinavia, Quist and Svendsen 2015). In this talk, focus will be on the ways
multiethnic youth styles differ across the three largest cities of Denmark (Copenhagen,
Odense and Aarhus). The starting point will be a presentation of results from an
ongoing study of language variation in Vollsmose, an ethnically diverse social housing
estate in Odense. Vollsmose is geographically, socially and economically marginalized
from the surrounding city of Odense, and the question therefore is whether this
marginalization is reflected in the speech of people living there. To what extent is
regional dialect part of young people's speech in Vollsmose? Our studies show that
local Funen dialect – mostly in terms of prosodic features – are part of young people's
vernacular while they also use features that are characteristic of multiethnic youth
styles as described elsewhere in the country (Quist 2008, Christensen 2012, Pharao &
Hansen 2010).
A closer look at this ‘hybrid’, however, shows vast variation among individual speakers
in terms of the amount and selection of features used. We observe on the one hand a
habitually used vernacular that in this community of practice does not seem to be
marked or emblematic in any way among the speakers, thus a ‘first order index’ in this
context (Kiesling & Johnstone 2008, Silverstein 2003). On the other hand, there is
another way of speaking that the young people themselves connect to the place of
Vollsmose. They have a name for it, Vollsmosian. Vollsmosian indexes masculine
toughness and is only used by a few of the participants. The features used to perform
Vollsmosian form a 2nd order index – it’s something that the speakers are aware of,
can play with, use or not use, and make social work with (Eckert 2008).
The results from Vollsmose will be compared to results from studies of multiethnic
speech styles in Aarhus and Copenhagen with specific focus on the use of regional
dialect in combination with multiethnic style features. It will be argued that when
comparing dialect and speech styles across places local orders of indexicality should
be taken into consideration. The studies and the results from the three different Danish
cities point in slightly different directions, which leads to the conclusion that (1)
multiethnic youth styles are different in the three cities as they show traits of regional
dialect from each place; and (2) that the general language situation, with Copenhagen
as the strong national norm center and Aarhus as a strong regional norm center, needs
to be taken into account when the differences between the language of the three sites
are to be explained.
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References:
Appel, R. and R. Schoonen (2005). Street language: A multicultural youth register in
the Netherlands. Journal of multilingual and multicultural development 26 (2),
85-117.
Auer, P. (2003). Türkenslang – ein jugendsprachlicher Ethnolekt des Deutschen und
seine Transformationen. In A. Häcki Buhofer (ed). Spracherwerb und
Lebensalter (pp. 255-264). Tübingen and Basel: Francke.
Christensen, M.V. (2012): 8220, 8219. Sproglig variation blandt unge i multietniske
områder i Aarhus. [8220, 8219. Language Variation among Youth in multi-ethnic
areas of Aarhus]. PhD thesis. Department of Aesthetics and Communication.
Aarhus University.
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the Indexical Field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4,
2008, 453–476
Hansen, G. F. and Pharao, N. (2010). Prosody in the Copenhagen multiethnolect. In P.
Quist and B. A. Svendsen (eds.). Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. New
Linguistic Practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 79-95.
Quist, P. and B. A. Svendsen (eds.) (2010). Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. New
Linguistic Practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Quist, P. and B. A. Svensen (2015). MultiNord (2007-2015): Et nettverk for forskning
om språk i heterogene byrom – empiriske og teoretiske hovedlinjer. NOA Norsk som andrespråk, Vol. 1-2, Nr. 2015, 151-194.
Quist, P. (2008). Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and
stylistic practice. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12 (1 & 2), 43-61.
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.
Language and Communication, 23, 193–229.
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DIALECT ACQUISITION AND MIGRATION IN NORWAY
Unn Røyneland
University of Oslo
Over the last decades Norwegian society, like many other societies of Europe, has
changed substantially due to increasing globalization, mobility and labor and refugee
driven immigration. Today approximately 16 % of the population of 5.2 million people
have migrated to Norway or are born in Norway to foreign-born parents (Statistics
Norway 2016). Although many immigrants choose to settle in the urban centers, people
with immigrant background live all over the country. Now the question is, do these
people acquire local dialects? And are they perceived as entitled and legitimate users
of these local dialects?
A few years ago a popular singer-songwriter from a small town in Mid-Norway, well
known for the use of local dialect in his lyrics, released a song where he refers to
refugees as flies and lice. Since then he has given numerous interviews where he
warns against immigration and claims that Muslims contaminate Europe. In her blog
and also in a number of interviews a young Iraqi refugee to the same town in MidNorway speaks out against this. And she does so speaking the local dialect. Her
statement has both received massive support and evoked negative reactions – some of
them questioning her claim to be an authentic and entitled citizen of this local
community. Even if she sounds local, she doesn’t look local.
Previous research indicates that it is generally seen as positive that immigrants acquire
and use local dialects (e.g. Jølbo 2007; Van Ommeren 2010). Norway is known for its
dialect diversity and also for the fact that dialects, on the whole, are cherished and
used within all social domains – formal as well as private (e.g. Nesse 2014; Røyneland
2009; Sandøy 2011). The normal scenario, therefore, is that immigrants to Norway
acquire and are seen as entitled users of local speech. However, different dialects
seem to vary as to the degree of acceptance and authenticity they provide when
spoken by a person with immigrant background. And as the story above indicates,
language alone may not always be enough to be accepted as someone who belongs.
In order to investigate attitudes towards immigrant’s use of dialect, a visual-verbalguise and an extensive online questionnaire was designed. A number of rural and
urban dialects were played once with a traditionally Norwegian-looking face and once
with a foreign-looking face. The guises were evaluated using traditional five point
semantic differential scales. In addition, the respondents were asked to evaluate the
guise according to how foreign and how Norwegian they were perceived to be. Almost
400 high school students from different urban and rural places in Eastern and Western
Norway took part in the study (Røyneland 2016; Røyneland & Uri forthc.).
In my paper I will present the results both from the experimental study and from the
questionnaire, and attempt to answer the question of the extent to which immigrants
are seen as authentic and entitled dialect users by young people in Norway.
References:
Jølbo, I. D. (2007). «Det e måden e uttykke meg på». En sosiolingvistisk undersøkelse
av dialektbruk i norsk som andrespråk. MA thesis, NTNU, Trondheim.
Van Ommeren, R. (2010). «Ja, jæi la an på å tålå oppdaling, ja». En sosiolingvistisk
studie av språklige praksisformer blant voksne innvandrere i Oppdal. MA
thesis, NTNU, Trondheim.
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Røyneland, U. (2009). Dialects in Norway – catching up with the rest of
Europe? Intern. J. Soc.Lang. 196-- 7, 7-- 30.
Røyneland, Unn (2017). Hva skal til for å høres ut som du hører til?
Forestillinger om dialektale identiteter i det senmoderne Norge. Nordica
Helsingiensia. ISSN 1795-- 4428. 48, 91-- 106
Røyneland, Unn & Jensen, Bård Uri (forthc.). What should you sound like to
sound like you belong? Attitudes towards immigrants’ use of local
dialects.
Sandøy, H. (2011). Language culture in Norway: A tradition of questioning
standard language norms. I: Tore Kristiansen & Nikolas Coupland
(eds.), Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing
Europe. Oslo: Novus. S. 119−126.
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DIALECT USE BY MIGRANTS IN THE DUTCH PROVINCE OF LIMBURG (THE
NETHERLANDS)
Leonie Cornips
Maastricht, Meertens Institute
In this talk, I will explore the process of language choice between Dutch and dialect by
so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ speakers (migrants and their descendants) in the process of
attributing local identity – both self-ascribed by new speakers in Limburg and ascribed
to them by established dialect speakers in the Dutch province of Limburg. In Limburg,
there is high vitality of local dialects but dialect use by migrants are being erased in
discourse (cf. Irvine & Gal 2000) from the dominant classification scheme in the
Netherlands by processes of denaturalization and illegitimation (questioning dialect
use, making jokes about it and/or being surprised about it). Selling linguistic
authenticity in case of dialect use turns out to be complicated in Dutch Limburg: is the
speaker a producer or transmitter of an authentic good, is (s)he an embodiment of that
commodity? The data which stems from both fieldwork, sociolinguistic literature and a
documentary will show that dialect speakers in the Netherlands/Limburg are imaged to
be white. This is accordance with Bucholtz and Hall (2016:12) claim that “the body,
though imagined to be a biological truth, is meaningful only because discourse makes it
so”. Although such iconicity is always ideological, it may have a physical basis such as
race in the context of dialect use.
References:
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall (2016). “Embodied sociolinguistics.” In Sociolinguistics:
Theoretical debates, edited by Nikolas Coupland. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Irvine, Judith T.
and Susan Gal (2000). Language Ideology and Linguistic
Differentiation. In Regimes of Language; Ideologies, Polities, and Identities.
Paul V. Kroskriry (ed.) pp. 35-84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research
Press.
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«IT SOUNDS LIKE THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY THOSE LIVING AROUND THE
SEASIDE». LANGUAGE ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE LOCAL ITALO-ROMANCE
VARIETY AMONG GHANAIAN IMMIGRANTS IN BERGAMO
Federica Guerini
University of Bergamo
Italian, which is basically the result of the standardization process of the Florentine
literary language developed in the 14th century, is the national language of Italy since
1861, when political unification was achieved. At the time, it was the mother tongue of
less than three per cent of the population (De Mauro 1991: 43) who spoke a number of
Romance varieties that, just like Italian, derived from the varieties of Latin spoken
across the peninsula. The latter are traditionally referred to as dialetti italo-romanzi
‘Italo-Romance dialects’. The implementation of a monolingual language policy aimed
to promote the use of the national language in a number of domains previously
dominated by the presence of Italo-Romance dialects is responsible for a process of
language shift that is almost complete. Italian is presently the native language of the
majority of Italy’s population, while most Italo-Romance varieties are used only in
informal conversations within the family domain.
In this contribution, I will focus on position occupied by Bergamasco, the local ItaloRomance variety, within the linguistic repertoire of the Ghanaian community in
Bergamo and its province. It will be argued that Bergamasco is generally viewed as a
crucial component of the linguistic identity of the host community, which tends to be
associated to the values —productiveness, determination and industriousness—
traditionally attributed to its members (cf. Guerini 2006: 62). Yet, Ghanaian immigrants
in Bergamo cannot speak Bergamasco since the local people refrain from speaking
Bergamasco to them. In fact, Bergamasco can be regarded as a we-code (Gumperz
1982) of the indigenous community, whereas Italian —in most cases, a simplified
variety of Italian— is the default choice in order to communicate with immigrants. This
lack of proficiency, combined with the intimacy and solidarity connotations carried by
Bergamasco, is responsible for the development of mixed attitudes towards the local
dialect. Despite its (positive) identity-related associations, it tends to be perceived as a
sort of secret language deliberately used by the local people to exclude immigrants and
other outsiders, a stereotype that originates from and is reinforced by the lack of
competence, but it is completely devoid of foundation.
References:
De Mauro, T. (1991). Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. Roma-Bari: Laterza.
Guerini, F. (2006). Language Alternation Strategies in Multilingual Settings. A case
study: Ghanaian Immigrants in Northern Italy. Bern: Peter Lang.
Guerini, F. (2008). Atteggiamenti e consapevolezza linguistica in contesto migratorio:
qualche osservazione sugli immigrati ghanesi a Bergamo. In C. Andorno, G.
Berruto, J. Brincat and S. Caruana (eds.). Lingua, cultura e cittadinanza in
contesti migratori. Europa e area mediterranea (pp. 113–163). Perugia: Guerra.
Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: CUP.
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DIALECT ACQUISITION (OR ITS ABSENCE) IN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES
COMES IN VERY DIFFERENT SHADES IN QUADRILINGUAL SWITZERLAND
Raphael Berthele
University of Freiburg
In this talk, I focus on the German- and Romansh-speaking areas to show how the
ecology of the respective languages/varieties affects the construal of the ‘problem’ of
linguistic heterogeneity: In German-speaking Switzerland, migrants find themselves
torn between the discourse of (standard) language proficiency in the local language as
a prerequisite for educational success on the one hand and dialect proficiency (or its
absence) as an emblem of integration (or its absence) on the other.
In the case of the minority language of Romansh, however, the acquisition of the local
dialect by certain groups of immigrants, mostly Portuguese, is highlighted as a
somewhat unexpected support of the endangered local language, whereas questions
of integration and the interests of the group in question, e.g. the desire to learn the
strong language German, are backgrounded in the media discourse.
Drawing on media clippings, census data, but also on longitudinal studies involving
proficiency tests from German-speaking and Romansh-speaking schools, I discuss
dialect and school (standard) language acquisition by migrants in the interplay of both
contradictory and converging language policies and educational linguistic discourses. I
show that the celebration of linguistic diversity by policy-makers and linguists tends to
be rather selective and highly dependent on the respective local political agenda.
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THE ACQUISITION OF SWISS GERMAN DIALECTS BY FIRST AND SECOND
GENERATION IMMIGRANTS
Stephan Schmid
University of Zurich
Switzerland is among the European countries with the highest proportion of foreign
population, as there has been a large immigration of labour force since the Fifties.
Moreover, the sociolinguistic situation of German-speaking Switzerland is
characterized by a type of diglossia where the ‘low variety’ has a large diffusion in
almost all domains of everyday communication.
However, the acquisition of the local varieties by immigrants has been only scarcely
investigated, at least as far as the first generation is concerned. The available evidence
from spon¬taneous second language acquisition points to the existence of various
types of inter-languages which often display a hybrid character, containing elements of
both the standard and the dialectal variety. On the other hand, the diglossia itself may
hinder the motivation to acquire a German variety, and alternative sociolinguistic
scenarios have been documen¬ted, in particular the use of Italian as a lingua franca
among foreign workers (Berruto 1991).
As regards second generation immigrants, a Swiss German dialect normally
constitutes one of their two first languages. Nevertheless, one can observe different
scenarios how Swiss German enters into the repertoire of these multilingual subjects.
The first scenario implies code-switching between a heritage language and Swiss
German, where the latter displays no structural divergence from the varieties spoken
by non-immigrant speakers. Such bilingual conversations have been documented since
the Eighties, in particular within the Italian community (cf. Schmid 1993, Schmid &
Russo forthcoming).
The second scenario appeared shortly after year 2000. While code-switching could still
be observed, it was also noticed that the Swiss German dialects used by second
generation immigrants revealed some particular features on different linguistic levels,
i.e. discourse, lexis, grammar and – most importantly – pronunciation (cf. Tissot et al.
2011, Schmid 2012). Moreover, these ‘multi-ethnolects’ underwent several
transforma¬tions along the lines already individuated by Auer (2002)in Germany, thus
functioning as ‘secondary ethnolects’ for comedians and as ‘tertiary ethnolects’ in the
speech of non-immigrant speakers.
This contribution illustrates some of the most salient features of these scenarios,
analyzing authentic linguistic data from different sources.
References:
Auer, P. (2002). ‘Türkenslang’: ein jugendsprachlicher Ethnolekt des Deutschen und
Transformationen. In A. Häcki Buhofer (ed.). Spracherwerb und Lebensalter
(pp. 255-264). Tübingen: Francke.
Berruto, G. (1991). Fremdarbeiteritalienisch: fenomeni di pidginizzazione nella Svizzera
tedesca. Rivista di linguistica 3, 333-367.
Schmid, S. (1993). Lingua madre e commutazione di codice in immigrati italiani di
seconda generazione nella Svizzera tedesca. Multilingua 12, 265-289.
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Schmid, S. (2012) [online]. Segmental features of Swiss German ethnolects. In S.
Calamai, C. Celata and L. Ciucci (eds.). Proceedings of “Sociophonetics, at the
crossroads of speech variation, proccessing and communication” (pp. 69-72).
Pisa:
Edizioni
della
Scuola
Normale
Superiore.
Available
at:
http://edizioni.sns.it/it/downloadable/download/sample/sample_id/19/
Schmid, S. and C. Russo (forthcoming). La commutazione di codice tra gli immigrati
italiani nella Svizzera tedesca: un confronto fra due corpora raccolti a vent’anni
di distanza. In E. Pandolfi and M. Casoni (eds.). Linguisti in Contatto II.
Bellinzona: OLSI.
Tissot, F., S. Schmid and E. Galliker (2011). Ethnolektales Schweizerdeutsch:
soziophonetische und morphosyntaktische Merkmale sowie ihre dynamische
Verwendung in ethnolektalen Sprechweisen. In E. Glaser, J. E. Schmidt and N.
Frey (eds.). Dynamik des Dialekts – Wandel und Variation (pp: 319-344).
Stuttgart: Steiner.
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LINGUISTIC SEGREGATION IN THE CITY: ETHNIC BOUNDARIES AND THE
RURAL/URBAN DISTINCTION IN SOUTHWEST GERMANY
Peter Auer
University of Freiburg
Previous studies in the Alemannic-speaking part of Southwest Germany have shown
that second (or „middle“) generation immigrants in southwest Germany of Italian or
Russian family background who live in small towns or villages tend to acquire the local
dialect, although with some restriction – Italians more than Russians, due to attitudinal
differences vis-à-vis dialects that reflect those of the country of origin (Foffi 2010,
Prediger 2016). On the other hand, a recent study carried out in Stuttgart among
second/middle generation adolescents with mainly Turkish and Balkan family
backgrounds shows that for these speakers, the dialect of Stuttgart plays no role
whatsoever. Instead, they use ‚multiethnic‘ features. Both the non-use of the dialect
and the use of a “multiethnolect” can be seen as an act of divergent self-positioning
against German main-stream society in an urban context, in which the dialect is no
longer perceived as belonging to the German working class or agricultural milieus, but
rather as a symbol of that main-stream society.
In order to investigate the question of whether this linguistic segregation is a typical
feature of a large city such as Stuttgart with distinct ‘multiethnic’ neighborhoods we
carried out a further study in the smaller and socially less heterogeneous city of
Freiburg. I will report on its results, which point to a similar kind of linguistic
segregation. Several possible explanations are discussed.
References:
Foffi, Silvia (2010). Der Gebrauch alemannischer Dialektmerkmale durch Italiener im
Oberrheingebiet. Master Thesis, U Freiburg.
Prediger, Alexander (2016). Erwerb und Gebrauch alemannischer Dialektmerkmale
durch russische Muttersprachler, unpubl. PhD Thesis, U Freiburg.
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DISCUSSION
Paul Kerswill
University of York
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REVISITING MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN STANDARD AND PRIMARY
DIALECTS
IN GALLO-ROMANCE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE – PART 2:
MORPHOSYNTACTIC FEATURES
ORGANISERS:
Mathieu Avanzi
Université catholique de Louvain
André Thibault
Université Paris-Sorbonne
Keywords: Diaglossia; syntax; French regional and dialectal variation; Gallo-Romania;
Oïl, Oc and Francoprovençal dialectology.
In French-speaking Europe (now type D in Auer’s model), there is a long history of
contacts between Standard French and its closest cousins, the Gallo-Romance dialects
(‘Oïl’, ‘Francoprovençal’ and ‘Occitan’ families). Traditionally, regional variation in
Standard French used to be entirely explained by substrate effects, contacts with
Gallo-Romance dialects being seen as the unique source capable of triggering
variation in the standard. This vision has been challenged by a large number of authors
(amongst many others, Bloch 1921 or Chambon 1997; see Chambon and Greub 2009
for an overview) who have shown that French has a dynamism of its own, and that
primary dialects can also be strongly influenced by the standard language with which
they have been coexisting for centuries, in a situation of prototypical diglossia,
eventually evolving into a diaglossia. This panel aims at gathering specialists of GalloRomance and Regional French varieties, to shed new light on mutual influences
between these two linguistic systems across time and space. Some of the general
questions that we would like to address in this panel can be formulated as follows:
-
What criteria can help us to identify the regional vs. dialectal nature of a given
set of data?
-
Can new dialectal data give us relevant information on the history of
Standard/Dialect coexistence in Gallo-Romance, as far as code-switching,
code-mixing and continuum situations are concerned, across time and history?
-
Can the data at our disposal allow us to assess that a situation of diaglossia, so
frequent in other linguistic areas (Italian, German), existed massively at some
point in the past, in the history of Gallo-Romance? Do we have evidence of
inter-linguistic codes being widely used at some point in certain regions? Can
overseas colonial French varieties shed light on these issues?
-
Which methodological precautions have to be taken to assess that the presence
of a given form in a source is due to the direct influence of standard French on
the dialect or vice versa, and not an artefact created by the way that the
material was elicited?
Five speakers will take part in this panel. The influences between primary dialect and
regional French will be addressed through the lens of two important morphosyntactic
features, which are known to be quite sensitive to variation in Gallo-Romance
languages: the pronominal and conjugation systems (see the talks of Avanzi, Duval,
Martineau and Morin) and the system of negation (see talks of Dagnac and Martineau).
Data from different sources and different periods will be used by the participants,
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covering thus a large spectrum of time and space. The panel will conclude with a
discussion animated by three experts: André Thibault, Yan Greub and Wim Remysen.
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: a typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque et al. (eds.). Perspectives on
variation (pp. 7-42). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Bloch, O. (1921). La pénétration du français dans les parlers des Vosges méridionales.
Paris: Champion.
Chambon, J.-P. (1997). Les emprunts du français moderne aux dialectes ou patois:
une illusion d’optique en lexicologie française ou historique?, Lalies, 33-53.
Chambon, J.-P. and Y. Greub (2009). Histoire des variétés régionales dans la
Romania: français. In G. Ernst, M.-D. Gleßgen, Ch. Schmitt, W. Schweickard
(eds.). Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (pp. 25522565). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
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1. CLITIC INCREMENT IN 16TH-CENTURY POITOU FRENCH, A SUBSTRATE
EFFECT? Yves-Charles Morin. Université de Montréal
2. THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN VARIETIES IN GALLO-ROMANCE LORRAINE AND
VERB MORPHOLOGY. Marc Duval. Université Paris Sorbonne
3. A FRESH LOOK AT THE NEUTRAL ACCUSATIVE ‘Y’ PRONOUN IN
FRANCOPROVENÇAL DIALECTS AND REGIONAL FRENCH. Mathieu Avanzi.
Université catholique de Louvain
4. FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW WORLD: MORPHOSYNTACTIC FEATURES IN
18TH AND 19TH C. QUEBEC FRENCH. France Martineau. University of Ottawa
5. OPTIONAL NEGATIVE CONCORD IN QUEBEC FRENCH AND PICARD: ONE
SUBSTRATE, DIFFERENT PATHS? Anne Dagnac. Université Toulouse-le-Mirail
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CLITIC INCREMENT IN 16TH-CENTURY POITOU FRENCH,
A SUBSTRATE EFFECT?
Yves-Charles Morin
Université de Montréal
Keywords: Poitou French, Oïl dialect, geminated consonant, expletive pronoun.
A geminated articulation of the elided object clitic pronoun, as in tu l’as vu [ty ll a vy] is
one oddity that has attracted the curiosity of many observers. Over thirty linguists have
discussed the matter since the beginning of the twentieth century, often describing it as
a recent phonetic gemination initiated by Parisian lower classes and offering widely
divergent views on its source. The only geographical survey is Martinet’s (1945: 193194), showing this development to have taken place in a large North-Western area of
France, which closely relates to that of Oïl dialects where a geminated articulation of
the same clitic pronoun was attested at the turn of the twentieth century (as found in
ALF and several dialectal monographs) – which strongly suggests its presence in
French to have emerged from dialectal substrates.
The development of geminated l’, however, is not uniform; three morphosyntactic
patterns can easily be distinguished: (1) in Picardy, (2) in Poitou-Saintonge, and (3) in
the other North-Western Oïl dialects. That of Poitou-Saintonge is markedly different
from that found in modern regional varieties of French and is attested long before the
other ones (although this may simply reflect the paucity of early spontaneous data
elsewhere). One early attestation is found in Le Gaygnard’s poetic work: En honorant
la Noce il le l’a Espouzée (1585: 42, XXI, line 3), where an “expletive” pronoun le
precedes the regular elided clitic l’. Most attestations of this usage are confined to
private letters, often written by women.
Expletive le, however, is not found in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Poitou dialects
(cf. Pignon 1960, Gauthier 1995) and hardly ever later (except in dialects that straddle
the boundary between Poitou and Saintonge dialects). The closest equivalent in this
dialect is the sequence igl gle [iλλəә], in free variation with the two prototypical 3sg/3pl
subject pronouns igl [iλ], gle [λəә]. I claim that expletive le developed as an emphatic
marker deprived of referential value (much like the so-called ethic dative in modern
French) out of the sequence of igl gle and relate it to the strategies at work during the
early stages of the appropriation of French in areas where the local dialect was
relatively distinct from the Parisian norm (cf. Morin 2009).
References:
Gauthier, P. (1995). Le système des pronoms dans le ‹Rolea›, recueil anonyme
poitevin du XVIIe siècle. Fontaine-lès-Dijon: ABDO.
Le Gaygnard, P. (1585). Promptuaire d’unisons ordonné et disposé methodiquement
[…] avec quelques autres poesies de son invention. Poitiers: Nicolas Courtoys.
Martinet, A. (1945). La prononciation du français contemporain. Paris: Droz.
Morin, Y. C. (2009). Acquiring the vowel system of a cognate language: the role of
substrate and spelling in the development of the French spoken in Marseille
during the sixteenth century. In F. Sánchez Miret. Romanística sin complejos,
(pp. 409-454). Bern: Peter Lang.
Pignon, J. (1960). La gente poitevinrie, recueil de textes en patois poitevin du XVIe
siècle. Paris: D’Artrey.
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THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN VARIETIES IN GALLO-ROMANCE LORRAINE AND
VERB MORPHOLOGY
Marc Duval
Université Paris-Sorbonne
Keywords: Verb morphology, Lorrain dialects, regional French.
Modern Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in Lorraine have been the target of linguistic
description by several scholars. Differently from other areas, research on dialectal
variation was certainly emulated by the specific context of the annexation of most of the
Moselle department by the German Empire. During this period, dialect descriptions
would predominantly focus on lexical and phonetic matters, but data on verbal
morphology are also available, at least for the most frequent regular and irregular
verbs.
In this talk, attention will be given to the questions whether, and how, influences
between local and supra-local varieties can be disclosed in the specific realm of verb
morphology. For this purpose, data, as well as methodological issues about how to
handle, they will be presented. As will be shown, linguistic influences on inflectional
morphology can show up in different ways.
Two main sets of data will be considered for the sake of comparison:
•
The morphology of regular verbs, with a focus on the first inflectional class
•
The morphology of irregular verbs, with a focus on the copula ‘be’
As for methodological issues, it should be noted that data on irregular verbs require
particular care. However, several hints of external influence can be posited on careful
observation of the data:
•
inconsistencies in the phonetic output in terms of expected historical evolution;
•
inconsistencies in the phonetic realization due to the grammatical context;
•
inconsistencies in the “general economy of the system”, in a structuralist view
striving to claim that even irregular forms stand together with other forms.
Unveiling influences between local and supra-local varieties is then made possible by
observing geographical and historical variations. Presenting dialectal maps of GalloRomance Lorraine on the one hand, and data gathered from linguistic surveys
belonging to two different periods on the other hand (namely Adam’s Les patois
lorrains and the ALF for the late 19th / early 20th century vs the ALLR for the second
half of the 20th century), three main claims can be done:
•
First, cities neatly appear as centers from which paradigms that are closest to
the standard spread;
•
Second, non-standard paradigms may also spread from peripheries, but only to
other peripheral zones;
•
Third, as much as negative evidence can be supported, sources on regional
French only display paradigms that are closest to the standard.
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These three claims are very consistent with the idea that mutual influences between
(Gallo-Romance) varieties, including regional French, are predominantly of a ‘topdown’, rather than a ‘bottom-up’, type.
References:
Adam, L. (1881). Les patois lorrains. Nancy: Grosjean-Maupin.
Bloch, O. (1921). La pénétration du français dans les parlers des Vosges méridionales.
Paris: Champion.
Duval, M. (2010). J’es, tu es, il est: un problème de dialectologie lorraine. RLiR 74,
341-414.
Gilliéron, J. and Edmont, E. (1902-1910). Atlas linguistique de la France. Paris:
Champion.
Lanher, J., A. Litaize and J. Richard (1979-1988). Atlas linguistique et ethnographique
de la Lorraine romane. Breitenau: CNRS.
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THE 'Y' NEUTRAL ACCUSATIVE PRONOUN IN FRANCOPROVENÇAL DIALECTS
AND REGIONAL FRENCH
Mathieu Avanzi
Université catholique de Louvain
Keywords: Neutral accusative pronoun, francoprovençal dialect, regional French,
crowdsourcing, geolinguistics.
This talk aims to have a fresh look at the "y" neutral accusative pronoun, a pronoun
that can be found both in Francoprovençal dialects and isotopic varieties of French. In
these linguistic systems, the "y" pronoun has the property to act as a substitute for a
"vague" referent, as in the sentence: çai, je vais yi faire (this, I’m going to do it), that
could have as an equivalent the following sentence in standard French: çai, je vais lei
faire. Very little work has been done on this linguistic form. The presentation will be
articulated around two main issues:
First we will draw as precisely as possible the boundaries which delimit the use of this
pronoun in regional French and in dialect. As for dialects, we will use the data
published in the numerous atlases covering the Francoprovençal area and its confines
(ALF, ALJA, ALLy, etc.) throughout the 20th c. As for regional French, we will use the
data collected in the frame of a crowdsourcing survey, in which more than 13k Frenchspeaking participants from France, Switzerland and Belgium took part in 2015 (Avanzi
et al. 2016). The comparison of the two maps will allow us to assess empirically the
hypothesis according to which the use of this pronoun in regional French is related to
its use in the substrate dialects.
Next, we will examine the possible reasons that favored the relatively recent outbreak
of this pronoun in Francoprovençal dialects (Regnier 1968, Tuailon 1969, Taverdet
1980), and its parallel existence in the corresponding varieties of regional French. We
will argue that the situation we can observe is likely due to mutual influences between
Francoprovençal dialects and regional French: in regional French, the use of the "y"
pronoun (normally dedicated to indirect and adverbial phrases) has been "deviated" by
dialect speakers in order to distinguish neutral verbal complements and animated
verbal complements, as they could do in their dialect (namely with the forms inherited
from HOC, which are different from the forms inherited from ILLUM; in parallel, due to
the growing importance of the French language in everyday speech, the form "y” was
simultaneously borrowed in dialect to refer to neutral verbal complements.
References:
Gilliéron J. and E. Edmont (1902-1910). Atlas linguistique de la France. Paris:
Champion.
Martin, J.-B. and G. Tuaillon (1971-1978). Atlas linguistique et ethnographique des
Alpes et du Jura. Paris: CNRS.
Avanzi, M. et al. (2016). Présentation d’une enquête pour l’étude des régionalismes du
français. Actes du 5e CMLF, 1-15.
Regnier, C. (1968). Le pronom personnel régime neutre dans les parlers du Morvan. In
Mélanges Gamillscheg (pp. 461-476). Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
Taverdet, G. (1980). Les patois de Saône-et-Loire. Dijon: ABDO.
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Tuaillon, G. (1969). Substrat et structure : à propos d'un solécisme du français
populaire de Lyon et de sa région. Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature
romanes, 7/1, 169-176.
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FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW WORLD:
MORPHOSYNTACTIC FEATURES IN 18TH AND 19TH C. QUEBEC FRENCH
France Martineau
University of Ottawa
Keywords: Levelling, Parisian French, Laurentian French, Gallo-Romance dialects.
Laurentian French is a variety of French introduced in the New World in the 17th c. by
settlers who mainly came from Normandy, Center-West and Ile-de-France. It allows for
a better understanding of the relationships that existed between varieties of GalloRomance and the standard French prevailing in France back then. Morin's work (1996)
suggests an important phonological leveling towards Parisian linguistic uses in early
colonial days that would explain the strong presence of features of elite Parisian
French in Laurentian French. Martineau (2005, 2009) found similar results where
morphosyntax is concerned. As a result, the linguistic system prevailing in the colony
vis-à-vis that of Paris partially mirrors the relationship center/periphery existing
between Parisian Elite French versus Provincial Elite French.
We will compare two series of documents written just after the Conquest in the
Detroit/Windsor region. The first document is a personal diary written by a modest fur
merchant, Charles-André Barthe, born in Montreal in 1722 (Martineau and Bénéteau
2010). The second series is Joseph Campau’s private family papers, that were written
some forty years later by a fur merchant family after the Conquest, in a context where
French was becoming a minority language.
We will examine the alternation between the adverbial negative pas/point and the use
of the 1st plural verbal ending -ons in combination with je and 3rd plural verbal ending ont. We will compare the use of these features in Barthe’s diary and in Campau’s
letters and show the relationship between these features with dialectal features in
France, the linguistic leveling of some of these features, and the maintenance of some
conservative features after the Conquest. The features examined will be compared to
those of the Atlas linguistique de l’Est du Canada and Atlas linguistique de la France,
as well as 17th-19th c. plays showing regional French and/or patois.
References:
Gendron, J. D. (2007). D’où vient l’accent des Québécois? Et celui des Parisiens?
Québec: PUL.
Martineau, F. (2009). À distance de Paris: usages linguistiques en France et en
Nouvelle-France à l’époque classique. In D. Aquino-Weber et al. (eds).
Sociolinguistique historique du domaine gallo-roman (pp. 221-242). Berne:
Peter Lang.
Martineau, F. (2005). Perspective sur le changement linguistique: aux sources du
français canadien. Revue canadienne de linguistique, 50, 1-4, 173-213.
Martineau, F. and M. Bénéteau (2010). Incursion dans le Détroit. Québec: PUL.
Morin, Y. C. (1996). The origin and development of the pronunciation of French in
Québec. In H. F. Nielsen and L. Schøsler (eds). The origins and development of
emigrant languages (pp. 243-274). Odense: Odense University Press.
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OPTIONAL NEGATIVE CONCORD IN QUEBEC FRENCH AND PICARD:
ONE SUBSTRATE, DIFFERENT PATHS?
Anne Dagnac
Université Toulouse-le-Mirail
Keywords: Picard, Québec French, negation, optional negative concord.
Negative Concord (NC) refers to the co-occurrence of at least one N-word and a
Negative marker yielding a single negative interpretation. While it is ruled out in
standard French (SF, 1a), it is reputedly grammatical in dialects such as Quebec
French (QF; Burnett et al. 2015), (1b) and Picard, (2)
(1)
(2)
a. *Je n’ai pas rien contre cette loi.
[SF]
b. J’ai pas rien contre cette loi.
[QF]
a. J’n’in sais mie rien, min camarade !
[Picard]
However, these dialects differ as to the way negation and optional negative concord
(ONC) pattern. First, they have slightly different sets of N-words. Second, ne-drop is
the rule in QF while Picard largely retains ne (Auger and Villeneuve 2008). Third, QF,
like SF, has inherited only one medieval minimizer as a negative marker, pas ‘step’;
Picard has retained two: point ‘dot’ and mie ‘crumb’. Fourth, while pus ‘no longer’ is
incompatible with NC in QF, it is licit in Picard (Dagnac 2014). More strikingly, (3), QF
excludes preverbal N-words from ONC. In Picard, preverbal N-words can be involved
in ONC, (4).
(3)
a. *Personne a pas bougé.
[QF]
b. J’ai pas vu personne.
(4)
a. Parsonne n’a poé l’air éd comprènne.
[Picard]
b. Parsonne n’a mie bougè.
In spite of these differences, we show, on the basis of a corpus study, that both
varieties converge in unexpected ways : in the two dialects, not only does the
frequency of ONC crucially depend on the identity of the N-word involved, but it does
so along the lines of one same hierarchy : on one end of the ladder is nulle part ‘no
where’, which triggers NC almost systematically ; on the other one stands jamais
‘never’, which is involved in ONC only up to 10% in Picard and 1% in QF. In between
we find personne ‘nobody’ (40%), then rien ‘nothing’ (15%). Moreover, the cases
judged ungrammatical in one dialect are of lower frequency in the other one. ONC with
pus, ruled out of in QF, culminates at 1% in Picard. Eventually, for some Picard
speakers, while point and mie both combine with the nominal N-words, only mie can do
so with jamais and pus, the most disprefered N-word in QF ONC. Furthermore, mie is
also over-represented with preverbal N-words – a case banned in QF – and other
speakers can only display ONC with mie, to the exclusion of point.
References:
Auger, J. and A.-J. Villeneuve (2008). Ne deletion in Picard and in regional French. In
M. Meyerhoff and N. Nagy, Social Lives in Language (pp. 223-247).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Burnett, H. et al. (2015). The Variable Grammar of Montréal French Negative Concord.
Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 21, 11-20.
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Dagnac, A. (2014). ‘Pas’, ‘mie’, ‘point’ et autres riens : de la négation verbale en picard.
In J. Goes and M. Pitar, La négation en français. Rash: PUA.
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TREND AND PANEL STUDIES: WHAT CAN THEY REALLY TELL US ABOUT
LANGUAGE CHANGE?
ORGANISERS:
Karen V. Beaman
Queen Mary, University of London
Gregory R. Guy
New York University
Frans Hinskens
Meertens Institute (KNAW) & VU University
Keywords: Trend and panel studies, language change, variationist.
The fact that language is constantly changing has been recognized since antiquity.
Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC) was noted for saying, "Consuetudo loquendi est in
motu;" "The usage of speech is always in motion." The search for the drivers of
language change has always been central to the field of sociolinguistic variation. Since
the 1970s, studies in language change have taken a largely synchronic approach in
evaluating diachronic processes, analyzing language usage across different age
groups and thereby inferring the direction and nature of language change – the
‘apparent time’ method.
Fifty years after Labov's seminal work on New York City English, two types of
longitudinal studies have become prevalent in variation sociolinguistics: trend studies,
which sample the different speakers in the community across different times, and panel
studies, which sample the same individuals across different times in their life-span, and
this relates to one of the central assumptions underlying the 'apparent time' method.
Both of these approaches are critical to developing a full understanding of language
change: trend studies are most suitable for determining language change within a
community; whereas, panel studies, are most useful for understanding language
changes at the individual level (Sankoff 2006).
Common to all of these longitudinal studies is the goal to understand the nature and
direction of language change. Labov defines two types: change from above, that is
change driven by "overt social pressures consonant with the social hierarchy" and
change from below, that is change "well below the level of conscious awareness of any
speakers" (Labov 1966:128). Similarly, the works of Auer et al. (2011) and Villena et al.
(2003) discuss the role that horizontal (geographical spread from neighboring dialects)
and vertical (pressure from the standard language) influences have on propagating
language change. What light do panel and trend studies shed on these phenomena?
Gillian Sankoff (2006) laid down the foundation and summarized the results of 13 panel
and trend studies, from Labov's work in New York City (1966) to her most recent work
on Montreal French (2013). She defines three types of trajectories: (1) speaker stability
after early childhood while the community continues to change, (2) ongoing change in
the community with some older speakers moving in the direction of change as they
age, and (3) ongoing change in the community with some older speakers undergoing
retrograde change as they age.
The decade-long LANCHART study in Denmark (Gregersen 2009) has conducted one
of the most comprehensive longitudinal approaches to date by integrating both panel
and trend studies in analyzing language change. The goal of the LANCHART study has
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been to test the apparent time hypothesis by conducting studies in real time. The
findings show that language change cannot be explained solely by generational or agegraded differences but is intricately entwined with the historical usage and evolution of
each linguistic variant.
The main question that will be addressed in this workshop is the following: what have
the findings of the panel and trend studies over the last decade revealed about the
source, the nature, and the drivers of language change? Additional questions to be
discussed include:
1. What is the relative value of apparent time versus real time studies in
understanding the loci of language change?
2. What are the current limitations of these studies and what steps do we need to
take to move our analysis to the next level?
3. What can trend and panel studies tell us about whether language changes
systematically and incrementally or through a more sporadic and episodic
process (cf. bricolage)?
4. Can trend and panel studies contribute to our understanding of the role that
style and different stylistic repertoires play in language change?
5. How can real time studies help to uncover the influences from the substrate and
the superstrate on the direction of language change, such as overt and covert
prestige?
6. Has the directionality of language change shifted from predominantly horizontal
(geographical) to principally vertical (from the standard) causing greater dialect
convergence?
References:
Auer, P., P Baumann and C. Schwarz. (2011). Vertical vs. horizontal change in the
traditional dialects of southwest Germany: a quantitative approach. Taal &
Tongval 63(1), 13-41.
Labov, W. (1981). What can be learned about change in progress from synchronic
description? Variation Omnibus. Edmonton: Linguistic Research Inc.
Labov, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington
D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Gertenberg, A. and A. Voeste (eds.). (2015). Language development: the lifespan
perspective. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gregersen, F. (2009). The data and design of the LANCHART study. Acta Linguistica
Hafniensia 41, 3-29.
Sankoff, G. (2013). Language change across the lifespan: longitudinal research on
Montreal French. Talk given at the University of York (YouTube).
Sankoff, G. (2006). Age: Apparent time and real time. Elsevier Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics. Second Edition. Article Number: LALI:01479.
Sankoff, G. and H. Blondeau. (2010). Instability of the [r] ~ [R] alternation in Montreal
French: the conditioning of a sound change in progress. In: Van de Velde, van
Hout, and Hinskens (eds). VaRiation.
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Villena Ponsoda, J. A., J. A. Moya Corral, A. M. Ávila Muñoz, and M. Vida Castro.
(2003). Proyecto de investigación de la formación de dialectos (FORDIAL).
ELUA 17, 607-636.
Wagner, S. E. (2012). Age Grading in Sociolinguistic Theory. Language and Linguistics
Compass 6(6), 371-382.
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1. TYPES OF VARIABLES, LEVELS OF LANGUAGE AND RATES OF CHANGE.
Frans Gregersen. The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre. Torben Juel
Jensen. The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre. Marie Maegaard and
Nicolai Pharao. The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre
2. A REAL-TIME STUDY IN ESKILSTUNA: COMPARISONS BETWEEN A PANEL
AND A TREND STUDY. Eva Sundgren. Mälardalen University, Sweden
3. DOWN TO A (T): EXPLORING THE COMPLEX CONDITIONING EFFECTS ON TGLOTTALING ACROSS THE LIFE-SPAN. Isabelle Buchstaller. Leipzig University.
Adam Mearns. Newcastle University
4. BEYOND THE PEAK: EVIDENCE FOR ADOLESCENT INCREMENTATION IN
TREND AND PANEL STUDIES. Sali Tagliamonte. University of Toronto. Derek
Denis. University of Victoria
5. VIRTUAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS: RADIO AND HISTORICAL ARCHIVAL SOURCES
FOR TRACING LINGUISTIC CHANGE AS TIME-MACHINE LONGITUDINAL
APPROACHES. Juan Manual Hernández Campoy. Universidad de Murcía. Tamara
García-Vidal. Universidad de Murcia
6. CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PANEL AND TREND STUDIES: THE CASE OF
PORTUGUESE IN RIO DE JANEIRO. Maria da Conceição de Paiva. Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro. Maria Eugênia L. Duarte. Federal University of Rio
de Janeiro
7. COMPLEMENTARY METHODOLOGIES FOR STUDYING LANGUAGE CHANGE:
NULL SUBJECTS IN EUROPEAN AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE. Gregory R.
Guy. New York University
8. DISCUSSION & WRAP-UP. Karen V. Beaman. Queen Mary, University of
London. Gregory R. Guy. New York University. Frans Hinskens. Meertens
Institute (KNAW) & VU University
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TYPES OF VARIABLES, LEVELS OF LANGUAGE AND RATES OF CHANGE
Frans Gregersen
The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre
Torben Juel Jensen
The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre
Marie Maegaard
The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre
Nicolai Pharao
The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre
The LANCHART study collected data from five sites in Denmark at two different points
in time around 20 years apart (Gregersen 2009). The participating informants were
partly the original informants from the first studies, partly informants who had the
relevant social background characteristics. In addition, we performed new studies with
youngsters at the four sites of Copenhagen, Næstved, Odder and Vinderup. We
investigated two different a-variables (raising of front /a/ and backing of back /a/) and
two further phonological variables (the raising of the mid-front unrounded vowel before
the velar nasal and the lowering of /u/ and /u:/ after /r/), as well as three syntactic
variables (the generic pronoun (du or man), the use of main clause word order in
grammatically subordinate clauses and the reflexives), and we are currently looking at
changes in the lexicon. Thus, the corpus enables a combination of panel and trend
studies from five different regions sharing a national language. We have reported on
our analyses of the phonological variables in Gregersen, Maegaard and Pharao 2009,
Gregersen, Maegaard and Pharao 2014, Maegaard and Pharao 2015, Maegaard et al.
2013, Gregersen 2014, Gregersen 2015, Gregersen and Barner-Rasmussen 2011 and
Gregersen and Pharao 2016. In brief, the results are, firstly, that it is not always
possible to conclude from apparent time studies that a specific variable is undergoing
change since some informants change their use of variants significantly in one direction
while others change significantly in the other possible direction, and secondly, that
there does not seem to be any simple relationship between the use by individuals of
the various phonological variables over time. We have reported on the syntactic
variables in Jensen 2009, Nielsen et al. 2009, Jensen and Christensen 2013, Jensen
and Gregersen 2016. The results here are that some of the syntactic variables are
better explained by internal semantic factors than by social background while other
variables show a pattern among the various sites which closely resemble the
phonological variables, i.e., that Copenhagen usage patterns are emulated all over
Denmark albeit with some delay.
The LANCHART study, since it involves several variables at the three levels of
phonology, grammar and lexicon, makes it possible to look at an interesting general
question, viz. which parts of the language system change at which rates. The
operationalization of the concept rate of change is of course controversial in itself and
will be discussed in the paper, but the paper will apart from that discuss whether the
crucial distinction is that between the levels of language or rather of different types of
variables such as those proposed by Labov (variables partaking in new and vigorous
(sound) changes versus more stable ones, variables that have a definite social
meaning shared by a community versus variables which are below linguistic
consciousness).
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One significant factor has to be added, though, and that is the rate of intra-individual
variation at the two different points in time. Through the analysis of discourse contexts
within recordings we are able to estimate the amount of intra-individual variation for
each variable and each informant (Gregersen, Jensen and Pharao, forthcoming.). We
hypothesize that there is a connection between the degree of intra-individual variability
of a variable in the first study and the rate of change which can be observed when the
first and the second study are compared.
References:
Gregersen, F. (2009). The data and design of the LANCHART study. Acta Linguistica
Hafniensia 41, 3-29.
Gregersen, F. (2014). Coding in time. On the historical character of linguistic
knowledge. In T. A. Åfarli and B. Mæhlum (eds.). The Sociolinguistics of
Grammar (Studies in Language Companion Series 154). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 237-58.
Gregersen, F. (2015). Phonetic Variation across Centuries: On the Possible
Reappearance of a Case of Stable Variation in Copenhagen Danish. In R.
Torres, N. Dion and A. Lapierre (eds.) Linguistic Variation: Confronting Fact and
Theory (pp. 96-110). London: Routledge.
Gregersen, F. and M. Barner-Rasmussen (2011). The Logic of Comparability, Corpus
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7(1), 7-36.
Gregersen, F., M. Maegaard and N. Pharao (2009). The long and short of (æ)-variation
in Danish – a panel study of short (æ) variants in Danish in real time. Acta
Linguistica Hafniensia 41, 64-82.
Gregersen, F., M. Maegaard and N. Pharao (2014). The LANCHART Corpus. In J.
Durand, U. Gut and G. Kristoffersen (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Corpus
Phonology (pp. 534-545). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gregersen, F. and N. Pharao (2016). Lects are perceptually invariant, productively
variable: A coherent claim about Danish lects. Lingua 172-173, 26-44.
Gregersen, F. and I. L. Pedersen (2001). A la Recherche du word order not quite
perdu. In S. Herring, L. Schøsler and P. Van Reenen (eds.). Textual parameters
in older languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gregersen, F., T. J. Jensen and N. Pharao (forthcoming). Comparing speech samples:
On the challenge of comparability in panel studies of language change in real
time. In I. Buchstaller and S. E. Wagner (eds.). Panel Studies of language
variation and change.
Jensen, T. J. (2009). Generic variation? Developments in use of generic pronouns in
late 20th century spoken Danish. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41, 83-115.
Jensen, T. J. and T. K. Christensen (2013). Promoting the demoted. The distribution
and semantics of “main clause word order” in spoken Danish complement
clauses. Lingua 137, 38-58.
Jensen, T. J. and F. Gregersen (2016). What do(es) you mean? The pragmatics of
generic second person pronouns in modern spoken Danish. Pragmatics, 26(3),
417-446.
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Nielsen, S. B., C. F. Fosgerau and T. J. Jensen (2009). From community to
conversation – and back. Exploring the interpersonal potentials of two generic
pronouns in Danish. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41, 116-142.
Maegaard, M., T. J. Jensen, T. Kristiansen and J. N. Jørgensen (2013). Diffusion of
language change: Accommodation to a moving target. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 17(1), 3-36.
Maegaard, M. and N. Pharao (2016). (s) variation and perceptions of male sexuality in
Denmark. In E. Levon and J. Mendes (eds.). Language, Sexuality and Power:
Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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A REAL-TIME STUDY IN ESKILSTUNA: COMPARISONS BETWEEN A PANEL AND
A TREND STUDY
Eva Sundgren
Mälardalen University, Sweden
The project Continuity and Change in Present-Day Swedish: Eskilstuna Revisited,
directed by Bengt Nordberg, is a large-scale study of language change in real time. In
1967-68, recordings were made of 83 individuals and the results were fully presented
in Nordberg (1972, 1985). In 1996, a new study was conducted, comprising both at
panel study, with 13 re-recorded informants, and a trend study, with 72 new informants.
All informants were natives of the medium-sized town Eskilstuna. As a result, both
individual and generational language change over a period of nearly 30 years could be
studied. Many, although not all, of the inferences regarding intra- and extralinguistically conditioned variation that Nordberg originally found have proven correct.
However, there are also some unexpected results, which demonstrate the need for
incorporating quantitative investigations in real-time to determine whether changes are
continuing as the apparent-time data suggest.
Thelander (1982) and Labov (1994:83–85) both conclude that a trend study is the best
method for gathering data on linguistic change; however, Labov adds that information
from a panel study is important to show how individuals behave over time and can
thereby support the interpretation of apparent-time results. The quantitative approach
was combined with qualitative explanations, specifically concerning the individuals in
the panel study, along with the concepts of integration and social mobility.
Seven morphological and morphophonological variables were analyzed using
quantitative variationist methods (Sundgren 2002). The expectation was that all the
variables were in the process of rapid change from the regional dialect towards the
spoken standard; however, the rate of change at the community had been low. Social
class- and age-conditioned differences decreased, whereas gender-conditioned
differences increased. The study also showed that social mobility and integration in the
local community have an impact on linguistic behavior, but only in specific combination
with other social variables.
The changes in the seven variables over the 30 years in the direction of standard
speech was manifested both as individual change and as generational change. It has
been assumed that, for example, 62-year-olds speak the same way they did when they
were 42 and that there is linguistic stability in middle and older ages (Chambers,
1995:194). However, the results from the Eskilstuna panel study show that older
individuals change their language as well. The results demonstrate that idiolectal
change is strongest before age 50, but there are also informants older than 50 who
have changed, either in the direction of more standard or more local speech. Labov
(2001:447) sets the age of stabilization at 17, but with a reference to Nordberg and
Sundgren (1998), he adds:
The lability of speakers 30-50 may be characteristic of changes from above
as opposed to changes from below, or of morphology as opposed to
phonology, but it underlines the fact that the assumption of stability for
young adults, built into the models that follow, may have to be revised.
In the Eskilstuna study most variables are morphological, and the changes toward the
spoken standard are changes from above, whereas Labov’s focus (2001) is on
phonological variables and changes from below.
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The comparison between the panel and the trend study demonstrate that a trend study
is the most reliable way of investigating real-time change. Different comparisons show
that the panel speakers were not representative of the Eskilstuna population in 1996;
they spoke consistently more vernacular, as they did in 1967. This paper will
demonstrate the methods used to make these comparisons.
References:
Chambers, J. K. (1995). Sociolinguistic theory. Linguistic variation and its social
significance. University of Toronto. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 2: Social factors. (Language
in Society 29). Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Nordberg, B. (1972). Böjningen av neutrala substantiv i Eskilstunaspråket (The
inflection of neuter nouns in the urban dialect of Eskilstuna). Nysvenska
studier 51, 117–227.
Nordberg, B. (1985). Det mångskiftande språket. Om variation i nusvenskan (The
variable language. On variation in modern Swedish). (Ord och Stil.
Språkvårdssamfundets skrifter 14.) Malmö.
Nordberg, B. and E. Sundgren, (1998). On observing real-time language change: a
Swedish case study. SoLiD nr 10 (=FUMS Rapport nr 190). Uppsala
University: Uppsala.
Sundgren, E. (2002). Återbesök i Eskilstuna. En undersökning av morfologisk
variation och förändring i nutida talspråk. (Eskilstuna revisited. An
investigation of morphological variation and change in present-day spoken
Swedish.) Skrifter utgivna av Institutionen för nordiska språk vid Uppsala
universitet 56. Uppsala.
Thelander, M. (1982). Språklig variation och förändring – om sociolingvistiska
metoder att belysa språkets nutidshistoria. (Linguistic variation and change.
On sociolinguistic methods to illustrate language history of today.) In M.
Saari and M. Tandefeldt (eds.). Svenskans beskrivning 13 (pp. 45–68).
(Meddelanden från Institutionen för nordiska språk och nordisk litteratur vid
Helsingfors universitet. Serie B 6.) Helsingfors.
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DOWN TO A (T): EXPLORING THE COMPLEX CONDITIONING EFFECTS ON TGLOTTALING ACROSS THE LIFE-SPAN
Isabelle Buchstaller
Leipzig University
Adam Mearns
Newcastle University
Since Sankoff & Blondeau’s (2007) call for action, longitudinal linguistic research has
started to systematically rely on panel studies to assess the degree and kind of lability
that occurs during speakers’ life-spans. As the field has matured, and the growing
number of available data-sets therefore cover an increasing period of time, the
sociolinguistic enterprise has amassed an ever growing body of literature on the lifespan. But while most scientists agree that cognitive maturation alone cannot explain
age-related effects in language use (Birdsong 1999, Loewen & Reinders 2011), the
relative recency of life-span analysis as a field of research means that we are not yet
able to formulate clear generalizations about the conditions which facilitate or inhibit
linguistic instability across the life-course of the individual. Consequently, we do not yet
know enough about “how maturation and the life cycle relate to the formulation and the
development of the grammars of individual speakers” (Sankoff 2013a: 262).
This might be partly due to the fact that linguistic panel research tends to rely on almost
antithetical data-sources: while some classic studies are based on very small samples,
often of public figures, which are characterized by detailed interpretation of local social
meaning and stylistic performance, at the other end of the spectrum are four large
samples collected in Copenhagen, Texas, Montreal and Brazil, which consider larger
timespans and focus on broad socio-demographic categories.
In this paper we report on ongoing research on a panel sample of 6 speakers, first
recorded in 1971 and then again 42 years later in 2013, in the urban community of
Tyneside. We explore the factors that impact upon the realization of (t) amongst
individuals across their life-spans. While the glottal stop is rapidly spreading across the
British Isles (Schleef 2013), Tyneside is the site of a complex system of variation
around (t), which includes glottalized variants, preaspirated and flapped forms, as well
as — in a restricted number of contexts — T-to-R. While the occurrence of these
variants is constrained by social, phonetic and syllable-structural factors, research in
apparent time suggests that glottal forms are rapidly encroaching into the Tyneside
system (Milroy et al. 1994).
Our paper probes the malleability of individual speakers’ grammars with respect to (t).
Panel research has identified a number of socio-demographic speaker characteristics
that promote the adoption of linguistic forms amongst speakers past critical age. But
people’s lives have become increasingly complex, speakers’ propensity to engage with
ongoing changes is also affected by a number of orthogonal influences, including the
person’s communities of practice and social networks (see Sankoff 2013a/b), and their
attitudes towards innovations and change (Buchstaller 2016). Our analysis relies on
longitudinal ethnographic analysis in the community as well as insights gleaned from
the interviews about the speakers’ socio-demographic trajectories and their
presentations of self. By investigating the complex set of factors that impact upon the
phonetic choices speakers make across the 42 years that divide the two parts of our
data-set, our paper contributes to the growing body of panel research that aims to
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“determine the scope and limitations of speakers’ abilities to change their speech”
across their life histories (Bowie & Yaeger-Dror 2016: 608).
References:
Birdsong, D. (ed.) (1999). Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period
Hypothesis. Mahwah & London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bowie, D. and M. Yaeger-Dror. (2016). Language change in real time. In P. Honeybone
and J. Salmons (eds). Handbook of Historical Phonology. Oxford: OUP.
Buchstaller, I. (2016). Investigating the effect of socio-cognitive salience and speakerbased factors in morpho-syntactic life-span change. Journal of English
Linguistics, 1-31.
Cukor-Avila, P. and Bailey, G. (To appear). The Effect of Small Ns and Gaps in Contact
on Panel Survey Data. Wagner, S. E. and I. Buchstaller (eds.). Panel Studies of
Variation and Change. New York: Routledge Ltd.
Loewen, S. and H. Reinders (2011). Key Concepts in Second Language Acquisition.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCrae, R. R. and P. T. Costa (2008). Empirical and theoretical status of the five-factor
model of personality traits. In G. J. Boyle, G. Matthews and D. H. Saklofske
(eds). Sage Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment: Vol 1
Personality Theories and Models (pp. 273–294). Los Angeles: Sage.
Milroy, J., et al. (1994). Glottal Stops and Tyneside Glottalization: Competing Patterns
of Variation and Change in British English. Language Variation and Change 6,
327-357.
Sankoff, G. (2013a). Longitudinal studies. In R. Bayley, R Cameron and C. Lucas
(eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 261-279). Oxford: OUP.
Sankoff, G. (2013b). Language change and the lifespan: Where do we go from here?
Plenary given at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 42, University of Pittsburgh
and Carnegie Mellon University.
Sankoff, G. and Blondeau, H. (2007). Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in
Montreal French. Language, 83(3), 560–588.
Schleef, E. (2013). Glottal replacement of /t/ in two British capitals: Effects of word
frequency and morphological compositionality. Language Variation and Change
25(2), 201–223.
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BEYOND THE PEAK: EVIDENCE FOR ADOLESCENT INCREMENTATION IN
TREND AND PANEL STUDIES
Sali Tagliamonte
University of Toronto
Derek Denis
University of Victoria
Labov (2001:346) proposes a model for the propagation of sound change such that
adolescents advance the “frequency, extent, scope, or specificity” of changes in the
direction of the community through a process of vernacular reorganization. In this
model, children initially acquire their caregiver’s grammar, including the caregiver’s
level of any changes in progress; at around age four, children begin to advance
changes by extrapolating a target level to align with the community age vector;
adolescents incrementally advance their baseline level until around the age of
seventeen when stabilization occurs (see D’Arcy 2015 for an overview). An empirical
artifact of this hypothesized mechanism of change is a ‘peak’ in apparent time: at any
given point in synchrony, speakers at approximately 17-19 years of age, will exhibit the
most advanced level of a change. This is due to the fact that the younger speakers
have not had as much time to advance while the older speakers have lower levels due
to having started at a lower initial baseline and having undergone stabilization in early
adulthood. Labov (2001) reported this peak in nine sound changes in Philadelphia and
Tagliamonte & D’Arcy (2009) replicated this pattern in Toronto with six lexico-syntactic
changes. Further, adolescent peaks in apparent time have subsequently been
observed by Wagner (2008), Wagner & Tagliamonte (in press), Cheshire, Kerswill,
Fox, & Torgersen (2011), and Labov, Rosenfelder, & Fruehwald (2013).
The problem is that the peak in apparent time is relatively weak evidence given the
possibility of other explanations for this pattern (including age-grading and retrograde
change). Discounting these alternative explanations from adolescent incrementation
requires real-time evidence. In this talk, we report on two real-time studies, one a trend
study, the other a panel study, which provide more definitive support for Labov’s model.
The trend study builds on Tagliamonte & D’Arcy’s (2009) examination of the peak in
apparent time associated with the be+like quotative in Toronto English. Tagliamonte &
D’Arcy’s (2009) study is based on 4377 tokens from 188 speakers representing a wide
range of ages (9–93) recorded in 2003. We supplement this data with 1157 tokens
from 88 speakers aged 14–29, recorded in 2013. These two sets of speakers allow for
a trend comparison of speakers born between 1986 and 1999 at two points in time: in
2003, when they were adolescents, and ten years later when they were (mostly)
beyond the age of stabilization. Our results are consistent with Labov’s model of
incrementation: the rate of the be+like quotative for speakers younger than seventeen
in 2003 is significantly lower than speakers born in the same timeframe but recorded
ten years later. This demonstrates that between 2003, when these speakers were still
adolescents, and 2013 when they were young adults, their frequency of be+like rose
steadily to a peak and remained stable thereafter. The trend study approach rules out
alternative hypotheses of age-grading (which predicts a decrease in be+like as
speakers enter adulthood) and retrograde change in the community (which predicts
that these speakers would show no change at all).
The panel study follows one individual from the Toronto speech community, Clara, who
has been interviewed every year since 2002, from ages sixteen to twenty-eight
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(Tagliamonte 2016). Her rate of be+like increases from age sixteen to age eighteen
from about 65% to about 75%, in line with the community apparent-time peak at age
seventeen. While her rate of be+like slightly fluctuates in correlation to various life
changes (e.g., graduating high school, attending university, entering the work force), it
hovers around her end-of-adolescence, ‘peak’ frequency from age eighteen to twentyeight (Wagner & Tagliamonte 2014; to appear). Moreover, the well-known constraints
on be+like (including the grammatical person of the subject, the content of the quote,
and the temporal reference) remain (mostly) stable for the duration. These findings
confirm that Clara’s use of be+like across her lifespan is not the result of age-grading
nor retrograde change but instead neatly dovetails with the incrementation model
whereby innovating forms increase to an adolescent peak and then stabilize.
Taken together these complementary real-time studies using the same speech
community, extensive corpora, consistent interviewing techniques, comparable
methodology, and rigorous statistical modeling permit us to disentangle the competing
hypotheses of linguistic change in the context of adolescent incrementation. While age
grading, retrograde, or lifespan change may well exist for other types of changes or
linguistic variables (see Sankoff 2006), the findings from these studies strongly support
the incrementation model for language change in progress.
References:
Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S. and Torgersen, E. (2011). Contact, the feature pool,
and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2), 151-196.
D’Arcy, A. (2015). Variation, transmission, incrementation. In J. Salmons (ed.). The
Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology (pp. 583–602). Oxford: OUP.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume II: Social Factors. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Labov, W., Rosenfelder, I. and Fruehwald, J. (2013). One hundred years of sound
change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal and reanalysis.
Language 89(1), 30-65.
Sankoff, G. (2006). Age: Apparent time and real time. In Elsevier Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics. Second Edition. Article Number: LALI:01479.
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2016). Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents. Cambridge: CUP.
Tagliamonte, S. A., and D’Arcy, A. (2009). Peaks beyond phonology: Adolescence,
incrementation, and language change. Language 85(1), 58-108.
Wagner, S. E. (2008). Language change and stabilization in the transition from
adolescence to adulthood. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Wagner, S. E. and Tagliamonte, S. A. (2014). Incrementation in adolescence: Tapping
the force that drives linguistic change. Paper presented at the International
Society for the Linguistics of English [ISLE 3]. Zurich, Switzerland.
Wagner, S. E. and Tagliamonte, S. A. (To appear). What makes a panel study work?
Researcher and participant in real time. In Wagner, S. E. and Buchstaller, I.
(eds.). Panel Studies of Variation and Change. New York: Routledge.
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VIRTUAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS: RADIO AND HISTORICAL ARCHIVAL SOURCES
FOR TRACING LINGUISTIC CHANGE AS TIME-MACHINE LONGITUDINAL
APPROACHES
Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy
University of Murcía
Tamara García-Vidal
University of Murcía
The limitations of apparent-time studies of language change and the difficulties of
conducting studies in real-time has traditionally been an essential part of the problems
in the empirically rigorous scientific methodology of variationist sociolinguistics.
However, the use of archived radio recordings has been demonstrated to be an
excellent source for sampling audio materials for both apparent-time and, crucially,
real-time measurement and analysis of linguistic variation and change. Similarly, the
development of electronic linguistic corpora, together with the assistance of corpus
linguistics and social history, is allowing historical sociolinguistics to immerse the
researcher into remote periods of any language that is sufficiently documented and
explore its internal functioning and its users' sociolinguistic behaviour in social
interaction more accurately, also conferring ‘empirical’ ease and ‘historical’ confidence.
Thus historical collections of private correspondence involving writers of different social
and geographical backgrounds provide us with a very useful source of data to carry out
quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic analysis longitudinally in remote periods of a
history of a given language.
The aim of this paper is to show the results from radio and historical archival sources
as examples of virtual longitudinal studies providing comparative evidence for language
change. Firstly, a study of current Murcian speech carried out following a real-time
approach with a retrospective trend design in order to detect and measure the
increasing expansion of standard Castilian features from northern Peninsular Spanish
over Murcian Spanish (supralocalisation), a traditionally non-standard region, as an
example of a radio archival source.
Secondly, the sociolinguistic patterning of a spelling change in progress in 15th century
English (the diffusion of <th> replacing <þ> and <ð>) is reconstructed by analysing the
individual repertoires of letter writers in the written correspondence of the Paston
Family in late medieval England, as an example of an historical archival source.
The analysis of radio archives and historical written corpora adds an interesting
methodological dimension to the historical reconstruction of linguistic change in
present-day or remote speech communities, as time-machine longitudinal approaches
where the problem of the real time in the longitudinal research process is conveniently
neutralised.
References:
Bayley, R. (2002). The quantitative paradigm. In J.K. Chambers, P. J. Trudgill & N.
Schilling-Estes (eds.). The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp.
117-141). Oxford: Blackwell.
Eckert, Penelope. (1997). Age as a sociolinguistic variable. In F. Coulmas (ed.). The
Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 151-167). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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Hernández-Campoy, J. M. and J. M. Jiménez-Cano (2003). Broadcasting
standardisation: An analysis of the linguistic normalisation process in Murcia.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3), 321-347.
Hernández-Campoy, J. M. and N. Schilling (2012). The application of the quantitative
paradigm to historical sociolinguistics: Problems with the Generalizability
Principle. In J. M. Hernández-Campoy and J.C. Conde-Silvestre (eds.). The
Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp. 63-79). Malden: WileyBlackwell.
Nevalainen, T. and H. Raumolin-Brunberg. (eds.) (1996). Sociolinguistics and
Language History. Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English
Correspondence. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Nevalainen, T. and H. Raumolin-Brunberg. (2003). Historical Sociolinguistics.
Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman Pearson
Education.
Sankoff, G. (2006). Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar,
K.J. Mattheier and P. Trudgill (eds.) Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook
of the Science of Language and Society, vol. 3 (pp. 1003-1013). Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Van de Velde, H., M. Gerritsen and R. van Hout (1996). The devoicing of fricatives in
standard Dutch: A real-time study based on radio recordings. Language
Variation and Change 8, 149-175.
Van de Velde, H., R. van Hout and M. Gerritsen (1997). Watching Dutch change: A real
time study of variation and change in standard Dutch pronunciation. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 1(3), 361-391.
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CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PANEL AND TREND STUDIES:
THE CASE OF PORTUGUESE IN RIO DE JANEIRO
Maria da Conceição de Paiva
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Maria Eugênia L. Duarte
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Since the 1990’s, many sociolinguistic studies have sought to address how “trend” and
“panel” studies help to elucidate predictions based on “apparent time” evidence. As
shown in several studies, differences associated with age grading can be indicative of
different situations: change in progress or stable variation. Such observations can only
be tested through real time studies. Sankoff (2006a, 2006b), based on Labov´s (1994)
proposal, shows that four different patterns are possible when we take into account
both change in the individual and change within the speech community.
In this paper we show how the combination of panel and trend studies has provided
evidence to better understand the direction of three potential changes in the Rio de
Janeiro variety of Portuguese.
(a) the deletion of the semivowel [ɪ] in the diphthong [ey]
‘beijo’ (kiss): [ˡbeyʒʊ] → [ˡbeʒʊ]
(b) the replacement of the preposition a by the preposition para in dative
complements.
Vou dar um presente a ele. → Vou dar um presente para ele.
(I’ll give a present to him)
(c) the loss of null referential subjects.
Minha esposa trabalha na Embratel. Ela fez segundo grau técnico em
contabilidade. Depois ela fez faculdade. Hoje ela é técnico em contabilidade da
Embratel. Ela ganha bem, mas eu acho que ela devia ganhar mais porque ela
merece.
My wife works at Embratel. She has taken a degree in accounting at secondary
technical school. Then she went to college. Today she is an accounting
technician at Embratel. She earns well, but I think she should earn more because
she deserves it.
For these three variable phenomena, results from an apparent time analysis suggest
ongoing change (Duarte 1995, 2000; Paiva 1996; Gomes, 1996, 2003). The indications
provided by age grading distributions have been verified by means of a trend study (by
the comparison of two stratified samples from the city of Rio de Janeiro (Censo 1980
Sample and Censo 2000 Sample) and a panel study of 16 speakers comprising the
Censo 1980 sample. The two samples are separated by a time interval of twenty years,
and they are comparable according to age group, level of schooling, and gender.
By this analysis over a short stretch of real time we have attested different patterns.
Concerning preposition para, we verify a communal change, i. e, increasing use of the
preposition para both in the individual and in the community (Gomes, 2003). For the
loss of null subject, the analysis shows stability in the community and different
directions among individuals (Duarte, 2003). The reduction of the diphthong [ey]
presents a more complex pattern: a possible reversal of the change when the
semivowel is followed by palatal consonants (Paiva, 2003).
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References:
Durate, M. E. (1995). A perda do princípio “Evite Pronome” no português brasileiro.
PhD Dissertation, UNICAMP, Campinas.
Durate, M. E. (2000). The loss of the Avoid Pronoun principle in Brazilian Portuguese.
In M. A. Kato and E. V. Negrão (eds.). Brazilian Portuguese and the Null
Subject Parameter (pp. 17-36). Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana.
Duarte, M. E. (2003). A evolução na representação do sujeito pronominal em dois
tempos. In Paiva, M. da Conceição & M. E. L. Duarte (eds.). Mudança
lingüística em tempo real (pp. 115-128). Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa/Faperj.
Gomes, C. A. (1996). Aquisição e perda da preposição no português do Brasil.
Doctoral dissertation. Faculdade de Letras: Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro.
Gomes, C. A. (2003). Variação e mudança na expressão do dativo no português
brasileiro. In: Maria da Conceição de Paiva; Maria Eugênia Lamoglia Duarte.
(Org.). Mudança Lingüística em Tempo Real (pp. 81-96). Rio de Janeiro:
Contracapa/Faperj.
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Paiva, M. C. and M. E. L. Duarte (eds.). (2003). Mudança lingüística em tempo real.
Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa/Faperj.
Paiva, M. C. (2003). O percurso da monotongação de [ey]: observações no tempo real.
In M. C. Paiva and M. E. Duarte (eds.). Mudança lingüística em tempo real (pp.
31-46). Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa/Faperj.
Sankoff, G. (2006a). Age: Apparent time and real time. Elsevier Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguisticas, Second Edition. Article Number: LALI: 01479.
Sankoff, G. (2006b). Age grading in retrograde movement: the inflected future in
Montréal French. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics,
12(2).
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COMPLEMENTARY METHODOLOGIES FOR STUDYING LANGUAGE CHANGE:
NULL SUBJECTS IN EUROPEAN AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE
Gregory R. Guy
New York University
Real-time evidence of language change can be obtained from several types of sources,
each of which possesses distinct advantages and limitations. Panel studies – which
track individual speakers – as well as trend studies using well-controlled speaker
samples provide comparable data from different points in time, hence minimizing
potential confounds from social or dialectal differences between speakers. But trend
and panel studies are intrinsically limited as to the time depth and social breadth of
their coverage. Conventional historical data from archival sources can provide
evidence about much greater time spans, but cannot be well controlled for social and
stylistic comparability, and written data from previous centuries is usually produced by
educated elites rather than vernacular speakers. Finally, a third type of evidence is
available by dialect comparison: comparing representative samples of present-day
speakers from different but historically related dialects provides evidence about the
changes that differentiated them. However, such evidence may be indecisive about the
date of the change or the social factors that impacted on it. Collectively these different
sources of evidence are complementary; the most comprehensive picture of a change
process will be obtained when data from several such sources are available. This
paper will illustrate this approach in examining the change from null to overt subject
pronoun expression in Portuguese.
As a Romance language, Portuguese historically had low rates of expressed
pronominal subjects, and this is still true of dialects spoken in Portugal (European
Portuguese, EP), where overt subjects occur at low levels (10-30%) comparable to
Italian and Spanish. In Brazil (BP), however, subject pronoun expression is the default
option, occurring at rates of 70-80% or more. Given that the historical state of the
language is known, the comparative data provide definitive evidence that a change
occurred in Brazil. This has been characterized as a parametric change in BP from null
to non-null subject, and several theoretical analyses suggest that BP has contexts
where overt subjects have become obligatory, indicating grammatical restructuring.
Such evidence does not, however, tell us when the change occurred, or whether it is
still underway. Answers to these questions depend on the other kinds of data. Duarte’s
historical study (1993) of pronominal subjects in Brazilian popular drama from 1845 to
1992, showed steady increases in rates of overt expression across this period, from
20% in the earliest texts, to 74% in the latest. This suggests a gradual change
beginning in the 19th century, but given that the data were written by elite speakers in a
country with extreme social polarization, it is possible that the change occurred earlier
in the vernacular usage of the great majority of Brazilian speakers, while lagging in elite
speech or in written styles. Finally, trend and panel studies of contemporary speakers
do not provide clear evidence of change still in progress. Two corpora collected in Rio
de Janeiro circa 1980 and 2000 (by Paiva, Duarte and Omena), which included both
panel and trend samples, show little differentiation on this variable. However, Duarte
(2003) notes that this does not preclude the possibility that the change is still underway
but moving too slowly to be evident in such a short time span.
References:
Barbosa, P., M. E. Duarte and M. Kato. (2005). Null subjects in European Portuguese
and Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 4(2), 11-52.
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Duarte, M. E. (1993). Do pronome nulo ao pronome pleno: a trajetória do sujeito no
português do Brasil. In I. Roberts and M. A. Kato (eds.). Português Brasileiro:
uma viagem diacrónica (pp. 107-128). Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP.
Duarte, M. E. (2003). A evolução na representação do sujeito pronominal em dois
tempos. In M. C. Paiva and M. E. Duarte (eds.). Mudança Lingüística em
Tempo Real, 115-128.
Erker, Daniel and G. R. Guy. 2012. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic variability:
Variable subject personal pronoun expression in Spanish. Language 88(3), 526557.
Guy, G. R. (To appear). The African Diaspora in Latin America: Linguistic contact and
consequences. In C. Cutler, Z. Vrcic and P. Angermeyer (eds.). Language
Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Guy, G. R. (2014). Variation and change in Portuguese and Spanish. In A. Carvalho
and P. Amaral (eds). Portuguese/Spanish Interfaces. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Paiva, M. C. and M. E. Duarte. (2003). Mudança lingüística em tempo real. Rio de
Janeiro: Contra Capa/Faperj.
Posio, P. (2012). Who are ‘we’ in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European
Portuguese? Expression and reference of first person plural subject pronouns.
Language Sciences 34(3), 339–360.
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ADVANCES IN RURAL DIALECTOLOGY AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN EUROPEAN
IBERO-ROMANCE
ORGANISERS:
Miriam Bouzouita
Ghent University
Enrique Pato
Université de Montréal
Keywords: Dialectology, sociolinguistics, new tools and databases, language contact,
case studies, attitudes.
As a consequence of the rejection of the largely rural focus of traditional dialectology and
the view that cities constitute the best places to find socially complex and heterogeneous
communities, most variationist work of the last decades has concentrated on the study of
urban speech (e.g. Britain 2009). Ibero-Romance variational linguistics has not been
exempted from this general urbanist trend. For Spanish this is reflected, for instance, in the
creation and the work done by the numerous PRESEEA research groups (Proyecto para
el estudio sociolingüístico del español de España y América – Project for the
Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and America, initiated by Francisco Moreno
Fernández in 1993) that are examining Spanish urban varieties spoken in major cities all
over the Hispanic world (e.g. Madrid, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, La Havana, Bogotá, etc.;
see for example Moreno Fernández 2005).
Despite the current dominance of urbanist variation research, there have been limited
initiatives that have tried to redress this imbalance that is favouring urban speech: for
instance, in contrast to the PRESEEA corpora, the focus of the COSER corpus (Corpus
Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural – Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish, created by
Inés Fernández-Ordóñez) is on rural speech, which is elicited during sociolinguistic
interviews discussing changes in country life. Similarly, the European Portuguese
CORDIAL-SIN corpus (Corpus Dialectal para o Estudo da Sintaxe – Syntax-oriented
Corpus of Portuguese Dialects, created by Ana Maria Martins) enables researchers to
study syntactic variation in rural varieties of Portuguese. As has happened for urban
varieties, the creation of continuous speech corpora of rural dialects has contributed
immensely to the advancement of our knowledge on diatopic and sociolinguistic variation
in European Ibero-Romance.
This panel’s aim is to explore the contributions of the study of rural varieties to European
Ibero-Romance dialectology and sociolinguistics, either in isolation or in combination with
urban varieties. The following topics will be discussed:
(1)
New tools and databases, which make rural dialectological and sociolinguistic
studies possible for the different Ibero-Romance varieties, permitting as such a
more detailed and wider view on (Ibero-)Romance grammatical and lexical (micro)variation (Álvarez Pérez; Álvarez; Fernández-Ordóñez);
(2)
Dialect and language contact situations in rural settings, which show how contact
can accelerate or slow down linguistic changes in progress (Álvarez Pérez);
Case studies of micro-variability in space and real time for Ibero-Romance,
illustrating the importance of the study of rural varieties for a better theoretical
(3)
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(4)
understanding of the linguistic variables that govern variation and change
(Fernández-Ordóñez; Pato & Casanova; Louredo Rodríguez; de Benito, Bouzouita
& León on the relevance of the rural-urban dichotomy);
Attitudes and linguistic consciousness of rural Ibero-Romance speakers (Perea).
References:
Britain, D. (2009). ‘Big bright lights’ versus ‘Green and pleasant land’?: the unhelpful
dichotomy of ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’ in dialectology. In E. Al-Wer, R. de Jong (eds.).
Arabic dialectology: in honour of Clive Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth
birthday. Leiden: BRILL, 223-247.
Fernández-Ordóñez, I. (dir.) [online]. COSER. Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural.
Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Available at: www.uam.es/coser
Martins, A. M. (coord.) [online]. CORDIAL-SIN. Corpus Dialectal para o Estudo da Sintaxe.
Lisboa: Centro de Linguística, Universidade de Lisboa Available at:
http://www.clul.ul.pt/en/resources/218-cordial-sin-syntax-oriented-corpus-ofportuguese-dialects-r
Moreno Fernández, F. (2005). Corpus para el estudio del español en su variación
geográfica y social: el corpus PRESEEA. Oralia: Análisis del discurso oral 8, 123140.
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1. THE LINGUISTIC DOCUMENTATION OF THE SPANISH-PORTUGUESE BORDER
VARIETIES: ASSESSMENT OF THE PILOT PHASE AND NEW CHALLENGES FOR
THE FUTURE. Xosé Afonso Álvarez Pérez. Universidad de Alcalá
2. TESOURO DO LÉXICO PATRIMONIAL GALEGO E PORTUGUÉS [‘THE GALICIAN
AND PORTUGUESE WORD BANK’]: CHARACTERISTICS, METHODOLOGY,
APPLICATIONS AND USES. Rosario Álvarez. Universidade de Santiago de
Compostela
3. THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CORPUS ORAL Y SONORO DEL ESPAÑOL
RURAL (COSER). Inés Fernández-Ordóñez. Autonomous University of Madrid
4. PERCEPTIONS AND LINGUISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE RESULTS OF
SURVEYS CARRIED OUT IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY ON CATALAN DIALECTS.
Maria Pilar Perea. Universitat de Barcelona
5. FILLED PAUSES IN RURAL SPANISH CONVERSATIONS. Enrique Pato. Université
de Montréal. Vanessa Casanova. Université de Montréal
6. RE-ANALYZING TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL CHANGES IN THE RURAL GALICIAN
AREA OF THE RIBEIRO DISTRICT. Eduardo Louredo Rodríguez. Universidade de
Santiago de Compostela
7. THE POSITION OF POSSESSIVES IN EUROPEAN SPANISH: INSIGHTS FROM
RURAL VARIETIES. Carlota de Benito Moreno. Universität Zürich. Miriam Bouzouita.
Ghent University. Olga León. Autonomous University of Madrid
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THE LINGUISTIC DOCUMENTATION OF THE SPANISH-PORTUGUESE BORDER
VARIETIES: ASSESSMENT OF THE PILOT PHASE AND NEW CHALLENGES FOR
THE FUTURE
Xosé Afonso Álvarez Pérez
Universidad de Alcalá
The purpose of this paper is to present the preliminary results obtained in the pilot phase
of the project Frontera hispano-portuguesa: documentación lingüística y bibliográfica
(FRONTESPO) [Spanish-Portuguese Border: linguistic and bibliographic documentation]
with regard to the creation of a rural dialectological corpus. The main innovations of this
initiative will be explained and its methodological weaknesses discussed, in order to
debate reorientations and new tasks for future phases.
Led by the University of Alcalá (Spain), the project FRONTESPO involves several Spanish
and Portuguese entities, such as Campo Arqueológico de Mértola, Centro de Linguística
da Universidade de Lisboa, Universidad de Extremadura and the Centro Interdisciplinar de
Documentação Linguística e Social, and is currently funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Economy and Competitiveness. As may be deduced from its title, FRONTESPO aims at
documenting the Spanish-Portuguese borderland, a territory where several languages
converge, which are often characterised by diffuse limits that differ from the political
border. The dialectal identity of this area is disappearing at an alarmingly increasing rate
due to a variety of reasons, such as rural depopulation and migration, the expansion of
standard languages, etc. In order to reach its objective, FRONTESPO focusses on four
pillars: a) the collection of an oral corpus of the Spanish-Portuguese border varieties; b)
the location and edition of historical texts; c) the cataloguing and edition of dialectal
materials collected previously by other research groups; d) the development of a
multidisciplinary bibliographic database. In this presentation, we will focus on the first pillar,
namely, on the building of an oral corpus. During the pilot phase of FRONTESPO (July
2015 to May 2016), 178 interviews have been conducted, in 57 localities of the SpanishPortuguese border area, which is defined, for this purpose, as the portion of territory
located less than 15 km. from the political boundary between the two countries. So far 250
hours of digital video have been recorded. Additionally, about 30 hours of audio were
recorded. It is noteworthy that more than 80% of interviews are video-recorded, a further
advantage for research and, especially, for diffusion.
Within each surveyed locality, a minimum of three informants have been interviewed,
taking into account gender and age stratification, as well as particular characteristics of the
area. Some of the interviews took place collectively, which may provide a more realistic
linguistic performance on the part of informants.
The interviews that make up the oral corpus are semi-structured conversations that are
organised around three thematic cores:
a) diverse semantic fields linked to traditional country life: e.g. cattle, farm
labour, bread making, crafts, etc.
b) reflections on linguistic attitudes and behaviour: e.g. vitality of the local
dialect, perceived degree of differentiation from standard or neighbouring
towns dialects, languages used in daily contact with people from the other
side of the border, etc.
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c) ethnographic information regarding border situation: e.g. smuggling,
commercial relationship, migration between countries, changes after the
entry into force of Schengen Agreement, etc.
The FRONTESPO project has adopted a firm commitment to open access to knowledge.
All content produced by the project will therefore be publicly available under a Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. license. This includes dialectal interviews, which will
be downloadable from specialised language documentation repositories and audio and
video web portals (YouTube and Vimeo), as well as the educational media project
Wikimedia Commons. Although the interviews will be transcribed gradually, the media files
will be available before the release of the transcriptions, so they can be used by other
scholars.
Among future plans, we can mention (i) the recording of dialectal varieties in everyday
settings, i.e. communicative events (Himmelmann 2006), with the aim of reducing the
problems related to the interview setting of the current data, and (ii) the obtaining of more
fine-grained sociolinguistic information.
References:
Himmelmann, N. P. (2006). Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for?,
In J. Gippert, N. P. Himmelmann and U. Mosel (eds.). Essentials of language
documentation. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1-25.
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TESOURO DO LÉXICO PATRIMONIAL GALEGO E PORTUGUÉS [‘THE GALICIAN
AND PORTUGUESE WORD BANK’]: CHARACTERISTICS, METHODOLOGY,
APPLICATIONS AND USES
Rosario Álvarez
Instituto da Lingua Galega/ Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
O Tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués (The Galician and Portuguese Word
Bank; TLPGP) is a resource which enables access to a database containing lexicon from
different kinds of published and unpublished material (e.g. glossaries, ethnolinguistic
descriptions, atlases, databases, etc.). The TLPGP contains lexicon from Galicia (and
Galician-speaking areas), Portugal and Brazil. Currently, 141 works have been introduced
(25 for Brazil, 61 for Galicia and 55 for Portugal), with a total number of 192 816 registers.
It continues to expand and is open to the participation of new contributors. Moreover, the
resource can be accessed openly and freely at http://ilg.usc.gal/Tesouro/. Some of
material it contains result from fieldwork and offer, for this reason, geographical
information. The TLPGP is, however, not just a repository of sources as the data it
contains has been re-organised in accordance with a specified set of requirements,
lemmas have been added, as well as semantic classifiers and common categories. The
TLPGP offers, apart from the textual and visual information contained in the sources, a
cartographic representation of the geographical distribution of forms, obtained through
variants or lemmas.
In this talk, the fundamental characteristics of the TLPGP will be discussed, as well as the
tasks anticipated for the next period of development, and new applications that will allow
better and more complex usage. Further, the methodology used for the preparation of
each text will be detailed, as well as the process of lemmatisation (simple and complex
lemmas) and the attribution of semantic and categorical classifiers. The different search
and cartographic functions will also be illustrated, in addition to the utility of this resource,
which has been conceived not only for scholars from different research areas but also the
general public, with a special focus on educational purposes.
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THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CORPUS ORAL Y SONORO DEL ESPAÑOL
RURAL (COSER)
Inés Fernández-Ordóñez
Autonomous University of Madrid/ Real Academia Española
In the last decade, the COSER corpus (Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural – Audible
Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish; Fernández-Ordóñez dir., 2005-present), which has been
built through collaborative efforts, has been able to shed new light on European Spanish
rural dialectology: for instance, (i) a number of morphosyntactic rural dialect features,
which were only partially known or even completely ignored, have received more finegrained and comprehensive descriptions (e.g. pronominal paradigms; mass/count
distinctions); (ii) the geographic distribution of a number of phenomena has been traced
more accurately and in some cases this resulted in a considerably broader spread than
anticipated (e.g. analogical strong preterites; reflexive passives), and (iii) traditional
explanations have been replaced by new ones based on a better knowledge of the data
(see, for example, Fernández-Ordóñez 2010).
In this talk I will present the current state of elaboration of the COSER and the latest
electronic tools, which are being made available online to the linguistic community. The
following aspects will be discussed: (i) the number of interviews available for consultation
and the expected growth of the corpus, (ii) the new development of a collaborative online
editor, (iii) the development of an advanced search engine, with lemmatization and
tagging, and (iv) the dynamic cartography system. The general aim of this talk is thus to
stimulate the study of grammatical phenomena in (rural) Spanish, which will improve our
understanding of linguistic variation. In fact, grammar variation phenomena have showed
new areal configurations in Spanish dialectology, and moreover, the study of dialect
grammar has also revealed itself as an important source for a better understanding of
many cross-linguistic principles (see Fernández-Ordóñez 2010).
References:
Fernández-Ordóñez, I. (dir.) [online]. COSER. Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural.
Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Available at: www.uam.es/coser.
Fernández-Ordóñez, I. (2010). La Grammaire dialectale de l’espagnol à travers le Corpus
oral et sonore de l’espagnol rural (COSER, Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español
Rural)”. Corpus: “La syntaxe de corpus / Corpus syntax” 9, 81-114.
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PERCEPTIONS AND LINGUISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE RESULTS OF
SURVEYS CARRIED OUT IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY ON CATALAN DIALECTS
Maria Pilar Perea
Universitat de Barcelona
Antoni M. Alcover, the founder of Catalan dialectology, travelled widely throughout the
Catalan linguistic domain between 1900 and 1928 in order to collect data to develop
different projects, among which were a dialectal dictionary and a study on Catalan
conjugation. In some cases, the scope of these journeys went beyond the Catalan area,
because, in order to further his studies, Alcover travelled to various Spanish cities and
visited many European countries to contact prestigious Romance scholars.
Several descriptions of these travels have been collected in the form of a diary, which in
general systematically detailed the different activities, the anecdotes that emerged, the
localities he visited, the informants interviewed and, in some cases, the most important
characteristics of the language of various localities. In addition to these data, the diaries
also collected a number of statements related to speech perceptions by both the
interviewer and the informants. As a result of one of Alcover’s views, published in his diary
of 1907, which describes his first study trip abroad, his controversy with the writer Miguel
de Unamuno became known, because the Majorcan dialectologist stated that the Spanish
language was ‘rough, dry, too metallic’ as opposed to the Catalan language, which was
more ‘harmonious’.
In this presentation, all Alcover’s diaries will be analysed and the different appraisal
elements that appear concerning language and dialects, both from the point of view of the
researcher and the informants, will be classified. Some informants, as stated in several
diaries, felt ashamed of using some morphological forms and they concealed or hid certain
words or forms during the survey. Some of the prejudices and attitudes detected in the
diaries will be linked to the prejudices that are the result of the cultural tradition, which
started already in the past centuries, but can still be found today, in the opinion of some
speakers.
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FILLED PAUSES IN RURAL SPANISH CONVERSATIONS
Enrique Pato
Université de Montréal
Vanessa Casanova
Université de Montréal
The study of conversation, within the frameworks of conversation analysis and acoustic
and perceptual phonetics, has focused on determining how turn-taking is articulated and
how topics are arranged in spoken interaction, among other aspects. Turns (utterances)
and moves (responses) stand out as two of the most relevant conversational elements
(Gallardo Paúls 1993: 190). Pauses are another key element in conversation, since they
confirm and assure verbal exchange as a transitional mechanism between speakers.
This research focusses on the study of filled pauses, and to a lesser extent, of lengthening
and silences in conversations among rural speakers of Spanish. Considered as indicators
of mental processes experienced by the speaker, as well as communicative relevance,
pauses belong to informal conversation and may also be subject to sociolinguistic
variation.
Certainly, filled pauses and vocalizations, defined as nonverbal buccal sounds, carry an
important communicative role. They are related to discourse planning and they are used
by speakers for agreeing, disagreeing, taking or maintaining their turns, among other
discursive values. As has been pointed out, there are several types of vocalizations, such
as inhalations, exhalations (sighs or snorts), whistles, clicks, coughing, throat clearing,
belching, laughter, crying, onomatopoeia, filling noises (filled pauses) and lengthening (cf.
Calsamiglia & Tusón 2007: 54 and 56). These two last resources –filled pauses and
lengthening– may reinforce or change the direction of conversational transitions, and are
therefore used for signalling to the addressed recipient the right moment for turn-taking
(Cestero 2000).
By following Sacks, Schelgoff and Jefferson (1974) and Gallardo Paúls (1993), we can
establish three types of ‘pauses’: 1) the pause, which occurs when the speaker picks the
next participant and a silence takes place before the conversation is resumed (also known
as silence within turns); 2) the interval, when the next participant is not selected for turn
transition (silence between turns); and 3) the lapse, when the transition is not confirmed;
this silence is longer and establishes the limit between turns (silence between turns or
conversational exchanges).
In this talk we discuss the following questions: if we analyze the speech of Spanish
speaking rural informants of the COSER dialectal corpus, can we find any differences in
the use of filled pauses, silences and lengthening given a particular communicative
situation, the relationship between participants and their origin? Which are the basic
features of these procedures, when are they used and for what purpose? Additionally, this
study will examine what the most frequently used filled pauses in rural Spanish are and
whether they can be considered as discourse markers, as has been suggested for other
languages (cf. Schiffrin 1984, Swerts 1998 for Dutch). As for lengthening, it is also of
interest to determine which grammatical category serves as the best fit.
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References:
Calsamiglia Blancáfort, H. and A. Tusón Valls. (2007). Las cosas del decir. Manual de
análisis del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel.
Cestero Mancera, A. M. (2000). El intercambio de turnos de habla en la conversación.
Análisis sociolingüístico. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la
Universidad de Alcalá.
Gallardo Paúls, B. (1993). La transición entre turnos conversacionales: silencios,
solapamientos e interrupciones. Contextos XI/21-22, 189-220.
Sacks, H., E. A. Schelgoff and G. Jefferson. (1974). A simplest systematic for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50/4, 696-735.
Schiffrin, D. (1984). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stenström, A.-B. (1994). An introduction to spoken language interaction. London:
Longman.
Swerts, M. (1998). Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics
30, 485-496.
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RE-ANALYZING TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL CHANGES IN THE RURAL GALICIAN
AREA OF THE RIBEIRO DISTRICT
Eduardo Louredo Rodríguez
Instituto da Lingua Galega/ Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
In this presentation, I am going to present the first results of the quantitative analysis which
was realized in the Galician area of the Ribeiro district, a rural area of 406.9 km2 which has
a population of 18 329 inhabitants. This area is of high linguistic interest as it is a transition
zone between occidental and central Galician dialects (Fernández Rei 1990). For this work
I have interviewed 30 people from 10 localities (3 people by each locality), which have
been stratified according to age (generation A: over 60 years, generation B: between 4056 years, generation C: between 16-30 years). The localities where I have worked are 9
small villages with not more than 300 inhabitants and the town of Ribadavia, which has
approximately 3 000 inhabitants. In order to obtain the data, two complementary methods
have been used: the semi-scripted interview and the questionnaire. Thanks to the answers
of the questionnaire (200 questions about morphology and syntax) and to the
transcriptions of 30 semi-scripted interviews, a database with 117 linguistic variables was
created. Due to the compositional nature of the data, cluster analyses have been
performed (clr transformation; Martín-Fernández et al. 1998). Additionally, statistical
analyses have been carried out with the program R Project. The transformation have been
made with the function “clr” from the packet compositions (Van den Boogaart et al. 2014)
and the cluster analyses with the function “hclust” from the packet stats (R Core Team
2015).
As it can be anticipated, all informant show idiosyncratic linguistic characteristics which
make them different from each other. The aims of the present study are as follows:
1) To evaluate quantitatively the importance of diatopic and diastratic variables, such
as hometown and age of the informants, for the observed micro-variability in space
and in real time;
2) To verify if linguistic differentiation is more reduced among the youngest
informants;
3) To identify, in each locality, the linguistic similarity among the three informants.
References:
Fernández Rei, F. (1990). Dialectoloxía da lingua galega. Vigo: Xerais.
Martín-Fernández, J. A., C. Barceló-Vidal and V. Pawlowsky-Glahn. (1998). Measures of
Difference for Compositional Data and Hierarchical clustering methods. 4th Annual
Conference of the International Association for Mathematical Geology
(IAMG&#39;98), Ischia, Italy.
R Core Team. (2015) [online]. R: A language and environment for statistical computing.
Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: https://www.Rproject.org/
Van den Boogaart, K. G., R. Tolosana and M. Bren. (2014) [online]. Compositions:
Compositional Data Analysis. R package version 1.40-1. Available at:
https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=compositions.
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THE POSITION OF POSSESSIVES IN EUROPEAN SPANISH: INSIGHTS FROM
RURAL VARIETIES
Carlota de Benito Moreno
Universität Zürich
Miriam Bouzouita
Ghent University
Olga León
Autonomous University of Madrid
As is well known, possessives in Spanish have both a reduced and a full form, which are
dependent on their syntactic position. Reduced forms precede the noun (mi casa), while
full forms either follow the noun (which must be preceded by an article or demonstrative, la
casa mía) or act as pronouns, both in combination with an article (esta casa es la mía) or
on their own (esta casa es mía). There is some consensus that these forms are also
semantically different, inasmuch as pre-nominal possessives are always definite (mi hijo =
el hijo mío), while post-nominal possessives show no restrictions regarding definiteness
(un amigo mío, el amigo mío) (RAE/ASALE 2009: 18.3). These two types of possessives
are said to be pragmatically different too – post-nominal possessives are typically used for
contrast or with affective meaning (RAE/ASALE 2009: 18.3). This clear distinction
described in grammars, however, becomes blurrier when we look more in more detail at
rural and dialectal varieties. For instance, while reduced forms cannot appear in
combination with an article in Standard Modern Spanish – as opposed to Medieval
Spanish –, such forms are attested both in western dialects in Spain and in several
American dialects (la mi casa). These forms (‘article + possessive’), have been connected
with pragmatic notions, such as contrastive focus (see Serradilla 2003 for an overview).
The present work aims (i) to investigate the frequency and the functional distribution of
post-nominal possessives, which seem to be more productive in Southern varieties,
specifically in Andalusia and the Canary Islands, in comparison to other types of
possessives, and (ii) to test the relevance of the rural-urban dichotomy using the position
of possessives as a test case. The higher frequency of post-nominal possessives also
seems to be connected to the prepositional forms that mark possession by means of the
preposition de and a personal pronoun (la casa de ustedes). Using data from the COSER
(Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish), which records rural varieties from all over
Spain, we will compare the frequency of pre-nominal, post-nominal and prepositional
possessives in European Spanish, divided in three main areas for our purposes, namely,
Northern and Central varieties, Andalusian varieties and Canarian varieties. We will also
link these different distributions to the differences that exist in the pronominal paradigms of
these varieties, especially with respect to the plural forms, in which changes such as the
replacement in Southern varieties of vosotros, a specific form for the 2nd person plural, by
the 3rd person plural ustedes, have led to a number of syncretisms that have also affected
the possessive paradigm. Once the possessive systems of the rural varieties have been
examined, they will be contrasted with those of urban areas in Andalusia, using various
corpora (e.g. PRESEEA), in order to test the relevance of the rural-urban dichotomy as a
linguistic variable, given that social and linguistic diversity can be found everywhere, as
pointed out by Britain (2009: 237).
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References:
Britain, D. (2009). ‘Big bright lights’ versus ‘Green and pleasant land’?: the unhelpful
dichotomy of ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’ in dialectology. In E. Al-Wer and R. de Jong
(eds.). Arabic dialectology: in honour of Clive Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth
birthday (pp. 223-247). Leiden: BRILL.
Fernández-Ordóñez, I. (dir.) [online]. COSER. Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural.
Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Available at: www.uam.es/coser
Real Academia Española/ Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009).
Nueva gramática de la lengua española. 2 vols. Madrid: Espasa.
PRESEEA [online]. Proyecto para el estudio sociolingüístico del español de España y
América. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá Available at:
http://preseea.linguas.net/
Serradilla Castaño, A. (2003). ¿Existe la originalidad en sintaxis? El caso de la
‘desaparición’ de la construcción artículo + posesivo en español. Pandora: revue
d'études hispaniques 3, 257-272.
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EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES IN THE REALM OF LANGUAGE VARIATION
– NEW PERSPECTIVES ON DATA ACQUISITION OF LINGUISTIC VARIATION
AND ITS PERCEPTION
ORGANISERS:
Ludwig Maximilian Breuer
Department of German Studies (University of Vienna)
Lars Bülow
Department of German Studies (University of Salzburg)
Keywords: Variationist linguistics, language dynamics, experiments, linguistic
methods.
Experimental approaches in the realm of language variation – new perspectives on
data acquisition of linguistic variation and its perception
In the context of data acquisition of linguistic variation, modern studies on language
variation and language change have increasingly emphasised the importance of
implementing standardised research designs that go beyond the methods of
questionnaire surveys (cf. Kallenborn 2016). On the one hand, such research designs
are needed in order to adequately analyse syntactic and morphological variables on
the basis of sufficient language data (cf. Kortmann 2010); on the other hand, they pave
the way for the interoperability of data retrieved from written questionnaires as well as
oral tasks (cf. Cornips/Poletto 2005, 942).
Thus, it is hardly surprising that these standardised methods are gradually being
applied in current large-scale variationist projects such as “Syntax of Hessian Dialects”
(SyHD 2016) and “German in Austria” (Deutsch in Österreich – DiÖ). They not only
offer an efficient way of gaining statistically relevant quantitative and comparable data,
but also enable targeted testing of factors that could influence the choice of variants. In
addition, such methods allow for the detailed investigation of phonetic-phonological
aspects in a controlled setting.
Within the panel, we advocate a broader concept of the term ‘experiment’ within
variationist linguistics. In this sense, an experiment is first and foremost a standardised
research design for empirically obtaining language data.
Since data gained through experiments are commonly of high statistical relevance,
they are often used as a foundation for models and theories or are applied to verify
these. However, we are aware that language is a non-linear, complex, dynamic and
adaptive system (Bülow 2016; Ellis 2011), which is why one cannot control for all
potential influencing factors in linguistic experiments. As a consequence, (variationist)
linguistic experiments will be quasi-experimental, which means that a certain degree of
repeatability and comparability can be ensured, but the causal explanatory force is
limited (cf. Kristiansen 2010, 530).
The panel covers experiments in the laboratory and artificial settings (recordings in the
language laboratory; neurodialectology) as well as in the field (speech production tests
and attitudinal tests in the informant’s natural environment). Within the context of a
pluralistic methodical investigation setting, these various approaches will be described
and discussed, as the strengths of different methods can compensate for the
weaknesses of others (cf. Kallenborn 2016). In general, the panel will discuss
experimental settings in the light of numerous theoretical approaches to obtaining
objective language data as well as subjective attitudinal data on all linguistic system
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levels. These approaches range from neurodialectology, sociolinguistics and urban
language research to studies of vertical variation, language awareness and language
perception. The focus will be put on theoretical questions concerning the acquired data,
i.e. the authenticity of the data or the observer’s paradox, and on practical research
aspects of designing experiments and elicitation settings. The presented investigations
are currently being carried out in Bavarian and Alemannic-speaking areas, which will
enable the presenters to refer to concrete examples of their studies. Moreover, the
broad-based interdisciplinary special research programme (SFB) “German in Austria:
Variation – Contact – Perception” – a cooperation between different universities
and institutes in Austria – offers an ideal basis for discussion, while input from outside
the SFB will broaden and supplement the discussion. The individual presentations
will be spearheaded by an introduction and rounded off by a final discussion.
References:
Bülow, L. (2016). Sprachdynamik im Lichte der Evolutionstheorie – Für ein integratives
Sprachwandelmodell. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
Cornips, L. and P. Cecilia (2005). On standardising syntactic elicitation techniques.
Lingua 115, 939-957.
Ellis, N. C. (2011). The Emergence of Language as a Complex Adaptive System. In J.
Simpson (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics. London:
Routledge, 654-667.
Kallenborn, T. (2016). Regionalsprachliche Syntax: Horizontal-vertikale Variation im
Moselfränkischen. Unpublished Dissertation (University of Vienna).
Kortmann, B. (2010): Areal Variation in Syntax. In P. Auer and J. E. Schmidt (eds.).
Language and Space, Vol. 1: Theories and Methods (pp. 837-864). Berlin: de
Gruyter.
SyHD
(2016)
[online].
Methoden.
In
SyHD-online.
Available
http://www.syhd.info/ueber-das-projekt/projektbeschreibung/#methoden
[06.09.2016].
84
at:
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1. INTRODUCTION: EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES IN THE REALM OF
LANGUAGE VARIATION – NEW PERSPECTIVES ON DATA ACQUISITION OF
LINGUISTIC VARIATION AND ITS PERCEPTION. Ludwig Maximilian Breuer.
University of Vienna. Lars Bülow. University of Salzburg
2. PHONEME CHANGE AND COGNITION: A NEUROLINGUISTIC APPROACH
ON CROSS-DIALECTAL COMPREHENSION. Manuela Lanwermeyer. University
of Marburg
3. THE LAB SITUATION: ARTICULATORY-ACOUSTIC VS. ACOUSTIC
EXPERIMENTS. Sylvia Moosmüller. Austrian Academy of Sciences. Michael
Pucher. Austrian Academy of Sciences
4. GRASPING URBAN LANGUAGE – SETTING UP A FRAMEWORK FOR
ANALYSING VARIATION IN CITIES AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS. Kristina
Herbert. University of Graz. Stefanie Edler. University of Graz.
5.
AUSTRIAN GERMAN IN THE MINDS OF THEIR SPEAKERS: PERSPECTIVES
–CHALLENGES – EMPIRICAL APPROACHES. Eva Fuchs. University of Salzburg.
Wolfgang Koppensteiner. University of Vienna
6. VERTICAL VARIETY SPECTRA IN RURAL AUSTRIA: AN
EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH TO THE COLLECTION OF MORPHOLOGICAL
DATA ALONG THE DIALECT-STANDARD AXIS. Katharina Korecky-Kröll.
University of Vienna
7.
DISCUSSION. Christoph Purschke. University of Luxembourg
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INTRODUCTION
Ludwig Maximilian Breuer
Department of German Studies (University of Vienna)
Lars Bülow
Department of German Studies (University of Salzburg)
Keywords: Variationist linguistics, language dynamics, data elicitation, complex
dynamic systems.
Current large-scale variationist linguistic projects in German speaking countries such
as SyHD (2016) or DiÖ (2016) emphasise the importance of implementing
standardised research designs in the context of data acquisition of linguistic variation.
Such research designs are needed in order to adequately analyse syntactic,
morphological, and phonological variables on the basis of sufficient language data (cf.
Kallenborn 2016; Kortmann 2010; Seiler 2010). They also guarantee the
interoperability of data retrieved from written questionnaires as well as oral tasks (cf.
Cornips/Poletto 2005: 942). Standardised research designs in the form of quasiexperimental settings not only offer an efficient way of gaining statistically relevant
quantitative and comparable data, but also enable the targeted testing of factors that
could influence the choice of variants.
Firstly, we will outline what we mean by quasi-experimental settings in variationist
research. In this regard, we are advocating for a broader concept of the term
‘experiment’ within (variationist) linguistics. An experiment is first and foremost a
standardised research design for empirically obtaining objective language data and
receiving information about language assessments and attitudes towards language.
Secondly, we will give an overview of current variationist linguistic projects working with
quasi-experimental settings. Our focus will be on the interdisciplinary special
research programme (SFB) “German in Austria: Variation – Contact –
Perception” (DiÖ 2016), taking a closer look at the project’s methodological issues
and empirical outcomes. Thirdly, we will explore the definition of language
underlying our approach, i.e. language as dynamic, complex, and adaptive system
(Bülow 2016; Ellis 2011). These systems develop in a non-linear way due to the
permanent interaction of various influencing factors. Such factors, e.g. the
interaction between the observer and the observed, lead to the main problem of
objective measurement. As a consequence, we can only assume the settings will be
quasi-experimental, which means that a certain degree of repeatability and
comparability can be ensured, but the causal explanatory force is limited (cf.
Kristiansen 2010, 530). Fourthly, we will provide a short outlook on the panel talks
with regard to their numerous theoretical and methodological approaches.
These approaches range from neurodialectological settings to speech production
tests and attitudinal tests. We would like to point out their possible
intersections and differences.
References:
Bülow, L. (2016). Sprachdynamik im Lichte der Evolutionstheorie – Für ein
integratives
Sprachwandelmodell. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
Cornips, L. and P. Cecilia (2005). On standardising syntactic elicitation
techniques.
http://dioe.at/teilprojekte/
[09.09.2016].
Lingua 115, 939-957.
DiÖ (2016) [online]. German in Austria. Teilprojekte. In dioe.at. Available
at:
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Ellis, N. C. (2011). The Emergence of Language as a Complex Adaptive System. In J.
Simpson (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 654-667).
London: Routledge.
Kallenborn, T. (2016). Regionalsprachliche Syntax: Horizontal-vertikale Variation im
Moselfränkischen. Unpublished Dissertation (University of Vienna).
Kortmann, B. (2010). Areal Variation in Syntax. P. Auer and J. E. Schmidt (eds.).
Language and Space, Vol. 1: Theories and Methods (pp. 837-864). Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Seiler, G. (2010). Investigating Language in Space: Questionnaire and Interview. In: P.
Auer and J. E. Schmidt (eds.). Language and Space, Vol. 1: Theories and
Methods (pp. 512-528). Berlin: de Gruyter.
SyHD
(2016)
[online].
Methoden.
In
SyHD-online.
Available
http://www.syhd.info/ueber-das-projekt/projektbeschreibung/#methoden
[06.09.2016].
87
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PHONEME CHANGE AND COGNITION: A NEUROLINGUISTIC APPROACH ON
CROSS-DIALECTAL COMPREHENSION
Manuela Lanwermeyer
University of Marburg
Keywords: Neurolinguistic, dialect change, dialect cognition, electroencephalography.
While communicating, differences in speakers’ dialect phoneme inventories may cause
comprehension difficulties, which may lead to competence modifications.
Misunderstandings during communication caused by such dialect differences are thus
thought to trigger dialect change (Labov, 2010; Schmidt &Herrgen, 2011). For the most
part, previous findings are based on production data, but neurolinguistic experiments
using electroencephalography (EEG) can also help to gain a better understanding of
the effects caused by cross-dialectal communication. The main advantage of such
studies is that they provide an insight into speech processing of linguistic stimuli in the
range of milliseconds. For the investigation of neural effects involved in phoneme
change processes, it is essential to adapt classic event-related potential (ERP) designs
to the requirements of dialectology.
Using production data from the end of the 19th (Sprachatlas des deutschenReichs) and
͡
͡
to /oː/ and / ou/
can
20th century (BayerischerSprachatlas) a phoneme change from / oa/
be observed in the MHG ô phoneme. It is assumed that these competence
modifications are triggered when Central Bavarian listeners systematically
misunderstand the variants used by the Bavarian-Alemannic speakers in interaction
(Schmidt &Herrgen, 2011).
In the first part, this talk deals with the question as to which special requirements need
to be fulfilled before carrying out an ERP dialect study. In the second part, an ERP
study is presented in which cross-dialectal communication between BavarianAlemannic speakers and Central Bavarian listeners is simulated. Using an adapted
oddball design containing full sentences combined with a semantic rating task, Central
Bavarians were exposed to Bavarian-Alemannic dialect variants which either have
͡
different meanings in both of the dialect areas (/r oas
n
̩ / ‘roses’ respectively ‘journeys’) or
͡
͡
only occur in the Bavarian-Alemannic transition zone (/l oas/
‘sow’). Since / ou/
and /oː/
appear jointly as a result of the phoneme change, this contrast is investigated as well
(/lõː/, /lõũ/ ‘wage’). The central question is whether different neural effects can be
elicited for these contrasts. The results indeed show a mismatch detection between
expected (native) and encountered (non-native) dialect forms resulting in an N200 and
͡
͡
late positive component (LPC) for /r oas
n
which is absent for /lõũ/
̩ / and /l oas/
(Lanwermeyer et al., 2016). These results support the assumption that non-native
dialect variants lead to enhanced neural costs during cross-dialectal comprehension.
The phoneme change can thus be interpreted as a strategy to avoid costly
communication difficulties in close dialect contact settings. Hence, neurolinguistic
experiments allow a deeper insight into the interplay between speech cognition and
interaction which cannot otherwise be achieved by production data.
References:
Labov, W. (2010). Language in Society, Vol. 39. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol.
III: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. Malden, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Lanwermeyer, M., K. Henrich, M. J. Rocholl, H.T. Schnell, A. Werth, J. Herrgen and
J.E. Schmidt (2016). Dialect variation influences the phonological and lexicalsemantic word processing in sentences: Electrophysiological evidence from a
cross-dialectal comprehension study. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 739.
Schmidt, J. E., and J. Herrgen (2011). Grundlagen der Germanistik., Vol. 49.
Sprachdynamik: Eine Einführung in die moderne Regionalsprachenforschung.
Berlin: Schmidt.
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THE LAB SITUATION:
ARTICULATORY-ACOUSTIC VS. ACOUSTIC EXPERIMENTS
Sylvia Moosmüller
Acoustics Research Institute (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Michael Pucher
Acoustics Research Institute (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Keywords: Articulatory acoustic, speech production, data elicitation.
Prompted by Labov‘s seminal work on Martha’s Vineyard or New York city,
sociolinguistics of the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by intense discussions on
how to obtain authentic speech data. In this respect, Labov was definitely a pioneer
(Labov 1984). With the growth of increasingly better technologies, researchers were
able to obtain quite authentic acoustic data. However, for articulatory analyses, specific
measurement instruments have to be applied, resulting in a rather artificial speech
situation and, possibly, in some interference with articulation (Hoole and Nguyen 1999).
In this contribution, we perform a comparison of a subject’s speech production
recordings in two experimental settings: acoustic data synchronized with EMA
compared with the same subject’s speech production using independent acoustic data.
Synchronized EMA + acoustic recordings of two male subjects were conducted at the
Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Munich. Acoustic recordings of the
same two subjects were performed in the lab of the Acoustics Research Institute,
Vienna (Schabus et al. 2014). In both settings, the subjects had to read a list of 200
sentences, in normal and fast speech mode. For the articulation rate, the number of
linguistic syllables per second were counted, with pauses subtracted from the total
duration.
Preliminary results suggest that speech production differs in an articulatory-acoustic
setting vs. in a purely acoustic setting. As one might expect, the articulation rate was
slower in the articulatory-acoustic setting than in the acoustic setting, both under
normal and fast speech condition:
Table 1: Articulation rate (measured as linguistic syllable/s) for recordings in an
articulatory-acoustic and in an acoustic setting, at normal and fast speech rate.
ling. syll/s
articulatory
acoustic
p
normal rate
4,3
4,7
.01
fast rate
6,3
6,9
.002
Moreover, we observed differences in the production of consonant clusters. Thus, in an
VF(P)#PV condition, where F is either a voiceless palatal or a velar fricative, P is an
alveolar plosive /t/ or /d̥ /, and V is a vowel, the plosive is more often realized as a
dental fricative in the articulatory-acoustic setting than in the acoustic setting (27 % vs.
5 %, respectively). We explain the fricativation by the difficulty of producing a complete
closure due to the sensor coil on the tip/blade of tongue.
For the time being, we analysed only one subject, and we have to consider speakerspecific differences in dealing with the impairment due to sensor coils. However, it is
worth keeping an eye on such differences.
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References:
Hoole, Ph. and N. Nguyen (1999). Electromagnetic articulography. In W. Hardcastle
and N. Hewlett (eds.). Coarticulation. Theory, Data and Techniques (pp. 260269). Cambridge University Press.
Labov, W. (1984). Field methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In
J. Baugh and J. Sherzer (eds.). Language in Use (pp. 28-53). Englewood Cliffs:
Prentics-Hall.
Schabus, D., M. Pucher and Ph. Hoole. (2014). The MMASCS multi-modal annotated
synchronous corpus of audio, video, facial motion and tongue motion data of
normal, fast and slow speech. LREC 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland, 3411-3416.
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GRASPING URBAN LANGUAGE –
SETTING UP A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING VARIATION IN CITIES AND THEIR
SURROUNDINGS
Kristina Herbert
Department of German Studies (University of Graz)
Stefanie Edler
Department of German Studies (University of Graz)
Keywords: Variationist linguistics, sociolinguistics, urban language, standard/dialect
axis, linguistic methods, data elicitation.
In modern variationist and sociolinguistic studies, analyses of repertoires of speakers in
urban areas and the linguistic variants constituting these repertoires have advanced to
the centre of research interest. In consideration of the linguistic and sociocultural
complexity of cities, methods of modern urban language research are, naturally,
diverse. They range from two-dimensional variation studies, assuming areal as well as
social variation, to ethno-methodological and interactional studies (e.g. Moosmüller
and Scheutz 2013; Bucholtz and Hall 2005). Within our long-term project ‘Vienna and
Graz – Cities and their influential force’, which is a subproject of the special
research program ‘German in Austria’ we aim at holistically examining the vertical
variation of urban language use on the dialect/standard axis by combining a
broad variety of elicitation methods – an urgent desideratum for Austria. The multiple
methods of data collection range from standardised experimental speech
production tests (as developed and used in Kallenborn 2016) to analytical interviews,
conversations among friends and free everyday conversations. These methods have
been designed in close cooperation with our partner project ‘Speech repertoires and
varietal spectra’, which focuses on rural areas rather than on urban ones. Thus, this
complementary approach to our data collection will lead to an extensive corpus
that will cover the entire horizontal spectrum as well as the vertical one. While the
non-standardised methods are aimed at documenting how individual repertoires
are unfolded in formal and informal settings, the speech production tests are
designed to constitute the framework in which the wide range of linguistic variation
between the poles on the dialect/standard axis can be observed. The presentation will
illustrate how such a framework can be set,
i.e. how speech production tests can be applied in order to elicit data about the
language use close to both poles of the axis. In addition, the presenters will give first
insights into preliminary results of the speech production tests (with a focus on
syntactic/morphosyntactic phenomena) and evaluate whether these results can reveal
first tendencies regarding the following research questions:
- Does the internal structure of linguistic variation differ considerably
between cities of different sizes and different demographic and societal
structures, which is the case for our two research locations Vienna and Graz?
- Could size and societal factors of cities determine the amount of
influence urban registers have on language use in their geographical
surroundings?
Finally, we will tackle the question whether such a methodical approach can be viewed
as a suitable frame for revealing the dynamics of urban colloquialism and will argue
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that an integrative approach can offer a holistic view on language variation in urban
areas.
References:
Bucholtz, M. and K. Hall (2005). Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic
approach. Discourse Studies 7, 585-614.
Moosmüller, S. and H. Scheutz (2013). Chain shifts revisited: The case of
monophthongisation and econfusion in the city dialects of Salzburg and Vienna.
In P. Auer and J. C. Reina and G. Kaufmann (eds.). Language variation –
European Perspectives 4 (pp. 173-186). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kallenborn, T. (2016). Regionalsprachliche Syntax: Horizontal-vertikale Variation im
Moselfränkischen. Unpublished Dissertation (University of Vienna).
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AUSTRIAN GERMAN IN THE MINDS OF THEIR SPEAKERS:
PERSPECTIVES – CHALLENGES – EMPIRICAL APPROACHES
Eva Fuchs
Department of German Studies (University of Salzburg)
Wolfgang Koppensteiner
Department of German Studies (University of Vienna)
Keywords: Perceptual variationist linguistics, attitude & perception towards Austrian
varieties, sociolinguistics, linguistic methods.
Although there have been approaches in the past (e.g. Soukup 2009; Pfrehm 2007),
perceptual variationist linguistic studies targeting the German standard language in
Austria have not yet answered the question of the/an Austrian standard variety and its
horizontal-national and vertical-social positioning. For example, the linguistic and
sociolinguistic relationship between the Austrian standard on the one hand and other
German standards in other countries on the other hand has by no means been
exhaustively analysed to date. In addition, the linguistic and sociolinguistic relationship
between the Austrian standard and varieties of the non-standard (e.g. dialects and
intermediate varieties called regiolects) is still unclear.
As recent attitudinal-perceptual findings and innovative empirical-methodological
developments seen in studies in other German speaking countries already have
shown, intrasituative variation of elicitation methods is necessary to cope, amongst
other, with highly variable parameters (e.g. context sensitivity, intra- and interindividual
grade of variation), the empirical complexity of qualitatively surveying linguistic
perceptional (self-)concepts, images and prestige as well as issues in verbalizing
language attitudes, stereotypes etc. (cf. Soukup 2012). As Purschke (2015, 38) puts it:
“[Attitudes] can only be deduced indirectly from overt behavior, which is still one of the
crucial problems of empirical attitude research”.
In the framework of a current research team (SFB “German in Austria”) standard
language attitudes and standard language perception in Austria will be analysed by
means of a mixed methods approach combining quantitative and qualitative methods.
Research on language attitudes in the German-speaking countries hitherto focused
especially on perception of adult individuals and certain groups of speakers
(emphasizing on students / young academics). Within the SFB-Project, attitudinalperceptual data of pupils and adults of various age groups will be contrasted. These
diverging age and social groups demand a lot of the methods of data elicitation itself.
Therefore data acquisition is conceptualized multi-dimensionally; both more
qualitatively-orientated data (interviews) and experimental settings (modifications of
Verbal Guise Techniques in particular) will be applied.
The presentation will answer the following questions:
•
Who perceives which standard or near-standard varieties/sections of the
spectrum of German how, and which attitudinal-affective values are ascribed to
them or to the speakers of these varieties? Which social functions are attributed
to standard and near-standard varieties in Austria?
•
In the minds of speakers/listeners, where does ‘standard German’ end and
‘non-standard’ begin, or rather where does the Austrian standard end and
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another standard – particularly a/the ‘German German standard’ – begin in the
minds of listeners?
•
Especially: Which methods (differentiating in the experimental degree) are
optimally suited for which of the aforementioned questions? Which methods fit
which age and social groups the best?
References:
Pfrehm, J. W. (2007). An empirical study of the pluricentricity of German: Comparing
German and Austrian nationals’ perceptions of the use, pleasantness and
standardness of Austrian standard and German standard lexical items.
Unpublished Dissertation (University of Wisconsin).
Purschke, C. (2015). REACT – A constructivist theoretic framework for attitudes. In D.
R. Preston and A. Prikhodkine (eds.). Responses to Language Varieties.
Variability, processes and outcomes (pp. 37-54). Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins (Impact. Studies in Language and Society 39).
Soukup, B. (2009). Dialect use as interaction strategy: A sociolinguistic study of
cpntextualization, speech perception, and language attitudes in Austria. Wien:
Braunmüller.
Soukup, B. (2012): Current issues in the social psychological study of ‘language
attitudes’: Constructionism, context, and the attitude-behavior link. Language
and Linguistics Compass 6/4, 212-224.
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VERTICAL VARIETY SPECTRA IN RURAL AUSTRIA: AN EXPERIMENTAL
APPROACH TO THE COLLECTION OF MORPHOLOGICAL DATA ALONG THE
DIALECT-STANDARD AXIS
Katharina Korecky-Kröll
Department of German Studies (University of Vienna)
Keywords: Variationist linguistics, standard/dialect axis, morphological variation, data
elicitation, adjective gradation.
On January 1st, 2016, the special research programme (SFB) “German in Austria –
Variation – Contact – Perception” was launched in cooperation with the universities of
Vienna, Salzburg and Graz and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Within this special
research programme, German in Austria will be analyzed from diverse research
perspectives. One substantial research interest is the analysis of vertical variety
spectra (cf. Auer 2005) – i.e. the variation between the “deepest” base dialects and the
standard language. This dimension is of central interest in two project parts (PP) within
the SFB (PP03 and PP04). While PP04 focusses on the structure of vertical spectra in
cities, PP03 concentrates on 16 rural localities all over Austria. PP03 aims at
answering the following questions: Can different varieties be separated between the
poles “deepest dialect” and “standard language”? Can we find different structures of
vertical variety spectra at different rural localities? Where do dialects end and regiolects
begin?
Even though PP03 focusses on three linguistic levels, phonology, morphology, and
syntax, the paper will concentrate on the morphological level: To gather sufficient
morphological data to answer the questions concerning the vertical variation mentioned
above PP03 will collect data from different recording situations: While a structured
interview is expected to elicit data closer to the standard, conversations among friends
are expected to elicit data from more dialect registers.
Due to high variation and competition between forms, German adjective gradation is an
especially interesting morphological phenomenon: Nearly all comparatives and
superlatives are formed synthetically from their positive forms via suffixation. Some
also undergo an optional or obligatory stem vowel change, which is more frequent in
southern than in northern regions of the German-speaking area (Nübling 2006). Due to
its location in the very south, Austria may be considered a particularly interesting
testing ground for this phenomenon.
As comparatives and especially superlatives appear infrequently in free speech, PP03
will also apply an experimental approach (Kallenborn 2016), in which data are collected
by using speech production tasks (SPT). These SPTs are designed to elicit
comparatives and superlatives using audio-visual stimuli. To elicit dialect as well as
standard data each SPT is conducted within a dialect and within a standard run. As
shown in Kallenborn (2016), this approach delivers sufficient high quality data for
quantitative analyses. Furthermore, the data are inter- and intrasituatively as well as
inter- and intraindividually comparable.
I will present the structure of the SPTs for adjective gradation as well as first results
from different rural regions. These results will be compared to those of a previous
grammaticality judgment experiment on comparatives and superlatives conducted with
speakers living in the city of Vienna.
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References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera and D.
Geeraerts (eds.). Trends in linguistics: studies and monographs. Vol. 163.
Perspectives on variation. Sociolinguistic, historical, comparative. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 7–42.
Kallenborn, T. (2016). Regionalsprachliche Syntax: Horizontal-vertikale Variation im
Moselfränkischen. Unpublished Dissertation (University of Vienna).
Nübling, D. (2006): Historische Sprachwissenschaft des Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr.
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DIALECT AND STANDARD IN ROMANCE.
CONVERGENCE, DIVERGENCE AND STABILITY
ORGANISER:
Massimo Cerruti
Università di Torino
Keywords:
Romance languages, dialect/standard continuum, language change and stability, de/re-standardization processes.
In many parts of Europe, the well-known social changes which have taken place in late
modernity, mainly related to the transition from agrarian to industrial and post-industrial
societies, as well as the acceleration of globalization from the end of the twentieth
century, have had a great impact on the pre-existing relationships between dialect and
standard and on the vitality of ‘base dialects’ itself. In most areas, a change from
diglossia to diaglossia (Bellmann 1998) has occurred, resulting in a continuum of
intermediate varieties between the base dialects and the standard and leading to the
development of new standard norms; moreover, in some of these areas, the
relationship between dialect and standard has evolved, or is evolving, from diaglossia
to dialect loss (Auer 2005). The shape of such continua is brought about by the
interplay of language change, i.e. convergence and divergence, and language stability
(Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill 2005; Braunmüller, Höder and Kühl 2014).
The aim of this panel is to shed light on similarities and differences between
dialect/standard continua in the Romance domain. Convergence and divergence
dynamics, stability (due to, or despite, language and dialect contact), coherence
(Hinskens and Guy 2016) of intermediate varieties, and de-/re-standardization
processes, will be the key issues of the panel. As far as Romance is concerned, some
of these issues have been dealt with in studies of specific languages (see e.g.
Hernández Campoy and Villena Ponsoda 2010; Armstrong and Pooley 2010; Cerruti,
Crocco and Marzo 2016), but a comprehensive comparison has hardly been made.
Among others, relevant research questions are the following: (i) which are the main
dynamics at play in a given dialect/standard continuum (downward convergence,
dialect leveling, koineization, etc.)? (ii) have koines and regional standard varieties
emerged? (iii) how focused and coherent are they? (iv) which (internal, external or
extra-linguistic) factors affect the co-occurrence of features in a continuum of
intermediate varieties? (v) which non-standard features have become, or are
becoming, acceptable in standard usage? (vi) do they have socially symbolic meaning?
(vii) which (internal, external or extra-linguistic) factors facilitate or, on the contrary,
constrain the inclusion of previously non-standard features into the standard norm?
(viii) are these changes more noticeable in pronunciation than in morphology and
syntax? (ix) do they have a different impact on different social groups? (x) do they differ
according to different geographical areas?
The panel will consist of six papers plus a plenary discussion. The papers will feature
Portuguese (Ernestina Carrilho and Sandra Pereira), Spanish (Juan Villena Ponsoda
and Matilde Vida-Castro), French (Nigel Armstrong), Italian and Italo-Romance dialects
(Riccardo Regis; Claudia Crocco and Stefania Marzo), and Romanian (Thomas Krefeld
and Elton Prifti). The plenary discussion will be led by Frans Hinskens.
Every paper will be allotted 20 minutes. A final 30 minute slot will be reserved for the
plenary discussion. The panel will thus take two and a half hours.
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References:
Armstrong, N. and T. Pooley (2010). Linguistic and social change in European French.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: a typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera and D.
Geeraerts (eds.). Perspectives on variation. Sociolinguistic, historical,
comparative, (pp. 7-42). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Auer, P., F. Hinskens and P. Kerswill (eds.) (2005). Dialect change. Convergence and
divergence in European languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bellmann, G. (1998). Between base dialect and standard language. Folia Linguistica 32
(1-2), 23-34.
Braunmüller, K., S. Höder and K. Kühl, (eds.) (2014). Stability and divergence in
language contact. Factors and mechanisms, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Cerruti, M., C. Crocco and S. Marzo, (eds.) (2016). Towards a new standard.
Theoretical and empirical studies on the restandardization of Italian. Berlin and
New York: de Gruyter.
Hernández Campoy, J. M. and J. A. Villena Ponsoda (2010). Standardness and NonStandardness in Spain: Dialect attrition and revitalization of regional dialects of
Spanish. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 196-197, 181-214.
Hinskens, F. and G. R. Guy (eds.) (2016). Coherence, covariation and bricolage.
Various approaches to the systematicity of language variation. Lingua (Special
issue), 172-173.
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1. REGIONAL VARIETIES AND STANDARD IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE:
ISSUES FROM THE ANGLE OF SYNTACTIC VARIATION. Ernestina Carrilho and
Sandra Pereira Universidade de Lisboa
2. VARIATION, IDENTITY, COHERENCE AND INDEXICALITY IN SOUTHERN
SPANISH: ON THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW VARIETY IN URBAN ANDALUSIA.
Juan Villena Ponsoda and Matilde Vida-Castro. Universidad de Málaga
3. STANDARDISATION AND LEVELLING IN FRENCH. Nigel Armstrong.
University of Leeds
4. A TIME FOR FOCUSING AND A TIME FOR DIFFUSION: STANDARD AND
“DIALECTS” IN ITALOROMANCE. Riccardo Regis. Università di Torino
5. THERE'S A NORTHERN WIND, BLOWIN'UP A SOUTHERN CHANGE: ON THE
SPREAD OF NORTHERN ITALIAN FRICATIVES IN SOUTHERN ITALIAN SPEECH.
Claudia Crocco (Universiteit Gent) and Stefania Marzo (KU Leuven)
6. THE CONTINUITY IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND THE CASE OF
ROMANIAN. Thomas Krefeld (Ludwig Maximilians Universität München) and
Elton Prifti (Universität Mannheim)
7. DISCUSSION.
Amsterdam
Frans
Hinskens.
Meertens
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REGIONAL VARIETIES AND STANDARD IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE:
ISSUES FROM THE ANGLE OF SYNTACTIC VARIATION
Ernestina Carrilho
Universidade de Lisboa
Sandra Pereira
Universidade de Lisboa
Within the Romance landscape, the linguistic situation in Portugal displays an almost
unique scenario to study the interplay of variation and standard, stemming from a
diachronic context that differs from the background of the European most widespread
diaglossic type of standard/dialect repertoire (Auer 2005, 2011). The Portuguese
national territory was almost definitely established as far as the mid-13th century and
this territory displayed a singular linguistic homogeneity, where a unique ‘traditional
dialect’ was spoken, which later developed into the standard language without
significant co-occurrence of other base dialects. The geographically delimited and very
peripheral manifestation of Astur-Leonese as a different historical dialect in the
Portuguese territory culminated in the official recognition of a minority language,
Mirandese, by the end of the 20th century. The Portuguese linguistic situation thus
allows a kind of “microscopic” focus to observe linguistic variation in a context where
the interplay of language and dialect is almost absent.
However, such linguistic homogeneity appears attenuated by an important divide in
Portuguese regional variation. Geolinguistic research has significantly emphasized the
linguistic differences between the northern varieties and the central-southern ones
(Cintra 1971, Carrilho and Pereira 2013, Segura 2013), pointing to a bipartition that in
many respects is also found extra-linguistically and anchored in diverse sociohistorical
and natural conditions (e.g. Cintra 1962). Mainly, while the northern territory hosts, over
the centuries, an autochthon, numerous, and stable population, the central-southern
region corresponds to a territory of internal colonization during the 12th and 13th
centuries and of long-standing linguistic contact with Mozarabic varieties. From the
angle of lexical and phonetic/phonological variation this opposition equates in general
to the contrast between a (northern) conservative area and a (central-southern) area
where highly intense linguistic contact promoted the levelling of phonetic differences
and the spread of lexical innovations. Importantly, as the Portuguese political center
falls within the central-southern region, there exist remarkable linguistic differences
between northern varieties and standard Portuguese.
The aim of our contribution is to examine the behavior of morphosyntactic variation
within this scenario, by providing or reassessing answers to the following questions: (i)
does morphosyntactic variation display any regional pattern? (ii) does morphosyntactic
variation pattern with variation in other grammatical components (Cheshire, Kerswill
and Williams 2005)? (iii) is morphosyntactic variation as noticeable as variation in
pronunciation? (iv) does morphosyntactic variation have socially symbolic value? (v)
how does the standard language relate with syntactic variants?
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera and D.
Geeraerts (eds.). Perspectives on variation. Sociolinguistic, historical,
comparative, 7-42. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
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Auer, P. (2011). Dialect vs. standard: A typology of scenarios in Europe. In B.
Kortmann and J. van der Auwera (eds.). The languages and linguistics of
Europe. A comprehensive guide, 485-500. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Carrilho, E. and S. Pereira (2013). On the areal dimension of non-standard syntax:
Evidence from a Portuguese corpus. In A. Barysevich, A. D’Arcy and D. Heap
(eds.). Proceedings of Methods XIV: Papers from the Fourteenth International
Conference on Methods in DialectologyI, 69-79. Pieterlen: Peter Lang.
Cheshire, J., P. Kerswill and A. Williams (2005). On the non-convergence of
phonology, grammar and discourse. In P. Auer, F. Hinskens and P. Kerswill
(eds.) Dialect change: Convergence and divergence in European languages,
(pp. 135-167). Cambridge: CUP.
Cintra, L. F. L. (1971). Nova proposta de classificação dos dialectos galegoportugueses. Boletim de Filologia 22, 81-116.
Cintra, L. F. L. (1962). Áreas lexicais no território português. Boletim de Filologia 20,
273-307.
Segura, L. (2013). Variedades dialectais do Português Europeu. In E. P. Raposo et al.
(eds.). Gramática do Português (pp. 85-142). Lisboa: F. Calouste Gulbenkian.
102
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VARIATION, IDENTITY, COHERENCE AND INDEXICALITY IN SOUTHERN
SPANISH: ON THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW VARIETY IN URBAN ANDALUSIA
Juan Villena Ponsoda
Universidad de Málaga
Matilde Vida-Castro
Universidad de Málaga
The aim of this paper is to claim that the emergence of a new intermediate variety
between the Castilian standard and the vernacular varieties from Andalusia (VillenaPonsoda 2008; Villena and Vida 2015) is based on a new identity that blends, on the
one hand, the individual’s orientation towards modern life, urbanisation and
standardness and, on the other hand, faithfulness to the southern traditionalcommunity values. This mixed identity has been gradually taking shape since the
second half of the twentieth century, particularly among urban middle-class speakers,
to be eventually widespread by the end of the Franco era (1939-1975).
This new variety accepts, on the one hand, a set of prestige changes involving split of
southern consonant mergers (Villena Ponsoda 2001; Moya-Corral 2015), as well as
reversion of the old phonological processes in syllable-onset position characterising the
southern phonology but, on the other hand, preserves the southern erosive changes
affecting consonants in the syllable-coda position. Actually, linguistic features shaping
this intermediate variety go far beyond phonology and correlate in a way that it is
conceivable to think of a socially and perceptually coherent variety able to be
considered as an alternative to the regional standard from Seville. Stances adopted by
speakers vary according to age, social class, background and attitudes towards
standardness.
To prove this, multivariate analyses of phonological, morphological, syntactic and
lexical variables have been carried out in the context of a research project including
southern (Granada, Malaga, Seville) and central (Madrid) urban areas. Results tend to
confirm that this variety is basically spoken by young urban middle-class standardorientated speakers willing to escape from the southern traditional way of life.
References:
Moya-Corral, J. A. (2015). La inserción social del cambio. La distinción s/θ en
Granada. Análisis en tiempo aparente y en tiempo real. Lingüística Española
Actual, 37/1, 33-72.
Villena-Ponsoda, J. A. (2001). La continuidad del cambio lingüístico. Granada:
Universidad.
Villena-Ponsoda, J. A. (2008). Sociolinguistic patterns of Andalusian Spanish.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 193-194, 139-160.
Villena-Ponsoda, J. A. and M. Vida (2015). Between local and standard varieties:
horizontal and vertical convergence and divergence of dialects in Southern
Spain. In I. Buchstaller and B. Siebenhaar (eds.). Proceedings of the 8th
ICLaVE Conference, Leipzig. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (forthcoming).
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STANDARDISATION AND LEVELLING IN FRENCH
Nigel Armstrong
University of Leeds
Although it seems plausible on a superficial view that recent social change has
proceeded in essentially similar ways in most Western industrialised liberal
democracies with standardised languages, different linguistic, social and political
traditions across cultures can make comparisons problematic. The French case is often
cited as a highly ‘standardised’ one, but if, as recent research has suggested, some
70% of French have a similar accent, such that regional identification is difficult, this
simply raises the question what is meant by the standard, since lack of regionality is
the criterion usually applied in the case of the UK.
Notable features of social organisation characteristic of France are the dirigisme and
sense of cultural uniqueness characteristic of the country, reflected quite vividly in the
example of quite recent (1994) legislation designed to prohibit the use in official
documents of Anglicisms by French state employees; and the republican attitude
widespread in France that sees democracy in the light of upward rather than downward
levelling. Against this, it makes sense to assume that youth-driven changes are at work
in France; for example, the events of May 1968, often seen as a turning point in social
relations, are above all associated with their French manifestation.
In this paper we explore these opposing forces by examining various changes
seemingly in progress in French pronunciation; we also consider the ‘envelope of
variation’ through the example of ‘prepausal schwa’, perhaps the most innovation to
have come to the attention of sociolinguists.
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A TIME FOR FOCUSING AND A TIME FOR DIFFUSION:
STANDARD AND “DIALECTS” IN ITALOROMANCE
Riccardo Regis
Università di Torino
If focusing implies “greater regularity in the linguistic code, less variability” and diffusion
“the converse” (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 116), it is undeniable that the
history of each and every language reveals an alternation between moments of
focussing and moments of diffusion.
This state of affairs can be easily observed by using the threefold distinction between
primary, secondary and tertiary dialects, originally devised by Eugenio Coseriu (1980,
1981) for the diachronic developments of the Spanish language. While primary dialects
are those dialects which already existed before the spread of a common language
(Gemeinsprache), secondary dialects developed after the diffusion of a common
language and its geographic differentiation; when a common language exhibits a
standard variety (exemplarische Sprache), then geographic varieties of the standard,
i.e. tertiary dialects, are expected to develop.
This paper aims to retrace the history of Italoromance in terms of focusing and
diffusion, within the Coserian framework sketched above. As far as Italoromance is
considered, primary dialects are the so-called dialetti italoromanzi (such as
Piedmontese, Lombard, Sicilian, etc.), secondary dialects are regional varieties of
Italian (italiani regionali), tertiary dialects are standard regional varieties of Italian
(italiani regionali standard) (see Krefeld 2011, Regis 2016 and in press). Since all of
these dialects still live side by side, the Italoromance context also allows to tackle some
issues of synchronic interest, such as the sociolinguistic dynamics between the
“dialects” and the standard language and the interplay between a regional variety
(secondary dialect) and a regional standard variety (tertiary dialect).
References:
Coseriu, E. (1980). «Historische Sprache» und «Dialekt». In J. Göschel, P. Ivić and K.
Kehr (eds.). Dialekt und Dialektologie (pp. 106–22) Steiner: Wiesbaden.
Coseriu, E. (1981). Los conceptos de «dialecto», «nivel» y «estilo de lengua» y el
sentido propio de la dialectología. Lingüística Española Actual 3, 1–32.
Krefeld, Th. (2011). «Primäre», «sekundäre», «tertiäre» Dialekte – und die Geschichte
des italienischen Sprachraums. In A. Overbeck, W. Schweickard and H. Völker
(eds.). Lexikon, Varietät, Philologie. Romanistische Studien Günter Holtus zum
65. Geburtstag (pp. 137–47). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Le Page, R. B. and A. Tabouret-Keller (1985). Acts of identity. Creole-based
approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Regis, R. (2016). How regional standards set in: the case of Standard Piedmontese
Italian. In M. Cerruti, C. Crocco and S. Marzo, eds. (2016). Towards a new
standard. Theoretical and empirical studies on the restandardization of Italian,
de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.
Regis, R. (in press). La nozione coseriana di dialetto e le sue implicazioni per l’area
italo-romanza. In Revue Romane.
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THERE'S A NORTHERN WIND, BLOWIN'UP A SOUTHERN CHANGE:
ON THE SPREAD OF NORTHERN ITALIAN FRICATIVES IN SOUTHERN ITALIAN
SPEECH
Claudia Crocco
Universiteit Gent
Stefania Marzo
KU Leuven
In the past years, Italian linguists have amply documented the slow and complex
spread of Italian as a spoken language after the political unification of the country in
1861. During this process, the prolonged situation of dialect/standard contact has led to
the rise of regional varieties (Berruto 2012 [1987]). Nowadays the regionalization of the
national language manifests itself mainly in speech as a coexistence of several
regional pronunciations. Broadly speaking, these region-specific pronunciations are
characterized by the retention of phonetic/phonological features from the dialectal
substratum. However, not all regional features are also socio-stylistically marked, as
several of them are also used in formal or official situations as well. Therefore, they are
said to be part of a Regional standard.
A main feature of regional variation concerns the geographical distribution of alveolar
fricatives, i.e., /z/ and /s/. In the standard pronunciation and in Tuscan, both /z/ and /s/
may occur in intervocalic position, such as in asino (‘donkey’) [ˈasino] and sposo
(‘groom’) [ˈspozo] (cf. Migliorini et al. 1969²). In non-Tuscan varieties, however, this
contrast is neutralized and only one of the two variants ([s] or [z]) is generalized in
intervocalic position: [s] is generalized in southern Italian regions ([ˈfuso] and [ˈsposo]),
while [z] recurs in the same context in northern Italy ([ˈfuzo] and [ˈazino]). There is,
however, still no clear evidence that the generalization of intervocalic [s] or [z] is
socially or stylistically constrained.
Previous studies have shown that the northern variant [z] is spreading outside its area
of origin. For instance, Galli de’ Paratesi (1984; Calamai 2016) has shown that [z] is
spreading in Florence. Recently, Nocchi and Filipponio (2010) have shown that the
voiced variant together with a lenis variant [z̥ ], are gaining terrain in north-western
Tuscany.
In this paper, we study to what extent the northern variant [z] is further spreading in
southern Italian regions and whether this diffusion might be socio-stylistically
constraint. We focus on the city of Naples and we compare the production and
perception of the variation between the intervocalic /s/. For the production study, we
examined spontaneous dialogues and read speech from the CLIPS corpus produced
by a group of 6 speakers (M/F), with university education, to verify the effect of speech
style (read vs dialogical) and gender on the variable. For the perception part, we set up
a perception experiment whereby 100 listeners were asked to situate geographically
(on a map) three 20 second samples with three variants of intervocalic /s/: voiceless
[s], voiced [z] and lenis [z̥ ]. In a Free Response Task (Grondelaers and Van Hout
2010), they were also asked to give three adjectives they associated with these
samples.
With this study, we contribute on the current debate on the acceptance of northern
Italian pronunciation features as prestige variants in southern Italian speech. Moreover,
we offer new insights into the emergence and spread of regional standards in
contemporary Italian.
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References:
Berruto, G. (2012) [1987]. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo. 2nd edn.
Roma: Carocci. (1987: Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica).
Calamai, S. (2016). Tuscan between Standard and Vernacular: a Sociophonetic
perspective. In M. Cerruti, C. Crocco and S. Marzo (eds.). Towards a new
standard. Theoretical and Empirical Studies on the restandardization of Italian
(pp. 213-241). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
CLIPS [online]. Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto. Available at:
http://www.clips.unina.it.
Galli de’ Paratesi, N. (1984). Lingua toscana in bocca ambrosiana. Tendenze verso
l’italiano standard: un’inchiesta sociolinguistica. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Grondelaers, S. and R. Van Hout (2010). Do Speech Evaluation Scales in a Speaker
Evaluation Experiment Trigger Conscious or Unconscious Attitudes?. University
of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL), 16, 2. 92–102
Migliorini, B., C. Tagliavini and P. Fiorelli. (1969) [online]. Dizionario d’ortografia e di
pronunzia (DOP). Torino: ERI. Available at: http://www.dizionario.rai.it/
(accessed 07.09.2016).
Nocchi, N. and L. Filipponio (2012). Lo vuoi co[z]í o co[s]í? A Sociophonetic Study on
Sibilants in the Regional Italian of Livorno (Tuscany). In S. Calamai, C. Celata
and L. Ciucci (eds.). Sociophonetics, at the crossroads of speech variation,
processing and communication (pp. 53–56). Pisa: Edizioni della Normale.
107
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THE CONTINUITY IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND THE CASE OF
ROMANIAN
Thomas Krefeld
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Elton Prifti
Universität Mannheim
Three dimensions of continuity are normally distinguished in the study of romance
varieties:
-
The diachronic continuity from Latin to the romance languages or varieties,
The 'horizontal' or interlinguistic continuity of romance dialects across the
borders of the national and official languages, as well as
The 'vertical' or intralinguistic continuity from each single dialect (i.e. basilect) up
to the corresponding standard variety (i.e. acrolect).
Referring to these three dimensions, the complex case of Romanian represents an
outstanding situation, above all due to the existence and the relations between the so
called four “dialects” of Romanian (Istroromanian, Aromanian, Meglenoromanian and
(Daco)romanian).
(1) The diachronic dimension. The continuity of the romanity of Romanian is commonly
accepted; it belongs to the romance family, notwithstanding its romanity partially
appears less solid that the romanity of other romance languages.
(2) The interlinguistic dimension. Geolinguistic continuity between the above mentioned
four idioms does not exist since these are spoken in areas without geographical
contact and each of them is surrounded by different, usually non romance languages,
except for Meglenoromanian, which is partially in contact with Aromanian, and
Romanian, which has been in contact with Aromanian for almost one century due to
migration in the region of Dobrogea.
(3) The intralinguistic dimension. Since the four mentioned groups do not have any
common standard variety, it is not possible to consider a vertical continuity.
The consideration of Aromanian, (Daco) romanian, Istroromanian and
Meglenoromanian as a unity appears a priori difficult without any backing in the
communicative spaces in which their speakers are moving. This paper will present
some criteria on how to better describe the particular case of Romanian.
References:
Thede, K. and E. Prifti (2016). Geschichte der Kodifizierung des Aromunischen. In W.
Dahmen, G. Holtus, J. Kramer, M. Metzeltin, W. Schweickard and O.
Winkelmann (eds.). Zum Stand der Kodifizierung romanischer Kleinsprachen.
Akten des XXVII. Romanistischen Kolloquiums (pp. 33-64). Tübingen: Gunter
Narr.
Kovačec, A. (2015). L’istrorumeno alla luce dei criteri sociolinguistici di Žarko Muljačić.
Studi italiani di linguistica teorica e applicata XLIV/1, 81-96.
Krefeld, T. (2003). Rumänisch - mit 'Abstand' ein Unicum. In: W. Busse and J. SchmidtRadefeldt (eds.). Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Rudolf Windisch (pp. 7390). Rostock: Universität Rostock, Philosophische Fakultät.
108
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Krefeld, T. (2003). La continuità’ della Romania - e la storiografia delle lingue nazionali.
In J. Hafner and W. Oesterreicher (eds.). Mit Clio im Gespräch. Romanische
Sprachgeschichten und Sprachgeschichtsschreibung (pp. 61-75) Tübingen:
Gunter Narr.
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SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS AND PROCESSES OF
CONVERGENCE/DIVERGENCE IN SPANISH IN AMERICA AND SPAIN
ACCORDING TO PRESEEA DATA
ORGANISERS:
Ana M. Cestero Mancera
University of Alcalá
Isabel Molina Martos
University of Alcalá
Florentino Paredes García
University of Alcalá
Keywords: Sociolinguistic patterns, convergence, divergence, varieties of Spanish.
Determining the linguistic uses that characterise a speech community while observing
the relationships between communities with the same language has been a priority
within the interests of variationist sociolinguistics since its inception. This panel aims to
present analyses which highlight the sociolinguistic patterns, at any linguistic level,
which operate in the different Spanish-speaking communities and to account for the
processes of convergence and/or divergence between speech communities and
between areas of Spanish in America and Spain. Based on the approach of Moreno
Fernández (2009), this panel will present data related to the dialect macro-areas of
Spanish: in America, Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, the Andean region,
Chile and the River Plate; in Spain, the Canary Islands, Andalusia and the centralnorthern zone.
The authors participating in the panel are associated with the PRESEEA project, which
aims to undertake coordinated sociolinguistic research in Latin America and Spain,
enabling the comparability of linguistic data and the exchange of materials and
information (see http://www.linguas.net/preseea).
The speakers will try to answer questions such as the following:
-­‐
What factors explain the linguistic behaviour of speakers in a speech
community?
-­‐
What sociolinguistic patterns does a specific speech community present?
-­‐
What is the relationship between the general language and the vernacular
variety?
-­‐
What processes of convergence or divergence between speech communities
can be identified?
-­‐
What general evolutionary trends can be observed in the Spanish language?
The participants are representatives from each of the macro-areas:
-­‐
Mexico-Central America region
-­‐
Caribbean region
-­‐
Chilean region
-­‐
Andalusian region
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-­‐
Canary Islands region
-­‐
Castilian region
References:
Cestero Mancera, A. M., I. Molina Martos and F. Paredes García (2015): Patrones
sociolingüísticos de Madrid. Bern: Peter Lang.
Moreno Fernández, F. (1996): “Metodología del ‘Proyecto para el estudio
sociolingüístico del Español de España y de América’ (PRESEEA)”, Lingüística
8: 257-287.
Moreno Fernández, F. (2009): La lengua española en su geografía. Madrid:
Arco/Libros.
PRESEEA (2003) [online]. “Metodología del “Proyecto para el estudio sociolingüístico
del español de España y de América PRESEEA”, Revised version, October
2003. Available at: http://www.linguas.net/preseea.
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1.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC
PATTERNS
AND
PROCESSES
OF
CONVERGENCE/DIVERGENCE IN SPANISH IN AMERICA AND SPAIN
ACCORDING TO PRESEEA DATA. Cestero Mancera, Molina Martos y Paredes
García. University of Alcalá
2. LEXICAL SOCIOLINGUISTIC IDIOSYNCRATIC PATTERNS (SINGULARITIES) IN
MEXICAN SPANISH. Flores Treviño y González Salinas. Autonomus State
University of Nuevo Leon
3. LINGUISTIC VARIATION IN CENTRAL-EASTERN SPANISH IN SPAIN. Gómez
Molina y Albelda Marco. Universitat de València
4. SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS OF CHILEAN SPANISH. Guerrero. Universidad
de Chile
5. SPANISH SOCIOLINGUISTIC
Universidad Central de Venezuela
PATTERNS
OF
VENEZUELA.
Malaver.
6. THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF MADRID: CONVERGENCY AND DIVERGENCY
TOWARDS SOUTHERN AND NORTHERN CASTILIAN SPEECH. Molina Martos.
Paredes García. University of Alcalá
7. PATTERNS OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE IN THE ANDALUSIAN. Moya Corral y
Tejada Giráldez. University of Granada
8. CONVERGENT AND DIVERGENT PATTERNS BETWEEN THE SPEECH
COMMUNITY OF LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA AND OTHER SPANISH
MAINLAND AND AMERICAN VARIETIES. Samper Padilla, Samper Hernández y
Hernández Cabrera. University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
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LEXICAL SOCIOLINGUISTIC IDIOSYNCRATIC PATTERNS (SINGULARITIES) IN
MEXICAN SPANISH
María Eugenia Flores Treviño
[email protected]
Autonomus State University of Nuevo Leon
Armando González Salinas
[email protected]
Autonomus State University of Nuevo Leon
In Mexico based on "the Intercensal Survey 2015 conducted by the INEGI, 119;
530,753 inhabitants were counted in Mexico" (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y
Geografía-INEGI, 2015a). Of these, 7; 382, 785 people 3 years and older speak an
indigenous language "(INEGI, 2015b). Therefore, there are 112; 147, 968 Mexican
Spanish speakers. Moreover, "the continental land area is 1; 960,189 km2" (INEGI,
2015c), excluding the island territory, from which "only 144 km2 are inhabited by
618,930 people, i.e. 0.6% of the national population "(INEGI, 2015c). The Mexican
territory is divided into 32 states and Mexico City is the capital. As it can be noted, from
the demographic and geographic characteristics, lexical variation of Spanish in this
country is plentiful.
We focus on the speech of the northeastern part of Mexico, which presents some
characteristic patterns of sociolinguistic variation that distinguish the everyday use in
this region, from that in the other modalities used in central and southern parts of
Mexico. Some recent studies (Hueda and Moreno, 2016) allow, from their findings, to
offer some specifications on the subject.
This presentation will provide a general description of some of the differences in the
current lexical variation between the northern, central and southern parts of Mexico.
We focus our interest on the common semantic features underlying the different lexical
modalities, and on the variations of sense that are generated and derived from the
socio-linguistic-pragmatic context in which these forms are used. The impact of register
in these variations is also considered. These characteristics are reviewed from the
illocutionary force which allow and guide their study within a communicative interaction,
and also provide the receiver with the possibility of socio-contextual language user
identification, in order to complement the process of co-construction of meaning; thus
getting the perlocutionary effect of the act performed, and interpreting its social effect.
From the examination of the sample, it is possible to suggest that the trends observed
in the corpus indicate that in these variations there is an incidence of these factors: 1)
Socio-economic context of the speaker, 2) educational level of the speaker, and 3) age
group to which it belongs. This paper offers only a general description.
References:
Hueda, H. (2003) [online]. VARILEX. Variación Léxica del Español en el mundo.
Available at: http://lecture.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~cueda/varilex/cues.htm. Visited on
October 20, 2016.
INEGI. (2015a) [online]. Encuesta Intercensal. Instituto Nacional de Estadística
Geografía
e
Informática.
Available
at:
http://www3.inegi.org.mx/sistemas/tabuladosbasicos/default.aspx?c=33725&s=
est. Visited on October 20, 2016.
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INEGI. (2015b) [online]. Hablantes de lengua indígena en México. Instituto Nacional de
Estadística
Geografía
e
Informática.
Available
at:
Visited
on
http://cuentame.inegi.org.mx/poblacion/lindigena.aspx?tema=P.
October 21, 2016.
INEGI. (2015c) [online]. Extensión de México. Instituto Nacional de Estadística
Geografía
e
Informática.
Available
at:
http://cuentame.inegi.org.mx/territorio/extension/default.aspx?tema=T. Visited
on October 23, 2016.
Rodríguez, L. (2010) [online]. El habla de Monterrey PRESEEA. Available at:
http://www.filosofia.uanl.mx/posgrado/hablamty/ElHabladeMonterreyPRESEEA_2010.pdf Visited on January 20, 2012.
Rodríguez, L., Flores, M. E. and Pérez, T. (2011). El habla de Monterrey-PRESEEA
2006-2010. Registro SEP/MÉXICO 03-2010-091313044500-01
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LINGUISTIC VARIATION IN CENTRAL-EASTERN SPANISH IN SPAIN
José Ramón Gómez Molina
Universitat de València
Marta Albelda Marco
Universitat de València
This paper aims to present the most significant linguistic variations in the Spanish
central-eastern area of Spain, specifically in the region of Valencia. The study will be
carried out using the PRESEEA-Valencia corpus (PRESEVAL, www.uv.es/preseval).
Focusing on this oral corpus (Gómez Molina, coord. 2001, 2005, 2007), we will present
the main results of several phenomena at the following linguistic levels: phonetic,
morphosyntactic and pragmatic. At the phonetic level, we will study the variation of two
phenomena: dropping the phoneme /d/ between vowels, particularly at the end of
Spanish past participles (-ado) and the phenomenon called ‘yeísmo’. At the
morphosyntactic level, we will study the impersonal verb haber, what is known as
‘laísmo, leísmo, loísmo’ and the expression of future time; and at the pragmatic level
we will study the behaviour of the rhetorical phenomenon of mitigation.
We will focus on variation as interrelated with other sociolinguistic parameters such as
age, gender and sociocultural level. In addition we will delve into the factors and
causes that can explain this variation.
References:
Caravedo, R. (2006). Sobre factores internos y externos en la lingüística de la
variación. In M. Sedano et alii (comp.). Haciendo Lingüística. Homenaje a Paola
Bentivoglio (pp. 709-716). Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Cestero, A. M. and M. Albelda (2012). La atenuación lingüística como fenómeno
variable. Oralia, 15, 77-124.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (1997). La variación lingüística en el español hablado de
Valencia. In A. Briz, J. R. Gómez and M. J. Martínez (Grupo Val.es.co.) (eds.).
Pragmática y gramática del español hablado. Actas del II Simposio sobre
análisis del discurso oral (pp. 75-90). Zaragoza: Libros Pórtico.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (2011). La preposición de como mecanismo comunicativo en las
construcciones ‘Ø/de + que + verbo en forma personal’. Oralia 14, 345-376.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (2012). Variación y cambio fónicos de la /d/ intervocálica en el
español de Valencia. Proyecto PRESEEA-PRESEVAL. Lingüística Española
Actual 34(2), 167-196.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (coord.) (2001). El español hablado de Valencia. Materiales para
su estudio. I. Nivel sociocultural alto. Anejo XLVI de Cuadernos de Filología.
Valencia: Universitat de València.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (coord.) (2005). El español hablado de Valencia. Materiales para
su estudio. II. Nivel sociocultural medio. Anejo LVIII de Cuadernos de Filología.
Valencia: Universitat de València.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (coord.) (2007). El español hablado de Valencia. Materiales para
su estudio. III. Nivel sociocultural bajo. Anejo LXI de Cuadernos de Filología.
Valencia: Universitat de València.
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Gómez Molina, J. R. (coord.) (2013). El español de Valencia. Estudio sociolingüístico.
Bern, Peter Lang.
Gómez Molina, J. R. and J. M. Buzón (2015). Variabilidad en el paradigma verbal de
futuro. El español de Valencia y de otras sintonías. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gómez Molina, J. R. and B. Gómez Devís (in press). ¡Vaya Valla! El yeísmo en el
español de Valencia. Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile. (BFUCh),
35 pages.
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SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS OF CHILEAN SPANISH
Silvana Guerrero
[email protected]
Universidad de Chile
Keywords: Sociolinguistic patterns, convergence, divergence, varieties of Spanish.
This presentation describes the sociolinguistic distribution of sociolinguistic
phenomena regarding Chilean Spanish. The following work analyses variables on
three different levels: morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmatic-discursive. This
investigation studies cases from the 108 sociolinguistic interviews that constitute the
PRESEEA corpus of Santiago, Chile and correlates the former mentioned variables
with gender, age and the educational level of the Santiago speakers.
A preliminary analysis shows that variables of age and educational level show greater
variation, since on one hand, younger speakers usually present a higher diversity
in linguistic uses, and on the other, education constitutes a fundamental role
defining adult’s pattern variation. One of the explaining hypothesis we suggest
for these variations is that there are some phenomena–like voseo, clitics
redundancies and the use of specific discursive markers- that define the speaker’s
identity, especially in younger groups (20-34 years) and in the outermost groups of
the social scale (high and low).
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SPANISH SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS OF VENEZUELA
Irania Malaver
[email protected]
Universidad Central de Venezuela
Keywords: Sociolinguistic patterns, convergence, divergence, varieties of Spanish.
Venezuelan Spanish phonological variation recorded phenomena consonant with the
general features of the Caribbean, such as the weakening and elision of consonant
phonemes in inner position and word-final varieties.
They have different research sociolinguistic particular in those which have been
described and characterized the way in which these phenomena are manifested both in
the internal structure of the language and in relation to social factors that represent
symptoms of the degree of diffusion in the community stadium speech and they could
be located as processes of language change (Romero 2005, Carrasquero 2010,
Ugueto 2016, Malaver and Perdomo 2016)
In this communication we sociolinguistic patterns change processes that are
weakening and elision of / s in implosive position / R / in word-final position and / d / in
implosive position. We are interested in how the above phenomena evolve within the
speech community, that is, the contrasts and similarities sociolinguistic manifest, the
explanatory power of social factors and sociolinguistics radiograph showing
Venezuelan talks. Development trends of the above phenomena and their social
stratification are, in conclusion, bases of the Spanish sociodialectal characterization of
Venezuela.
References:
Carrasquero, V. (2010) [online]. Un caso de variación sociofonética: /-s/ posnuclear en
el español actual de Caracas. Letras, 52, N° 81. Available at:
http://www.scielo.org.ve/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S045912832010000100005
Malaver, I. and L. Perdomo. (2016). La elisión de /d/ en posición intervocálica en la
comunidad caraqueña. Boletín de Filología, Chile. Vol 52. N° 2.
Romero, M. (2005). Variación de /s/ implosiva en el español de Caracas. Trabajo de
grado para optar al grado de Magíster Scientiarum en Lingüística. Caracas:
Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Ugueto, M. (2016). La variación de / / en posición final de palabra en el habla de
Caracas: un estudio sociofonético. Lingüística y Literatura, 70 (julio-diciembre
de 2016).
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THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF MADRID: CONVERGENCY AND DIVERGENCY
TOWARDS SOUTHERN AND NORTHERN CASTILIAN SPEECH
Isabel Molina Martos
[email protected]
University of Alcalá
Florentino Paredes García
[email protected]
University of Alcalá
Keywords: Sociolinguistic patterns, convergence, divergence, varieties of Spanish,
Castilian.
In contrast with other linguistic areas in Spain, Madrid is situated at the very heart of
the Iberian Peninsula and, as the political center and capital of Spain, it concentrates a
numer of relevant personalities in positions of linguistic leadership. Linguistic
tendencies which Madrid helps to spread or reduce are clearly influenced not only by
the population traditionally settled in the city, but also by a variety of national and
international inmigrants.
In this presentation, we’ll ilustrate how linguistic innovation is socially advanced through
the analysis of two phonetic variables (two consonants in its syllabic implosive position:
-/s/ and -/d/) and two grammatical variables (leísmo and laísmo; non standard
concordance of haber verb). Our purpose is to illustrate how speakers in Madrid model
their linguistic patterns, since in the city there are different linguistic referencial norms
that speakers might follow. Sociolinguistics research in Madrid reveals a subtle net of
linguistic identities which makes it hard to predict the direction of social and linguistic
change.
References:
Cestero Mancera, A. M., I. Molina Martos and F. Paredes García (2008).
Sociolinguistics Issues of Madrid. International Journal of the Sociology of
Language, 193/194, 91-108.
Cestero Mancera, A. M., I. Molina Martos and F. Paredes García (2015): Patrones
sociolingüísticos de Madrid. Bern: Peter Lang.
Molina Martos, I. (2015). La variable sociolingüística -/s/ en el distrito de Vallecas
(Madrid). In A. M. Cestero, I. Molina and F. Paredes (eds.). Patrones
sociolingüísticos de Madrid (pp. 177-250). Bern: Peter Lang.
Molina Martos, I. (2016). Variación de la –d final de palabra en Madrid: ¿prestigio
abierto o encubierto?. Boletín de Filología, LI, 2.
Paredes García, F. (2006). Leísmo, laísmo y loísmo en la lengua hablada de Madrid
(barrio de Salamanca), Lingüística Española Actual, 28/2, 191-220.
Paredes García, F. (2015). Nuevos datos sobre el uso y las funciones de los
pronombres átonos de tercera persona en Madrid. In A. M. Cestero, I. Molina
and F. Paredes (eds.). Patrones sociolingüísticos de Madrid (pp. 177-250).
Bern: Peter Lang.
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PATTERNS OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE IN THE ANDALUSIAN
Juan Antonio Moya Corral
[email protected]
University of Granada
María de la Sierra Tejada Giráldez
[email protected]
University of Jaén
Keywords: Sociolinguistic patterns, convergence, divergence, varieties of Spanish.
The Andalusian Spanish is the variety characterized by its evolutionary trend. However,
studies conducted in recent decades have allowed us to know with some precision the
guidelines governing each of the processes and the general patterns that these
processes undergo.
We will not focus on the features that have traditionally been specific estimate of the
Andalusian dialect neither in the features that are often valued as prestigious, we can
distinguish two types of changes submit to different operating patterns and, in turn,
manifest different linguistic and social features.
On the one hand, it should be noted the changes that go up and down. These changes
are characterized by: 1) be relatively recent, 2) extend from a given point and driven by
a generational group given 3) be convergent with the national standard, 4) be
prestigious (open prestige) and 5) be common to the entire eastern Andalusia (where
they have studied in depth), although we consider lesser extent also act in the West.
On the other hand, it is essential to refer to linguistic effects induced as a result of the
elision of the /-s/ implosive. Note that this segment reaches even 100% of losses in all
contexts.
In this case, it is about changes ranging from the bottom up and they characterized in
that: 1) are not recent phenomena, 2) have different solutions, 3) involve different
prestige and 4) divide the territory into areas of different linguistic behavior, one area to
the east and another area west.
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CONVERGENT AND DIVERGENT PATTERNS BETWEEN THE SPEECH
COMMUNITY OF LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA AND OTHER SPANISH
MAINLAND AND AMERICAN VARIETIES
José Antonio Samper Padilla
[email protected]
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Marta Samper Hernández
[email protected]
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Clara Eugenia Hernández Cabrera
[email protected]
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Keywords: Sociolinguistic patterns, convergence, divergence, varieties of Spanish.
Many scholars have highlighted the central role of the Spanish from the Canary Islands
within the Hispanic dialectal panorama. In our communication we will rely primarily
on the results of the sociolinguistic studies, developed within the framework of
the PRESEEA project, on the phonological segment /d/ in the intervocalic
position and the personalization of the verb haber, in order to establish similarities
and differences with respect to other dialectal modalities from both sides of the
Atlantic.
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THE MYSTERIES OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER IN GERMANIC*: WHY IS
PRECISELY GENDER USED FOR IDENTITY PURPOSES?
*(EXCL. ENGLISH)
ORGANISERS:
Leonie Cornips
The Meertens Institute and University of Maastricht
Frans Gregersen
The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre
Keywords: Gender, identity signalling, variation in acquisition, Germanic.
The panel starts from the observation that in a number of Germanic languages such as
Dutch (Jenny Audring, Leonie Cornips), German (Heike Wiese), Norwegian (Opsahl
2009, Opsahl and Nistov 2010), and Danish (Quist 2005, Cornips and Gregersen
2011), gender is used by second language or multiethnolect speakers in different ways
than first language speakers. This is also the case for heritage speakers, which can be
seen in case studies from the heritage language American Norwegian (Johannessen
and Larsson 2015, Lohndal & Westergaard 2016) Taking a closer look, however,
almost always reveals that the gender category is variable also in first language users'
usage both semantically and as to assignment of gender to specific lexical items
(Audring 2006, Wiese and Pinango 2014, Cornips and Gregersen fthc). In that respect
and because gender is variously entrenched in the grammatical system, gender may
be termed a potentially vulnerable category. We also see this in Norway, where the
three-gender system in several dialects is replaced by a two-gender system, which has
been documented both through corpora and experimental studies (Lødrup 2011 for
Oslo, Rodina & Westergaard 2015 for Tromsø, Busterud, Lohndal, Rodina &
Westergaard in progress for Trondheim, and Lohndal & Westergaard 2016 for multiple
other dialects). This is parallel to the development reducing the Danish dialect three
gender systems to two gender systems in a process which has been labelled as
simplification (Pedersen 1999). And to the development towards a one gender system
in Dutch documented in Cornips and Hulk 2008.
In this panel we want to assemble a number of specialist researchers who will address
these questions engendered by parallel variational processes in European Germanic
gender from their various perspectives and with special reference to their preferred
data sources.
The panel format is intended for a group of researchers to concentrate on an issue of
common interest. It may lead to a joint focused publication in the guise of a special
issue as indeed we hope that this will.
As for references please cf. Lohndal & Westergaard:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00344/full
Most of the references mentioned above are quoted there.
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1. WEIGHING PSYCHOLINGUISTIC AND SOCIAL EXPLANATIONS FOR
SEMANTIC GENDER IN DUTCH. Gunther de Vogelaer. Universität Münster. Lien
de Vos. Université de Liège. Gert de Sutter. Universiteit Gent
2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER IN VARIETIES OF NORWEGIAN. Terje
Lohndal. NTNU, Trondheim. Marit Westergaard. UiT, The Arctic University of
Norway
3. THE ACQUISITION OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER OF THE (IN)DEFINITE
DETERMINER IN DANISH AND DUTCH BY MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL
CHILDREN. Frans Gregersen. The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre.
Leonie Cornips. The Meertens Institute and University of Maastricht
4. DEAD BUT WON’T LIE DOWN? – GRAMMATICAL GENDER AMONG YOUNG
NORWEGIANS. Toril Opsahl. University of Oslo
5. GRAMMATICAL GENDER FROM A COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE CONTACT
PERSPECTIVE. Suzanne Aalberse. University of Amsterdam. Maartje Hoekstra.
University of Amsterdam
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WEIGHING PSYCHOLINGUISTIC AND SOCIAL EXPLANATIONS FOR SEMANTIC
GENDER IN DUTCH
Gunther De Vogelaer
Universität Münster
Lien De Vos
Université de Liège
Gert De Sutter
Universiteit Gent
It is well-known, and well-investigated, that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of
resemanticisation, in which highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with
masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with neuter het,
irrespective of their grammatical gender (Audring 2009). The process is traditionally
explained psycholinguistically, in that it is triggered to a large extent by the loss of
adnominal gender agreement, which is rendering distinctions between masculine and
feminine nouns opaque, and forces speakers to resort to semantic default strategies
(De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). At the same time, the masculine-feminine distinction
carries social meaning, as it is associated with southern Dutch varieties, and there
especially maintained in non-standard registers (Plevoets, Speelman & Geeraerts
2009). Our talk sets out to weigh the importance of structural vis-à-vis social factors in
pronominal gender agreement in southern Dutch, using the southern component of the
Spoken Dutch Corpus (yielding a sample of some 3 million words). It will be shown
that, even though semantic agreement as such carries no significant social meaning, it
interacts in complex ways with register variation and speakers' social variables and is
primed by Standard Dutch articles and adjectival endings. Regarding the topic of the
panel, our data show that the knowledge underlying gender agreement in Dutch is
unavoidably unevenly distributed over the speech community, which creates a potential
for gender agreement to assume social meaning. While our data do not provides us
indications as to the reason why this has not (yet) happened in the case of
resemanticed pronominal gender, it can be observed that similar changes (e.g.,
feminine gender agreement, haar-ziekte 'her-disease') do carry social meaning, which
can be related to the fact that they are processed differently than the neuter pronouns
involved in resemanticisation (De Vogelaer, Poarch & Schimke, forthcoming).
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER IN VARIETIES OF NORWEGIAN
Terje Lohndal
NTNU Trondheim
Marit Westergaard
UiT, The Arctic University of Norway
In this paper, we will discuss recent research on the gender system of Norwegian
dialects. It is well known that certain dialects have changed from a three-gender to a
two-gender system (Jahr 1998, 2001; Lødrup 2011; Trudgill 2013). Interestingly, a
surprising finding in recent years is that feminine gender appears to be in the process
of being lost also in dialects where there traditional three-gender system has been
assumed to be quite stable in the spoken language, such as the city of Tromsø
(Rodina & Westergaard 2015). This has led to the question whether the loss of the
feminine gender reflects a general development in Norwegian taking place at the
current time, or whether this is a process that is only found in Tromsø. An indication
that this is a general development in many parts of Norway is found in Lohndal &
Westergaard (2016), who have investigated the Nordic Dialect Corpus (Johannessen
et al. 2009) and found that overall, feminine gender forms are attested 18.2%
(514/2828) among older speakers (age 50 and above) and only 5.4% (66/1214) among
younger speakers (age 30 and below). However, a recent master thesis (Alsos 2016)
has found that there is a considerable difference between the city dialect of Tromsø
and the dialect spoken in a close-by rural area (Kvaløya). Furthermore, Lundquist et al.
(forthcoming) have carried out an eyetracking study comparing the processing of
gender to production data, both in Tromsø as well as a small village further south
(Sortland), finding that the feminine gender forms are more stable in the village. Thus,
there may be significant differences in the rate of the development, depending e.g. on
an urban-rural distinction.
In order to investigate this main question, we have conducted the same study as was
carried out in Tromsø by Rodina & Westergaard (2015) in the city of Trondheim in the
middle of Norway. Trondheim is interesting for at least two reasons: It is a considerably
larger city than Tromsø, and it is also much closer to Oslo. If it is the case that the
current development of the feminine gander is the result of a change that has started in
Oslo and then spread to other urban areas, then the Trondheim dialect should clearly
be affected by this process. On the other hand, the dialect spoken in Trondheim and
the surrounding area is quite distinct from Eastern Norwegian and might thus be
expected to have retained the feminine to a larger extent.
The Trondheim study shows that the feminine is virtually unattested for children below
grade 7. The masculine and the neuter are used in a target-consistent fashion,
although the masculine is overgeneralized to neuter nouns in the youngest age group,
in line with findings from Tromsø showing that neuter is not fully acquired until the age
of 7. Among adolescents and adults, the feminine is used 16% and 35% of the time,
respectively, which is considerably less than in Tromsø where the figures are 56% and
99% respectively. We will discuss the nature of these findings and what they tell us
about the nature of gender more generally.
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THE ACQUISITION OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER OF THE (IN)DEFINITE
DETERMINER IN DANISH AND DUTCH BY MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL
CHILDREN
Frans Gregersen
The University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre
Leonie Cornips
The Meertens Institute and University of Maastricht
The aim of our talk is to examine child acquisition of the grammatical gender of the
(in)definite determiner in Dutch and Danish. Dutch and Danish are very similar in
gender marking. They both have a two-way common versus neuter distinction with
common outnumbering neuter nouns and both have an almost arbitrary lexical gender
assignment.
Important dissimilarities are that the determiner in Danish is prenominal in indefinites
and complex DP’s but the gendered definite article is postnominal in simple DP’s.
Determiners in Dutch are always prenominal. Further, Danish has more morphological
gender marking than Dutch. Calibrating the cross-linguistic differences and similarities,
both languages are extremely close to each other on the typological gender cline from
gender central (Greek) to gender indifferent languages (Afrikaans) (Duke 2009):
Greek-Icelandic-Norwegian-German-Danish-Dutch-English-Afrikaans
Since Danish has more morphological input cues for gender than Dutch, the
predictions are that:
•
•
•
monolingual and bilingual children will acquire grammatical gender of the definite
determiner in Danish faster than monolinguals and bilinguals in Dutch;
bilinguals lag significantly behind monolinguals in Dutch, and
bilinguals are like monolinguals in Danish.
The children’s knowledge of grammatical gender marking on determiners in Dutch and
Danish was tested using two elicited production tasks (Unsworth 2008; Unsworth et al.
2011a,b), namely by a (i) picture description task eliciting an (in)definite determiner in
either a simple (Det-N) or complex (Det-Adj-N) DP and (ii) a Story task in which the
child is expected to complement a sentence presented by the interviewer showing the
relevant pictures. The general set-up of the picture description task was that the
children are presented with pictures of the nouns in question on a computer screen and
first asked to name them, thereby eliciting an indefinite noun. Subsequently, they were
asked a question about the same object (e.g., “Which object is brown?”) or prompted to
describe the position of another object relative to the object of interest (e.g. “The ball is
in front of … (child: … the (yellow) robot”), thereby eliciting a definite determiner in
either a simple (Det-N) or complex (Det-Adj-N) DP. This procedure and tests are an
exact repetition of the ones used by Unsworth and Hulk (2010). Each noun was elicited
once in a simple DP (det-N) and twice in a complex DP (det-Adj-N). In both tests, the
participants were given 12 items, including 6 neuter and 6 common ones.
In the Story task, the experimenter explains that he or she will tell the child three short
stories, and that the child should help with this task. The child is expected to
complement a sentence presented by the interviewer while a PowerPoint shows the
relevant pictures (see Unsworth 2008; Unsworth and Hulk 2010). All children
(monolingual and bilingual) in this study were classified according to their scores on the
standardised Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT- III-NL) (Dunn et al. 2005; Dunn
& Dunn 2007).
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In this study, 59 monolingual and children participated for Dutch, aged between 4;1
and 6;0. The bilinguals have the following language backgrounds: Moroccan
Arabic/Berber, Turkish, Polish, Dari and Rumanian. For Danish, 65 monolingual and
bilingual children were tested. The bilinguals have the following language backgrounds:
Moroccan, Arabic, Urdu, Somali, Kurdish, Nepali, Turkish and Azerbaijani.
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DEAD, BUT WON’T LIE DOWN? – GRAMMATICAL GENDER AMONG YOUNG
NORWEGIANS
Toril Opsahl
Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (University of Oslo)
The Norwegian grammatical gender system is subject to several developmental
processes. The feminine gender is on the edge of disappearing among speakers of
many Norwegian varieties, including dialects which previously had strong three-gender
systems (Lødrup 2011, Rodina & Westergaard 2015, Lohndal & Westergaard 2016).
Neuter gender is also under pressure, and the masculine–or common–gender takes on
the role as what appears to be a strong ruler among speakers in some urban,
multilingual speech communities (Opsahl 2009). Some of these changes are probably
contact induced; similar developments regarding feminine and/or neuter are attested
among speakers of Northern contact varieties (Conzett et al. 2011), and the heritage
language American Norwegian (Lohndal & Westergaard 2016, Johannessen & Larsson
2016).
A three- or two-gender system is not–or at least seldom–a prerequisite for the
establishment of mutual understanding in conversation. Gender is in such a
perspective not only a vulnerable but also a “meaningless” category. This paper
represents the point of view that grammatical gender is in fact highly meaningful,
especially within the Norwegian context. The minor official Norwegian written variety
‘Nynorsk’–which is heavily stigmatized among many young Norwegians (cf. for
instance Vangsnes 2013)–has a three-gender system. Hence, to be able to participate
in the Nynorsk written culture, some knowledge and preservation of grammatical
gender is necessary. In the official written variety used by the majority of Norwegians,
‘Bokmål’, it is possible to avoid feminine gender all together. Some teachers teaching
Norwegian as a second or foreign language highlight the avoidance of three gender
systems as a means to facilitate the learning process (cf. MacDonald 1997). The
official written varieties are not the main object of study in this paper, however; the
paper rather focuses on how gender is meaningful in the sense that it is exploited as a
means to express, project and negotiate particular personae and identities in everyday
interaction, including social media expressions. This includes expressions of which
some are characteristic of multiethnolectal speech styles (Opsahl 2009, Opsahl &
Nistov 2010). Others are part of novel stylistic expressions revitalizing the feminine
gender (Opsahl (in progress)). Grammatical gender is thus part of interactional
meaningful events, also among speakers of varieties which are said to have lost a
three-gender system. “Novel” expressions of grammatical gender may be seen as
unsystematic, or parallel, developments, unrelated to other ongoing developmental
processes. Nevertheless, they are present, and they are at some level meaningful.
This raises questions both theoretically and empirically on how to describe and
understand grammatical variation, and add even more color to the overall picture of the
mysteries of gender in Germanic.
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GRAMMATICAL GENDER FROM A COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE CONTACT
PERSPECTIVE
Suzanne Aalberse
University of Amsterdam
Maartje Hoekstra
University of Amsterdam
This talk will consider domains of vulnerability in gender marking from a comparative
language contact perspective. Germanic languages generally show deflection, but the
speed of the deflection process differs per language community. Weerman (2009)
relates the speed and the extent of deflection in the Germanic languages to the effects
of language contact. Weerman builds on the observation by Van Haaringen (1956) that
that Dutch is in between German and English with regards to many linguistic changes.
Weerman explains this pattern in terms of levels of language contact. The van
Haeringen-pattern is illustrated in (1) below showing that all three languages shared
features in some point of history and that the extent to which these features were
retained differs per language.
(1) Van Haeringen pattern
English
Dutch
German
Old Stage
++
++
++
Present stage
-
+
++
The Van Haeringen pattern holds nicely for lexical gender, German has retained three
lexical genders, English has lost lexical gender all together and Dutch is in between: it
only distinguishes common from neuter gender. When we look at the role for lexical
and semantic gender agreement per language, the pattern also holds: German has
retained a system that shows gender agreement on a lexical basis except for some
words at the ends of the individuation hierarchy (see Kraaikamp 2017), Dutch shows
more semantic agreement in the pronominal domain and English has semantic
agreement only. Dutch is unique in showing semantic agreement with the feature
[countable] for objects (Kraaikamp 2017). Countable objects have semantic agreement
with the masculine pronoun whereas mass shows semantic agreement with the neuter
pronoun (Audring 2009, Kraaikamp 2017).
The working hypothesis in this talk is that developments in the English lexical system
are developments that are likely to occur in language contact-situations. We present
pilot-studies on contact-varieties of Dutch (bilingual language acquisition, monolingual
language acquisition, pronominal reference in monolingual and bilingual teens)
suggesting that in the realm of pronominal reference, Dutch is indeed moving towards
the English system, because contact varieties show more semantic agreement and
because contact varieties seem to be sensitive only to the feature [human] and not the
feature [countable] in using semantic agreement.
References:
Audring, J. (2009). Reinventing pronoun gender (Doctoral dissertation, LOT).
Kraaikamp, M. (2017). Semantic versus lexical gender. Synchronic and diachronic
variation in Germanic gender agreement. (Doctoral dissertation, LOT).
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Weerman, F. 2006. It’s the economy, stupid. Een vergelijkende blik op men en man. In:
M. Hüning, U.Vogl, T. van der Wouden & A. Verhagen. Nederlands tussen
Duits en Engels. Leiden: Stichting Neerlandistiek Leiden. 19-47.
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EXTENDING THE SCOPE OF LECTOMETRY I:
FROM DIALECTS TO GLOBAL VARIETIES
ORGANISERS:
Jocelyne Daems
QLVL, University of Leuven
Karlien Franco
QLVL, University of Leuven
Laura Rosseel
QLVL, University of Leuven
Melanie Röthlisberger
QLVL, University of Leuven
Keywords: Dialectometry, stylometry,
aggregated distance measures.
sociolectometry,
language
perception,
This panel aims to showcase research in the field of lectometry. In this field,
quantitative measures are employed to aggregate over linguistic variables in order to
establish the relative similarity (or distance) between different lects. These lects are
collections of linguistic features that can vary along any extra-linguistic contextual
dimension in the broadest sense possible (Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema 1994:
4). Given the definition above, several fields of linguistic research fall within the scope
of lectometry. Specifically, in dialectometry, stylometry, sociolectometry and language
perception research, distances between lects are studied along the geographical,
discursive, social and subjective axis respectively. In this panel, we aim to highlight the
range of research questions that can be addressed against the background of
lectometry.
Firstly, the geographical axis of lectometry is developed in dialectometry. In traditional
dialectometric research, the relative (dis)similarity between dialects is established by
aggregating over a large set of dialectal features (e.g. Goebl 2006, Heeringa 2004,
Nerbonne and Kleiweg 2003, Séguy 1971, Szmrecsanyi 2013). Recently, however, the
field of dialectometry is witnessing a trend of widening its scope from dialects to
sociolects (e.g. Hansen 2012, Wieling, Nerbonne and Baayen 2011).
Secondly, stylometry and register analysis are situated along the discursive axis of
lectometry. In stylometric studies, the distribution of linguistic features in texts provides
insight into the ways in which authors have individual and thus distinguishable styles
(e.g. Grieve 2007, Luyckx and Daelemans 2011). Also related to the discursive axis are
studies like Biber (1995), which looks into how text types/genres vary, positioning them,
for instance, along functional dimensions such as ‘involvedness’ or ‘narration’.
The third field of study related to lectometry, sociolectometry, considers language
variation in relation to traditional factors such as age, gender or region. A prime
example of a sociolectometric study is Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999),
which examines lexical variables in order to measure the relation between the two main
national varieties of Dutch. Expanding on this early work in sociolectometry, Speelman,
Grondelaers and Geeraerts (2003) and Ruette et al. (2014) introduce more elaborate
quantitative techniques such as cluster analysis and multi-dimensional scaling.
Advanced methodological techniques, like Semantic Vector Space models in Ruette,
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Ehret and Szmrecsanyi (2016), have recently been employed in sociolectometry as
well.
The fourth field of study that falls within the scope of lectometry, language perception
research, is situated along the subjective axis. So far, lectometry has mainly focused
on measuring distances between varieties based on language production data.
However, measuring subjective distances on the basis of language perception and
attitudes would offer a valuable addition. This avenue is still relatively unexplored
compared to the three fields above, but studies like Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) or
Van Bezooijen and Heeringa (2006) certainly offer a steppingstone to further
developing this aspect of lectometry.
To sum up, lectometry offers an interesting umbrella perspective for the
aforementioned fields measuring distances between language varieties along different
axes. The aim of this panel is to catalogue the range of different lectometric
approaches and the ways in which they can reinforce each other. More specifically,
research questions include but are not restricted to the following ones:
1. How can insights from different linguistic fields (e.g. Cognitive Linguistics)
inform lectometric research?
2. Do text types in contact situations exhibit the same dimensional patterns as in
more traditional settings?
3. How does sociolinguistic variation (in the narrow sense) influence dialectometric
results?
4. Which methods and datasets are available that can be used to combine
different approaches to language variation (e.g. geographical, stylistic and
social variation) into one comprehensive framework?
5. Can social psychological attitude measures recently adopted in linguistic
perception research (e.g. Speelman et al. 2013, Pantos and Perkins 2012)
provide interesting tools to measure subjective distances between
languages/language varieties?
This panel is divided in two parts1 according to how the contributions expand and
innovate current research lines in lectometry. The first and present part brings together
papers that expand the scope of lectometry from the more traditional dialects to global
varieties. The second part of the panel focuses on lectometric research that introduces
new methods and linguistic features into the field. The first part is preceded by a short
introduction by the organizers and the panel’s keynote speaker, Martijn Wieling
(Winner of the 2016 European Young Research Award), who will be talking about
“Generalized additive modeling as a useful tool for dialectometry.” Both talks will
emphasize how the papers in the two parts of the panel are interconnected and invite
discussion and interaction between the various strands of research represented by our
participants. Our panel concludes with a discussion slot, led by Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk
1
As agreed with the local organizers, we are submitting a twofold panel. Abstracts for the other
part can be found in the respective submission (“Extending the scope of lectometry II: New
methods and features”). Both parts are to be scheduled one after the other as to ensure
maximal interaction between all researchers involved and to emphasize the fact that both parts
make up one themed session. 132
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Speelman, which will bring together ideas put forward in both parts of the panel. In
addition, there will be a focus on perception research, the subfield of lectometry
underrepresented in this panel, and how we can encourage scholars in this field to
enter into dialogue with lectometric work.
References:
Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison.
Cambrigde: Cambrigde University Press.
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Speelman (1999). Convergentie en divergentie in
de Nederlandse woordenschat: een onderzoek naar kleding- en voetbaltermen.
Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens-Instituut.
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers and P. Bakema (1994). The Structure of Lexical
Variation. Meaning, Naming, and Context. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 5).
Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Goebl, H. (2006). Recent advances in Salzburg dialectometry. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 21(4), 411–435.
Gooskens, C. and W. Heeringa (2004). Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect
distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data. Language Variation and
Change 16(3), 189–207.
Grieve, J. (2007). Quantitative Authorship Attribution: An Evaluation of Techniques.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 22(3), 251–270.
Hansen, S. (2012). Dialektalität, Dialektwissen und Hyperdialektalität aus
soziolinguistischer Perspektive. In S. Hansen, C. Schwarz, P. Stoeckle and T.
Streck (eds.). Dialectological and Folk Dialectological Concepts of Space.
Current Methods and Perspectives in Sociolinguistic Research on Dialect
Change (pp. 48–74). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Heeringa, W. (2004). Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein
Distance. PhD thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Luyckx, K. and W. Daelemans (2011). The effect of author set size and data size in
authorship attribution. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26(1), 35–55.
Nerbonne, J. and P. Kleiweg (2003). Lexical distance in LAMSAS. Computers and the
Humanities 37(3), 339–357.
Pantos, A. J. and A. W. Perkins (2012). Measuring implicit and explicit attitudes toward
foreign accented speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 32(1), 3–
20.
Ruette, T., D. Geeraerts, Y. Peirsman and D. Speelman (2014). Semantic weighting
mechanisms in scalable lexical sociolectometry. In B. Szmrecsanyi and B.
Wälchli (eds.). Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis:
Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech (pp. 205–230). Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter.
Séguy, J. (1971). La relation entre la distance spatiale et la distance lexicale. Revue de
Linguistique Romane 35(138), 335–357.
Speelman, D., A. Spruyt, L. Impe and D. Geeraerts (2013). Language attitudes
revisited: auditory affective priming. Journal of Pragmatics 52, 83–92.
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Speelman, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Geeraerts (2003). Profile-based linguistic
uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers
and the Humanities 37(3), 317–337.
Szmrecsanyi, B. (2013). Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects: A Study in
Corpus-Based Dialectometry. (Studies in English Language). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Van Bezooijen, R. and W. Heeringa (2006). Intuitions on linguistic distance:
geographically or linguistically based? In T. Koole, J. Nortier and B. Tahitu
(eds.). Artikelen van de Vijfde Sociolinguïstische Conferentie (pp. 77–87). Delft:
Eburon.
Wieling, M., J. Nerbonne and R. H. Baayen (2011). Quantitative social dialectology:
Explaining linguistic variation geographically and socially. PLoS ONE 6(9),
e23613.
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1. KEYNOTE: GENERALIZED ADDITIVE MODELING AS A USEFUL TOOL FOR
DIALECTOMETRY. Martijn Wieling. University of Groningen
2. A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO SWISS GERMAN DIALECT SYNTAX. Yves
Scherrer. Université de Genève. Philipp Stoeckle. Universität Zürich
3. MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF DIALECT/STANDARD REPERTOIRES: ON THE
USE OF SOCIOLECTOMETRIC METHODS. Anne-Sophie Ghyselen. University of
Ghent
4. MEASURING LANGUAGE CONTACT IN GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE. Xulio Sousa.
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
5. SE CONSTRUCTIONS IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN
PORTUGUESE AND THE CLITIC LOSS, MAINTENANCE AND INSERTION: A
CORPUS-BASED SOCIOLECTOMETRIC AND SOCIOCOGNITIVE ANALYSIS.
Augusto Soares da Silva. Catholic University of Portugal, Braga.
Dafne Palú. Catholic University of Portugal, Braga.
6. INVESTIGATING GEOGRAPHIC AND REGISTER VARIATION IN WORLD
ENGLISHES. Axel Bohmann. The University of Texas at Austin
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KEYNOTE: GENERALIZED ADDITIVE MODELING AS A USEFUL TOOL FOR
DIALECTOMETRY
Martijn Wieling
University of Groningen
Keywords: Generalized additive modeling, dialectometry, articulatory data, atlas data.
In this presentation I will introduce and explain a relatively new statistical tool,
generalized additive modeling (Wood, 2006), which is excellently suited for
quantitatively analyzing dialect data. Generalized additive modeling allows the
researcher to model flexible (i.e. non-linear) patterns in large datasets. In this
presentation, I will illustrate the use of generalized additive modeling by focusing on
two types of dialect data. The first type of analysis focuses on modeling the influence of
geography on dialect variation. Rather than the usual dialectometric approach of only
focusing on the influence of geography, the generalized additive framework allows the
researcher to take into account the complex, non-linear influence of geography, while
simultaneously taking into account various sociolinguistic predictors, such as gender of
age of the speaker. This approach is illustrated by analyzing a large set of Dutch
dialect atlas data (Wieling et al., 2011; Ko et al., 2014). The second type of dialect data
covered in this presentation is rather new and involves articulatory data, i.e. the
movement of tongue and lips during speech. In this part I will focus on a dialect study
(Wieling et al., 2015; submitted) conducted onsite at two schools in the Netherlands,
one in the north and one further south. The two schools were located on opposite sides
of a strong dialect border. While high school pupils were naming different images in
their local dialect, their tongue movement trajectories were measured via three sensors
attached to the tongue. In this case, using generalized additive modeling allowed us to
analyze the non-linear trajectories of all three sensors over time. Our analysis revealed
striking differences between the two dialects with a tongue position which was
generally further back for the speakers from the north of the Netherlands. As such, this
is the first study which has provided quantitative evidence of differences in articulatory
settings at the dialect level.
References:
Ko, V., M. Wieling, E. Wit, J. Nerbonne and W. Krijnen (2014). Social, geographical,
and lexical influence on Dutch dialect pronunciations. Computational Linguistics
in the Netherlands Journal 4, 29-38.
Wieling, M., J. Nerbonne and R. H. Baayen (2011). Quantitative Social Dialectology:
Explaining Linguistic Variation Geographically and Socially. PLOS ONE 6(9),
e23613.
Wieling, M., F. Tomaschek, D. Arnold, M. Tiede and R. H. Baayen (2015). Investigating
dialectal differences using articulography. Proceedings of ICPhS 2015,
Glasgow, August 10-14.
Wieling, M., F. Tomaschek, D. Arnold, M. Tiede, F. Bröker, S. Thiele, S. N. Wood and
R. H. Baayen. Investigating dialectal differences using articulography. Revised
version submitted (July 29, 2015) to Journal of Phonetics.
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A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO SWISS GERMAN DIALECT SYNTAX
Yves Scherrer
Université de Genève
Philipp Stoeckle
Universität Zürich
Keywords: Dialect syntax, socio-demographic variation, Swiss German, dialectometry.
In the last decades, dialectometry has emerged as a new field of dialectology. As this
kind of research requires large amounts of data, many dialectometric studies used data
from “traditional” dialect atlases (e. g. ALF, AIS, RND) which were collected by
investigating representatives of the oldest dialects available in the survey locations (i.e.
the so-called NORMs, cf. Chambers and Trudgill 2004: 29). Moreover, these data
contained mostly lexical and phonological (and sometimes morphological) variables,
while syntactic phenomena are largely absent in traditional atlases.
In this paper we would like to present results of a dialectometric study that focuses on
three aspects which have not been given much attention in previous research. The first
aspect concerns the research area, German-speaking Switzerland. Although it is one
of the liveliest and at the same time best researched dialect areas in Central Europe,
until recently (cf. Goebl, Scherrer and Smečka 2013, Scherrer and Stoeckle accepted)
there have been very few dialectometric studies in this area (cf. Kelle 2001). The
second aspect regards the investigated linguistic level: our analyses are based on
syntax data from the Syntactic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (‘Syntaktischer
Atlas der deutschen Schweiz’, SADS; cf. Glaser and Bart 2015) which were collected
between 2000 and 2002 in 383 locations German-speaking Switzerland. A special
characteristic of this atlas – which leads to the third aspect we will focus on – lies in the
large number of informants and their varying socio-demographic backgrounds.
Whereas in traditional atlas projects, generally one or two representatives were
interviewed at each survey location, in the SADS a total of almost 3200 informants
participated in the survey (i. e. on average about 8 speakers per location). This gives
us not only the possibility to work with frequency instead of binary data for each
location, but more importantly, this setting allows us to include socio-demographic
variables into our analyses.
In other geographic and sociolinguistic contexts, extralinguistic variables other than
geography turned out to be important explanatory factors for dialect variation (cf.
Hansen-Morath 2016, Hansen-Morath and Stoeckle 2014). As for German-speaking
Switzerland, various studies focusing on single phenomena from the SADS revealed
high correlations between syntactic and socio-demographic variation (cf. Stoeckle
accepted, Friedli 2012, Richner-Steiner 2011). However, it is still unclear whether this
correlation can be observed for aggregated data and what role socio-demographic
variables play in explaining syntactic variation.
In order to answer these questions, we will pursue a twofold approach. On the one
hand, we will create different subsets with respect to socio-demographic variables and
perform dialectometric analyses for each of these subsets. A comparison of the results
will help to answer the question whether a change in the geographic dialect structuring
can be observed. On the other hand, we will perform regression analyses in order to
determine the importance of different extralinguistic factors in explaining linguistic
variation. Finally, the results will have to be interpreted in the light of the specific Swiss-
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German diaglossic situation, where (contrary to many other contexts) change toward
both dialectal and standard structures can be observed.
References:
Gilléron, J. and E. Édmont (1902–1910). Atlas linguistique de la France, vol. 9. Paris:
Champion.
K. Jaberg and J. Jud (1928–1940). Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der
Südschweiz, vol. 8. Zofingen: Ringier.
E. Blancquaert and W. Pée (1925–1982). Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen. 16 vol
Antwerp: De Sikkel.
Chambers, J. K. and P. Trudgill (2004). Dialectology. 2nd edition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Friedli, M. (2012). Der Komparativanschluss im Schweizerdeutschen: Arealität,
Variation und Wandel. Dissertation Universität Zürich.
Glaser, E. and G. Bart (2015). Dialektsyntax des Schweizerdeutschen. In R. Kehrein,
A. Lameli and S. Rabanus (eds.). Regionale Variation des Deutschen. Projekte
und Perspektiven (pp. 81–107). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Goebl,
H., Y. Scherrer and P. Smečka (2013). Kurzbericht über die
Dialektometrisierung des Gesamtnetzes des „Sprachatlasses der deutschen
Schweiz“ (SDS). In K. Schneider-Wiejowski, B. Kellermeier-Rehbein, J.
Haselhuber (eds.). Vielfalt, Variation und Stellung der deutschen Sprache (pp.
153–176). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Hansen-Morath, S. (2016). Regionale und soziolinguistische Variation im
alemannischen Dreiländereck. Quantitative Studien zum Dialektwandel.
Dissertation Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
Hansen-Morath, S. and P. Stoeckle (2014). Regionaldialekte im alemannischen
Dreiländereck – ‚objektive‘ und ‚subjektive‘ Perspektiven. In P. Bergmann, K.
Birkner, P. Gilles, H. Spiekermann and T. Streck (eds.). Sprache im Gebrauch:
räumlich, zeitlich, interaktional (pp. 175–192). Heidelberg: Winter.
Kelle, B.. (2001). Zur Typologie der Dialekte in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz: Ein
dialektometrischer Versuch. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 9, 9–34.
Richner-Steiner, J. (2011). ‘E ganz e liebi Frau’. Zu den Stellungsvarianten des
indefiniten Artikels in der adverbiell erweiterten Nominalphrase im
Schweizerdeutschen. Eine dialektologische Untersuchung mit quantitativgeographischem Fokus. Dissertation Universität Zürich.
Scherrer, Y. and P. Stoeckle (accepted). A quantitative approach to Swiss German –
Dialectometric analyses and comparisons of linguistic levels. Dialectologia et
Geolinguistica.
Stoeckle, P. (accepted). Zur Syntax von afa (‚anfangen‘) im Schweizerdeutschen –
Kookkurrenzen, Variation und Wandel. In A. Speyer (ed.), Syntax aus
Saarbrücker Sicht 2. Beiträge der SaRDiS-Tagung zur Dialektsyntax. Stuttgart:
Steiner.
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MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF DIALECT/STANDARD REPERTOIRES: ON THE
USE OF SOCIOLECTOMETRIC METHODS
Anne-Sophie Ghyselen
University of Ghent
Keywords: Sociolectometry, Dutch, dialect/standard repertoire.
In his by now famous 2005-article, Auer distinguishes five types of dialect/standard
constellations in Europe: (1) exoglossic diglossia, (2) medial diglossia, (3) spoken
diglossia, (4) diaglossia, and (5) dialect loss repertoires. His theoretical framework has
served as a starting point for several European linguists characterising the language
repertoires in their research areas (see e.g. Rys and Taeldeman 2007, Gooskens and
Kürschner 2009, Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 2009), and has raised
interest in generalizable patterns and dynamics. In this paper, I will discuss how
(socio)lectometric research can play a pivotal role in attempts to empirically map the
range and internal structure of language repertoires on both the level of the individual
as on the level of the speech community. Corpus data on the language behaviour of 30
Flemish women in 5 communicative speech contexts (Ghyselen 2016) will serve as
input. On the basis of these data, I will illustrate how a multivariate analysis of 31
linguistic variables yields insight in the internal structure, i.e. the components and the
distance between those components, of a dialect/standard continuum. Three statistical
methods will be reviewed: (1) correspondence analysis, (2) cluster analysis, and (3)
multidimensional scaling. It will be shown how these methods are ideally combined and
complemented to gain an in-depth understanding of the structure and dynamics of
speech repertoires.
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe's sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera and D.
Geeraerts (eds.). Perspectives on variation: Sociolinguistic, Historical,
Comparative (pp. 7–42). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Ghyselen, A.-S. (2016). Verticale structuur en dynamiek van het gesproken Nederlands
in Vlaanderen: een empirische studie in Ieper, Gent en Antwerpen. Gent:
Universiteit Gent doctoraatsverhandeling.
Gooskens, C. and S. Kürschner (2009). Cross border intelligibility - on the intelligibility
of Low German among speakers of Danish and Dutch. Zeitschrift für
Dialektologie und Linguistic 138, 273–297.
Hernández-Campoy, J. M. and J. A. Villena-Ponsoda (2009). Standardness and
nonstandardness in Spain: dialect attrition and revitalization of regional dialects
of Spanish. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 196/197, 181–
214.
Rys, K. and J. Taeldeman (2007). Fonologische ingrediënten van Vlaamse tussentaal.
In D. Sandra, R. Rymenans, P. Cuvelier and P. Van Petegem (eds.). Tussen
taal, spelling en onderwijs. Essays bij het emeritaat van Frans Daems (pp. 1–8).
Gent: Academia Press.
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MEASURING LANGUAGE CONTACT IN GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE
Xulio Sousa
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Keywords: Language contact, aggregate analysis, dialectometry, geolingusitics.
The quantitative analysis of linguistic data has been employed in variationist studies in
order to discover relationships between varieties and patterns of behaviour in features
that were hidden to traditional methodologies (Goebl 2006). Dialectrometric studies are
helping to understand in a more complete manner the spatial organisation of the
varieties, similitudes and distances that occur between readings. In the field of
variationist studies, this quantitative methodology tends to be applied in order to
analyse varieties within a linguistic domain, independently of its extension (Wieling
2011).
Traditionally, dialectology has been concerned with lexical transfers between varieties
associated with a single language, with special attention given to the regional and
diachronic spread of particular forms. Less often, the discipline examines lexical
transfers between varieties attributed to different languages and the spread of new
forms over a linguistic area (Haspelmath 2009). This contribution seeks to demonstrate
in what manner the dialectrometric procedures can also be employed in order to
analyse the contact between linguistic varieties. The procedures popularized by the
Salzburg dialectometric school can be employed to detect patterns of spatial
distribution for linguistic forms that belong to different varieties (Goebl 2010). The
aggregate analysis of these linguistic variables proves to be especially useful for a
more complete description of the linguistic changes produced by contact. The objective
of this contribution is to ascertain as to whether it is possible to discover the existence
of geographical patterns in the borrowing process (Speelman, Grondelaers and
Geeraerts 2003, Thun 2010, Tadmor, Hapselmath and Taylor 2010).
The different opportunities for the employment of quantitative methodologies will be
shown with examples taken from geolinguistic research on the Galician linguistic
domain from different periods. The demonstration will focus on geolinguistic contact
between varieties in the following aspects:
i.
ii.
iii.
Identification of more permeable areas (prone to change)
Identification of more resistant areas (less prone to change)
Identification of non-linguistic variables that influence change.
References:
Goebl, H. (2006). Recent advances in Salzburg dialectometry. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 21(4), 411–435.
Goebl, H. (2010). Dialectometry: Theoretical prerequisites, practical problems, and
concrete applications (mainly with examples drawn from the "Atlas Linguistique
de la France", 1902-1910). Dialectologia. Special Issue I, 63-77.
Haspelmath, M. (2009). Lexical borrowing: concepts and issues. In M. Haspelmath and
U. Tadmor (eds.). Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative
Handbook (pp. 35–54). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Speelman, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Geeraerts (2003). Profile-based linguistic
uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers
and the Humanities 37(3), 317–337.
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Tadmor, U., M. Haspelmath and B. Taylor (2010) Borrowability and the notion of basic
vocabulary. Diachronica 27(2), 226–246.
Thun, H. (2010). Variety complexes in contact: A study on Uruguayan and Brazilian
Fronterizo. In P. Auer and J. E. Schmidt (eds.). Language and Space: An
International Handbook of Linguistic Variation (pp. 706–723). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Wieling, M., J. Nerbonne and R. H. Baayen (2011). Quantitative Social Dialectology:
Explaining Linguistic Variation Geographically and Socially, PLoS ONE 6(9).
e23613.
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SE CONSTRUCTIONS IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN
PORTUGUESE AND THE CLITIC LOSS, MAINTENANCE AND INSERTION: A
CORPUS-BASED SOCIOLECTOMETRIC AND SOCIOCOGNITIVE ANALYSIS
Augusto Soares da Silva
Catholic University of Portugal, Braga
Dafne Palú
Catholic University of Portugal, Braga
Keywords: Constructional variation, impersonal/passive se constructions, clitics,
sociolectometry, European and Brazilian Portuguese.
European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) significantly differ in the use
of clitic se constructions. EP frequently makes use of a passive se construction with
agreement (1) and an impersonal se construction without agreement (2). In contrast,
the general trend in BP is to avoid the clitic se: either the accusative se of the passive
construction, or the nominative se of the impersonal construction, are suppressed in
cases like (3). The same happens in other uses of the clitic se (reflexives,
anticausatives and middles). The se pronoun deletion, more pronounced in the informal
register, has been attributed to the on-going loss of clitics in BP. As an alternative, BP
also uses overt personal subject pronouns (você, a gente, nós) instead of the
impersonal se construction in these contexts (4), which is attributed to the on-going
loss of the null subject in BP (Duarte 1995, Kato 1999, Barbosa et al. 2001). A third
alternative construction in BP, is the (less frequent) se construction without agreement
in (5), which is ambiguous between the passive reflexive (1) and the impersonal (2)
construction (Duarte et al. 2001).
(1) Vendem-se casas.
sell.PRES.3pl-SE houses
(2) Vende-se casas.
sell.PRES.3sg-SE houses
(3) Vende casa(s).
sell.PRES.3sg house(s)
(4) A gente vende casa(s).
people sell.PRES.3sg house(s)
(5) Se vende casa(s).
SE sell.PRES.3sg house(s)
‘Houses are sold’
Conversely, formal BP tends to insert the clitic se in impersonal infinitival
constructions, where EP tends towards non-realization (6). In these contexts, the clitic
insertion is a strategy to explicitly indicate subject indetermination, which has equally
been linked to the increase of the overt subjects in BP (Galves 1987, Colsato 2007).
(6) É impossível se/Ø achar lugar aqui. (BP/EP)
be.PRES.3sg impossible SE/Ø find.INF place here
‘It’s impossible to find a place here’
Based on a corpus of Portuguese and Brazilian texts of the 1950s, 1970s and
2000s, pertaining to different registers (newspapers and magazines, football chats and
blogs), we propose a sociolectometric analysis of the se constructions in order to
measure the relative (dis)similarity between the two national varieties along the
geographical, social, stylistic and historical axes, as well as a socio-cognitive analysis
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of the conceptual, structural and social factors determining the variation of se
constructions in EP and BP. The present case study on constructional lectal variation
follows the Cognitive Linguistics framework, specifically Cognitive Sociolinguistics
(Kristiansen and Dirven 2008; Geeraerts et al. 2010) and is an extension of our
sociolectometric and sociocognitive studies on lexical convergence and divergence
between EP and BP (Soares da Silva 2010, 2014). Firstly, we shall identify the
distributional contexts and meanings of the se constructions and, in a similar fashion, of
the loss, maintenance and insertion of the clitic se. We shall then analyse the
semasiological, onomasiological and lectal variation of the se constructions, developing
a usage-feature analysis in order to identify the conceptual, structural and lectal factors
of such constructional variation. Conceptually, se constructions profile the change-ofstate undergone by the thematic participant, and therefore the initiating force is present
only in highly schematic terms (Maldonado 2007). The different se constructions
constitute a continuum of increasing focal prominence of the schematic initiating force
profiled as Figure, as in the impersonal construction, or, inversely, of the event terminal
point, as in the passive construction. Semasiological and onomasiological profiles of se
constructions and profile-based sociolectometric measures, i.e. uniformity and featural
measures (Geeraerts et al. 1999, Speelman et al. 2003) are used to calculate both the
synchronic distance and the diachronic convergence/divergence between EP and BP.
Clustering techniques and logistic regression analysis serve to chart the correlation
between the conceptual, structural and lectal variables.
References:
Barbosa, P., M. Kato and M. E. Duarte (2001). A distribuição do sujeito nulo no
português europeu e no português brasileiro. In C. Correia and A. Gonçalves
(eds.). Actas do XVI Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de
Linguística (pp. 539–550). Lisboa: APL.
Colsato, A. (2007). A Inserção do SE em Sentenças Não-Finitas do PB. Dissertação
de Mestrado. Universidade de São Paulo.
Duarte, M. E. (1995). A Perda do Princípio “Evite Pronome” no Português Brasileiro.
Tese de Doutoramento. Campinas: UNICAMP.
Duarte, M. E., M. Kato and P. Barbosa (2001). Sujeitos indeterminados em PE e PB. In
Anais do II Congresso Internacional da ABRALIN (pp. 405–409).
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Speelman (1999). Convergentie en Divergentie
in de Nederlandse Woordenschat. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut.
Geeraerts, D., G. Kristiansen and Y. Peirsman (eds.) (2010). Advances in Cognitive
Sociolinguistics. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Galves, C. (1987). A sintaxe do português brasileiro. Ensaios de Lingüística 13, 31–50.
Kato, M. (1999). Strong and weak pronominals and the null subject parameter. Probus
11, 1–37.
Kristiansen, G. and R. Dirven (eds.) (2008). Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language
variation, cultural models, social systems. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Maldonado, R. (2007). Grammatical voice in Cognitive Grammar. In D. Geeraerts and
H. Cuyckens (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 829–
868). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Nunes, J. (1990). O Famigerado SE: uma análise sincrônica e diacrônica das
construções com se apassivador e indeterminador. Dissertação de Mestrado.
Campinas: UNICAMP.
Soares da Silva, A. (2010). Measuring and parameterizing lexical convergence and
divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese. In D. Geeraerts, G.
Kristiansen and Y. Peirsman (eds.). Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (pp.
41–83). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Soares da Silva, A. (2014). The pluricentricity of Portuguese: A sociolectometrical
approach to divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese. In
Augusto Soares da Silva (ed.). Pluricentricity: Language variation and
sociocognitive dimensions (pp. 143–188). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Speelman, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Geeraerts (2003). Profile-based linguistic
uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers
and the Humanities 37, 317–337.
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INVESTIGATING GEOGRAPHIC AND REGISTER VARIATION IN WORLD
ENGLISHES
Axel Bohmann
The University of Texas at Austin
Keywords: World Englishes, register analysis, geographical variation.
In research on World Englishes, individual national varieties are typically grouped
according to their sociolinguistic history (Schneider 2007) and the norm-orientation of
the English used in a given country (Kachru 1986). Structural comparison between
varieties has mostly been carried out in studies on individual features in a limited
number of settings. Insightful as such studies are, it is difficult to make generalizations
about the structural relations among World Englishes on their basis.
Feature-aggregation-based approaches to linguistic variation promise to help draw a
more systematic picture of unity and diversity in English world-wide. Biber’s (1988)
multi-dimensional technique has proven instructive in establishing dimensions of
variation across registers. More recently, aggregation-based methods have been
utilized in the study of regional and typological variation (Szmrecsanyi and Wälchli
2014; Szmrecsanyi 2013; Grieve 2016), but a systematic, empirical application of this
approach to World Englishes has thus far not been attempted (although see Neumann
and Fest 2016, Schaub 2016 for steps in this direction).
In this study, I present an aggregation-based study of eight national varieties of English
on the basis of 56 morpho-syntactic and lexical features in naturalistic language data. A
total of N=6,000 text samples, taken from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and
a corpus of geo-located Twitter messages, are coded for their frequency profile for
each feature. Factor analysis is then performed on the resulting data matrix to establish
the higher-level dimensions structuring the variation in the dataset. Moreover, network
diagrams are created to visualize the relationship among the different varieties (cf.
Szmrecsanyi 2014: 97-99), based on the aggregate frequencies for all text samples
representing each variety, on the whole as well as for individual registers (as reflected
in the different ICE text categories).
Results indicate that, while a geographic signal can be traced in the data, the
dimensions derived from factor analysis most clearly reflect the communicative
properties of different registers, a finding that is in line with Biber (1995). When
considering variety differences within individual text categories, the Twitter messages
yield the clearest signal. This is most likely due to the fact that these text samples
constitute a less coherent register than the ICE samples, and that they are less subject
to the homogenizing force of the linguistic standard. The relationship among varieties,
as reflected in the different network diagrams, can primarily be understood as a
difference between L1 varieties with a long history of codification and more recently
emerging L2 varieties.
The study demonstrates that a lectometric approach to World Englishes produces valid
results. These may help to put observations from studies of individual features into a
broader context of inter-varietal relationships. One question that remains is to what
extent it is warranted to discuss differences in varieties on the whole, when these
differences are as heavily mediated by register as the present study suggests.
Research in World Englishes, whether from a single-feature or an aggregational
perspective, will benefit from developing more explicit methods for incorporating
register as a factor in its analysis of cross-varietal differences.
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References:
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge
University Press.
Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic comparison.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grieve, J. (2016). Regional variation in written American English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kachru, B. (1986). The alchemy of English: The spread, functions, and models of nonnative Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Neumann, S. and J. Fest (2016). Cohesive devices across registers and varieties: The
role of medium in English. In C. Schubert and C. Sanchez- Stockhammer
(eds.). Variational text linguistics: Revisiting register in English (pp. 195–220).
Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Schaub, S. (2016). The influence of register on noun phrase complexity in varieties of
English. In C. Schubert and C. Sanchez-Stockhammer (eds.). Variational text
linguistics: Revisiting register in English (pp. 251–270). Berlin and Boston: de
Gruyter.
Schneider, B. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Szmrecsanyi, B. (2013). Grammatical variation in British English dialects: A study in
corpus-based dialectometry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Szmrecsanyi, B. (2014). Forests, trees, corpora, and dialect grammars. In B.
Szmrecsanyi and B. Wälchli (eds.). Aggregating dialectology, typology, and
register analysis: Linguistic variation in text and speech (pp. 89–112). Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Szmrecsanyi, B. and B. Wälchli (eds.) (2014). Aggregating dialectology, typology, and
register analysis: Linguistic variation in text and speech. Berlin: de Gruyter.
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EXTENDING THE SCOPE OF LECTOMETRY II:
NEW METHODS AND FEATURES
ORGANISERS:
Jocelyne Daems
QLVL, University of Leuven
Karlien Franco
QLVL, University of Leuven
Laura Rosseel
QLVL, University of Leuven
Melanie Röthlisberger
QLVL, University of Leuven
Keywords: Dialectometry, stylometry,
aggregated distance measures.
sociolectometry,
language
perception,
This panel aims to showcase research in the field of lectometry. In this field,
quantitative measures are employed to aggregate over linguistic variables in order to
establish the relative similarity (or distance) between different lects. These lects are
collections of linguistic features that can vary along any extra-linguistic contextual
dimension in the broadest sense possible (Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema 1994:
4). Given the definition above, several fields of linguistic research fall within the scope
of lectometry. Specifically, in dialectometry, stylometry, sociolectometry and language
perception research, distances between lects are studied along the geographical,
discursive, social and subjective axis respectively. In this panel, we aim to highlight the
range of research questions that can be addressed against the background of
lectometry.
Firstly, the geographical axis of lectometry is developed in dialectometry. In traditional
dialectometric research, the relative (dis)similarity between dialects is established by
aggregating over a large set of dialectal features (e.g. Goebl 2006, Heeringa 2004,
Nerbonne and Kleiweg 2003, Séguy 1971, Szmrecsanyi 2013). Recently, however, the
field of dialectometry is witnessing a trend of widening its scope from dialects to
sociolects (e.g. Hansen 2012, Wieling, Nerbonne and Baayen 2011).
Secondly, stylometry and register analysis are situated along the discursive axis of
lectometry. In stylometric studies, the distribution of linguistic features in texts provides
insight into the ways in which authors have individual and thus distinguishable styles
(e.g. Grieve 2007, Luyckx and Daelemans 2011). Also related to the discursive axis are
studies like Biber (1995), which looks into how text types/genres vary, positioning them,
for instance, along functional dimensions such as ‘involvedness’ or ‘narration’.
The third field of study related to lectometry, sociolectometry, considers language
variation in relation to traditional factors such as age, gender or region. A prime
example of a sociolectometric study is Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999),
which examines lexical variables in order to measure the relation between the two main
national varieties of Dutch. Expanding on this early work in sociolectometry, Speelman,
Grondelaers and Geeraerts (2003) and Ruette et al. (2014) introduce more elaborate
quantitative techniques such as cluster analysis and multi-dimensional scaling.
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Advanced methodological techniques, like Semantic Vector Space models in Ruette,
Ehret and Szmrecsanyi (2016), have recently been employed in sociolectometry as
well.
The fourth field of study that falls within the scope of lectometry, language perception
research, is situated along the subjective axis. So far, lectometry has mainly focused
on measuring distances between varieties based on language production data.
However, measuring subjective distances on the basis of language perception and
attitudes would offer a valuable addition. This avenue is still relatively unexplored
compared to the three fields above, but studies like Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) or
Van Bezooijen and Heeringa (2006) certainly offer a steppingstone to further
developing this aspect of lectometry.
To sum up, lectometry offers an interesting umbrella perspective for the
aforementioned fields measuring distances between language varieties along different
axes. The aim of this panel is to catalogue the range of different lectometric
approaches and the ways in which they can reinforce each other. More specifically,
research questions include but are not restricted to the following ones:
1. How can insights from different linguistic fields (e.g. Cognitive Linguistics)
inform lectometric research?
2. Do text types in contact situations exhibit the same dimensional patterns as in
more traditional settings?
3. How does sociolinguistic variation (in the narrow sense) influence dialectometric
results?
4. Which methods and datasets are available that can be used to combine
different approaches to language variation (e.g. geographical, stylistic and
social variation) into one comprehensive framework?
5. Can social psychological attitude measures recently adopted in linguistic
perception research (e.g. Speelman et al. 2013, Pantos and Perkins 2012)
provide interesting tools to measure subjective distances between
languages/language varieties?
This panel is divided in two parts1 according to how the contributions expand and
innovate current research lines in lectometry. The first part brings together papers that
expand the scope of lectometry from the more traditional dialects to global varieties.
The second and present part of the panel focuses on lectometric research that
introduces new methods and linguistic features into the field. The first part is preceded
by a short introduction by the organizers and the panel’s keynote speaker, Martijn
Wieling (Winner of the 2016 European Young Research Award), who will be talking
about “Generalized additive modeling as a useful tool for dialectometry.” Both talks will
emphasize how the papers in the two parts of the panel are interconnected and invite
discussion and interaction between the various strands of research represented by our
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participants. Our panel concludes with a discussion slot, led by Dirk Geeraerts, which
will bring together ideas put forward in both parts of the panel. In addition, there
will be a focus on perception research, the subfield of lectometry
underrepresented in this panel, and how we can encourage scholars in this field
to enter into dialogue with lectometric work.
References:
Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison.
Cambrigde: Cambrigde University Press.
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Speelman (1999). Convergentie en divergentie in
de Nederlandse woordenschat: een onderzoek naar kleding- en voetbaltermen.
Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens-Instituut.
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers and P. Bakema (1994). The Structure of Lexical
Variation. Meaning, Naming, and Context. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 5).
Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Goebl, H. (2006). Recent advances in Salzburg dialectometry. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 21(4), 411–435.
Gooskens, C. and W. Heeringa (2004). Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect
distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data. Language Variation and
Change 16(3), 189–207.
Grieve, J. (2007). Quantitative Authorship Attribution: An Evaluation of Techniques.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 22(3), 251–270.
Hansen, S. (2012). Dialektalität, Dialektwissen und Hyperdialektalität aus
soziolinguistischer Perspektive. In S. Hansen, C. Schwarz, P. Stoeckle and T.
Streck (eds.). Dialectological and Folk Dialectological Concepts of Space.
Current Methods and Perspectives in Sociolinguistic Research on Dialect
Change (pp. 48–74). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Heeringa, W. (2004). Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein
Distance. PhD thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Luyckx, K. and W. Daelemans (2011). The effect of author set size and data size in
authorship attribution. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26(1), 35–55.
Nerbonne, J. and P. Kleiweg (2003). Lexical distance in LAMSAS. Computers and the
Humanities 37(3), 339–357.
Pantos, A. J. and A. W. Perkins (2012). Measuring implicit and explicit attitudes toward
foreign accented speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 32(1), 3–
20.
Ruette, T., D. Geeraerts, Y. Peirsman and D. Speelman (2014). Semantic weighting
mechanisms in scalable lexical sociolectometry. In B. Szmrecsanyi and B.
Wälchli (eds.). Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis:
Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech (pp. 205–230). Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter.
Séguy, J. (1971). La relation entre la distance spatiale et la distance lexicale. Revue de
Linguistique Romane 35(138), 335–357.
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Speelman, D., A. Spruyt, L. Impe and D. Geeraerts (2013). Language attitudes
revisited: auditory affective priming. Journal of Pragmatics 52, 83–92.
Speelman, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Geeraerts (2003). Profile-based linguistic
uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers
and the Humanities 37(3), 317–337.
Szmrecsanyi, B. (2013). Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects: A Study in
Corpus-Based Dialectometry. (Studies in English Language). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Van Bezooijen, R. and W. Heeringa (2006). Intuitions on linguistic distance:
geographically or linguistically based? In T. Koole, J. Nortier and B. Tahitu
(eds.). Artikelen van de Vijfde Sociolinguïstische Conferentie (pp. 77–87). Delft:
Eburon.
Wieling, M., J. Nerbonne and R. H. Baayen (2011). Quantitative social dialectology:
Explaining linguistic variation geographically and socially. PLoS ONE 6(9),
e23613.
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1. A CORPUS- AND PROFILE-BASED LECTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF EMOTION
CONCEPTS IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE.
Augusto Soares da Silva. Catholic University of Portugal, Braga
2. APPLIED LECTOMETRY: USING A MULTIVARIATE SPATIAL ANALYSIS TO
IDENTIFY CULTURAL REGIONS. J. Grieve. Aston University
3. THE SOCIOLECTOMETRY OF FLEMISH ONLINE TEENAGE TALK: Lisa Hilte.
University of Antwerp. Reinhild Vandekerckhove. University of Antwerp. Walter
Daelemans. University of Antwerp
4. SOCIAL AND MEDIUM-RELATED VARIATION IN THE USE OF EXPRESSIVE
MARKERS. Lisa Hilte. Reinhild Vandekerckhove. Walter Daelemans. University of
Antwerp
5. LECTOMETRY AND LATENT VARIABLES. Koen Plevoets. University of Leuven
6. CHARACTERIZING
DIALECT
GROUPS:
CORRELATION
AND
INFORMATIVENESS
ASSOCIATED
WITH
LINGUISTIC
FORMS.
Gotzon
Aurrekoetxea. Universidad del País Vasco. Esteve Clua, UPF Universidad
Pompeu Fabra. Aitor Iglesias, UPV/EHU Universidad del País Vasco. Iker
Usobiaga, UPV/EHU Universidad del País Vasco. Miquel Salicrú, UB Universitat
de Barcelona.
7. DISCUSSION. Dirk Geeraerts.
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A CORPUS- AND PROFILE-BASED LECTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF EMOTION
CONCEPTS IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE
Augusto Soares da Silva
Catholic University of Portugal, Braga
Keywords: Lexical variation, emotions,
European and Brazilian Portuguese.
cultural
conceptualization,
lectometry,
In this study we develop a corpus- and profile-based lectometric analysis of three
emotion concepts, namely ANGER, PRIDE and LOVE in European Portuguese (EP) and
Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The present analysis is part of a wider project on the
conceptualization of emotions in EP and BP. The main goal is both to measure the
lexical-semantic (dis)similarity regarding emotion concepts between the two national
varieties of Portuguese along geographical, social and stylistic axes and to correlate
the lectal distances with conceptual and cultural similarities and differences. In order to
carry out this lectometric and socio-cognitive study, we follow the Cognitive Linguistics
framework, specifically Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Kristiansen and Dirven 2008,
Geeraerts et al. 2010) and Quantitative Cognitive Semantics (Glynn and Fischer 2010,
Glynn and Robinson 2014), particularly its application to emotion concepts (e.g. Glynn
2007, 2014; Krawczak 2014), and we adopt the sociolectometric methodology
developed by Geeraerts et al. (1999), Speelman et al. (2003), Soares da Silva (2010,
2014), Ruette (2012), Ruette et al. (2014). The lectometric analysis uses a concept-,
profile-based methodology, where profile stands for the set of usage features of a
linguistic form or meaning (semasiological profile, also called behavioral profile, Gries
2010) or the set of semantically equivalent usage words in a conceptual category
(onomasiological profile). Profile-based uniformity and featural measures quantify the
distance between language varieties. Multivariate statistical techniques, namely
multiple correspondence and logistic regression analyses serve to identify emotion
usage patterns across the data and to determine their descriptive accuracy and
predictive power.
The corpus includes Portuguese and Brazilian texts from blogs and newspapers,
compared for stylistic distance measurement. An analysis of a sample of 2500
examples of ANGER (expressed by the lexemes raiva ‘anger’, fúria ‘fury’, ira
‘anger/wrath’, cólera ‘anger/wrath’, irritação ‘irritation’), PRIDE (lexemes orgulho ‘pride’,
vaidade ‘vanity’) and LOVE (lexemes amor ‘love’, paixão ‘passion’, desejo ‘desire’,
atração ‘attraction’, coração ‘heart’) will be conducted. The different socio-semantic
factors that are associated to the arguments of ANGER, PRIDE and LOVE event-frames,
namely Emoter, Cause, Responsible and Receiver will be analyzed. These sociosemantic factors include Emoter behavior and control, Cause type and control,
Receiver type, intensity, emotional attitudes, and evaluation (the usage feature analysis
is inspired by work in social psychology on emotions, e.g. Fontaine et al. 2013).
Different clusters of usage features will be identified. Multiple correspondence analysis
shows three clusters of ANGER features: a violent type of anger associated with norm
violations and immoral behavior, a complaining type of anger associated with
inconveniences, and interpersonal anger associated with the behavior of known
people. Two clusters of PRIDE features were found: a self-centered pride and an otherdirected pride. Logistic regression reveals some lectal predictors. For instance,
belonging to a group or family causes of pride are predictors for EP, whereas the BP
predictor is cause relevance for Emoter. This means that EP appears to be more akin
to the cluster of other-directed pride, whereas BP seems closer to self-centered pride.
As for anger, EP is more consistent with the violent type of anger caused by norm
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violations and immoral behavior, whereas BP is more associated with the irritating kind
of anger caused by inconveniences. These results are in line with cultural
conceptualization differences, i.e. the more collectivist Portuguese culture in contrast
with the more individualistic Brazilian culture (Hofstede 2001). In order to measure the
lexical-semantic distance between the two national varieties of Portuguese,
onomasiological profiles of ANGER, PRIDE and LOVE are also analyzed. In fact,
synonyms, mainly denotational synonyms often display sociolinguistic differences and
therefore the competition between language varieties.
References:
Fontaine, J. R. J., K. R. Scherer and C. Soriano (2013). Components of Emotional
Meaning. A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Speelman (1999). Convergentie en Divergentie
in de Nederlandse Woordenschat. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut.
Geeraerts, D., G. Kristiansen and Y. Peirsman (eds.) (2010). Advances in Cognitive
Sociolinguistics. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Glynn, D. (2007). Mapping Meaning. Toward a Usage-based Cognitive Semantics.
PhD dissertation. Leuven: University of Leuven.
Glynn, D. (2014). The social nature of anger: Multivariate corpus evidence for context
effects upon conceptual structure. In P. Blumenthal, I. Novakova and D.
Siepmann (eds.). Emotions in Discourse (pp. 69–82). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Glynn, D. and K. Fischer (eds.) (2010). Quantitative Cognitive Semantics: CorpusDriven Approaches. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Glynn, D. and J. Robinson (eds.) (2014). Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative
Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Gries, S. Th. (2010). Behavioral Profiles: A fine-grained and quantitative approach in
Corpus-based Lexical Semantics. Mental Lexicon 5, 323–346.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors,
Institutions, and Organizations across Nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Krawczak, K. (2014). Shame, embarrassment and guilt: Corpus evidence for the crosscultural structure of social emotions. Poznan Studies in Contemporary
Linguistics 50(4), 441–475.
Kristiansen, G. and R. Dirven (eds.) (2008). Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language
variation, cultural models, social systems. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Ruette, T. (2012). Aggregating Lexical Variation: Towards large-scale lexical
lectometry. PhD thesis, University of Leuven.
Ruette, T., D. Geeraerts, Y. Peirsman and D. Speelman (2014). Semantic weighting
mechanisms in scalable lexical sociolectometry. In B. Szmrecsanyi and B.
Wälchli (eds.). Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis:
Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech (pp. 205–230). Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter.
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Soares da Silva, A. (2010). Measuring and parameterizing lexical convergence and
divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese. In D. Geeraerts, G.
Kristiansen and Y. Peirsman (eds.). Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (pp.
41–83). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Soares da Silva, A. (2014). The pluricentricity of Portuguese: A sociolectometrical
approach to divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese. In A.
Soares da Silva (ed.), Pluricentricity: Language variation and sociocognitive
dimensions (143–188). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Speelman, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Geeraerts (2003). Profile-based linguistic
uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers
and the Humanities 37, 317–337.
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APPLIED LECTOMETRY: USING A MULTIVARIATE SPATIAL ANALYSIS TO
IDENTIFY CULTURAL REGIONS
J. Grieve
Aston University
Keywords: Corpus linguistics, dialectometry, English, lexical variation, social media.
The number and location of American cultural regions has long been the subject of
debate. Numerous competing theories have been proposed, which have taken into
consideration a long list of different factors, including settlement, ethnicity, religion, and
politics. It is difficult, however, to choose between these theories because they have
been based almost entirely on the opinion of geographers and historians. Even when
empirical data, such as Census records, are taken into consideration, the selection,
weighting, and aggregation of these different factors has been subjective. For example,
although there can be no doubt that religion is an important factor for defining cultural
regions, it is unclear how important this factor is and if its importance is the same
across the United States. Assuming, however, that important cultural patterns are
reflected in everyday language use, specifically in the topics that people choose to
discuss, then the analysis of large regionalized corpora provides an alternative and
more objective method for identifying cultural regions.
In this paper, I show how methods borrowed from dialectometry can be used to identify
modern American cultural regions. In particular, I analyze the relative frequency of the
10,000 most common words in an 8.9 billon word corpus of geocoded American
Tweets collected between 2013 and 2014. To discover common patterns of regional
lexical variation in this dataset, I subject the maps for these words to a multivariate
spatial analysis, identifying 5 dimensions of lexical variation. I then interpret each of
these dimensions regionally, by mapping the dimension scores, and thematically, by
classifying the words associated with each dimension by topic. This analysis not only
reveals clear regional patterns that align with well-established cultural distinctions, but it
also allows for the topics of discussion that characterize language originating from
these regions to be identified, including not only topics related to factors traditionally
used to identify cultural regions such as religion and ethnicity, but also new factors
such as a focus on friendship, family, lifestyle, and the outdoors. Finally, based on
these dimensions of lexical variation, I generate a single overall map of American
cultural regions, identifying 5 main regions—the Northeast, the Southeast, The
Midwest, the South Central, and the West—which both support and challenge previous
theories.
In addition to mapping American cultural regions, I also consider what these results tell
us about dialect variation. The cultural regions I identify correspond closely to American
dialect regions, supporting the theory that dialect regions reflect cultural regions.
Although this is not a new theory, the results of this study offer a new explanation for
why this relationship holds, as it shows that cultural variation is expressed through
differences in the topics that people tend to use language to discuss. This result
suggests that regional variation in linguistic structure is not primarily due to arbitrary
language change but rather to cultural differences in the way language is used—a
hypothesis that challenges basic assumptions underlying sociolinguistic inquiry.
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THE SOCIOLECTOMETRY OF FLEMISH ONLINE TEENAGE TALK:
SOCIAL AND MEDIUM-RELATED VARIATION IN THE USE OF EXPRESSIVE
MARKERS
Lisa Hilte
University of Antwerp
Reinhild Vandekerckhove
University of Antwerp
Walter Daelemans
University of Antwerp
Keywords: Computer-mediated communication, adolescents, expressiveness, social
correlates, computational sociolinguistics.
Expressive markers often function as compensational pragmatic features in informal
computer-mediated communication (CMC). The present study analyzes to what extent
their use in informal CMC produced by Flemish adolescents correlates with social and
medium-related variables, or, in other words, to what extent they are (more or less)
prominent markers of ‘social digi-lects’.
Our analyses include three types of expressive markers: a number of typographic
chatspeak features, an onomatopoeic and a lexical variable. While the research design
and the interpretation of the results are essentially sociolinguistic, we rely on
computational linguistics methodology for data processing and feature extraction.
The corpus consists of two parts and covers nearly ten years of Flemish adolescent
CMC. The first part of the corpus, i.e. the reference corpus for the present study,
consists of 2 million tokens and contains chat conversations produced between 2007
and 2013. The social variables that are operationalized are the chatters’ gender and
age. As for medium, we take synchronicity into account, as well as the public versus
private character of the messages. Our general quantitative findings are that girls
outperform boys in the expression of emotional involvement (see also Parkins 2012),
and younger adolescents outperform the older group. The results are extremely
consistent in this respect: the same tendencies can be observed for each of the
expressive features. Quite strikingly however, medium has the largest impact: much
more expressive markers are used in (largely public) asynchronous social media posts
than in (private) synchronous instant messaging. Apart from that, the qualitative
analyses lay bare distinct preferences for particular features. E.g. girls prefer other
emoticons than their male peers. In other words, expressiveness takes different forms
in girls’ CMC than in boys’ CMC (see Hilte, Vandekerckhove and Daelemans
forthcoming).
For the second and more recent part of the corpus, we’ll report on a follow-up study.
The new corpus has been collected in 2015 and 2016, which adds a diachronic
dimension to the research on expressiveness. While the social variables of age and
gender have been maintained, an extra one is added: the educational background and
social class of the informants. For educational background, we make a distinction
between the three main types of Belgian secondary education, while the social class
categorization is based on a cluster of parameters. Medium is no longer a variable in
the new data, as all messages are synchronous and private. While we hypothesize that
the new analyses will corroborate the quantitative gender and age tendencies of the
reference study, we definitely expect qualitative differences, as CMC and youth
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language are subject to constant renewal, and new technology and media trigger
different expressive markers.
Finally, the present research may demonstrate there is no such thing as a Flemish
informal adolescent digilect. There are numerous and constantly changing social
digilects or digilectal varieties. While most adolescents have access to the very same
pool of expressive markers, gender and age determine their preferences, and so does
the digital medium and potentially also their educational and social class background.
References:
Hilte, L., R. Vandekerckhove and W. Daelemans (forthcoming). A corpus-based
analysis of social and medium-related linguistic variation. Forthcoming: short
paper, accepted for the proceedings of The 4th conference on CMC and social
media corpora for the humanities, Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 27-28, 2016.
Parkins, R. (2012) Gender and emotional expressiveness: An analysis of prosodic
features in emotional expression. Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and
Intercultural Communication 5(1), 46-­‐54.
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LECTOMETRY AND LATENT VARIABLES
Koen Plevoets
University of Leuven
Keywords: Latent variable models, correlation models, association models, register
analysis, corpus linguistics.
Ever since its first formulation in Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999),
lectometry has been widely used to map distances between language varieties or
‘lects’. Often, these distances are given a geometrical representation in a lowdimensional space. Examples are the use of Multidimensional Scaling in Speelman,
Grondelaers and Geeraerts (2003) and Ruette et al. (2014) and of Correspondence
Analysis in Plevoets (2008), Delaere, De Sutter and Plevoets (2012), Prieels et al.
(2015) and Ghyselen (2016). Usually, the number of dimensions of the geometrical
space is chosen on the basis of representativeness, leading to an approximate picture
of the linguistic variation. However, the spatial dimensions can also be interpreted as
underlying factors governing the variability of the data. This methodological paper will
explore this functional interpretation of the geometrical dimensions by establishing the
link between lectometry and Latent Variable Models. It will be shown that the
dimensions of the lectal space can be considered as hidden variables which lay bare
specific causal mechanisms. In particular, analyses of translation and interpreting data
will demonstrate that the lectometrical dimensions can be made to correspond to
various socio-cultural determinants. That opens up the possibility for lectometrical
studies of determining the ‘social meaning’ of linguistic varieties and variants.
References:
Delaere, I., G. De Sutter and K. Plevoets (2012). Is translated language more
standardized
than
non-translated
language?
Using
profile-based
correspondence analysis for measuring linguistic distances between language
varieties. Target 24 (2), 203–224.
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Speelman (1999). Convergentie en divergentie in
de Nederlandse woordenschat: een onderzoek naar kleding- en voetbaltermen.
Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens-Instituut.
Ghyselen, A.-S. (2016). From diglossia to diaglossia: a West Flemish case-study. In
M.-H. Côté, R. Knooihuizen and J. Nerbonne (eds.). The Future of Dialects (pp.
35–62). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Plevoets, K. (2008). Tussen spreek- en standaardtaal. Een corpusgebaseerd
onderzoek naar de situationele, regionale en sociale verspreiding van enkele
morfosyntactische verschijnselen uit het gesproken Belgisch-Nederlands.
Leuven: Doctoral Dissertation.
Prieels, L., I. Delaere, K. Plevoets and G. De Sutter (2015). A corpus-based
multivariate analysis of linguistic norm-adherence in audiovisual and written
translation. Across Languages and Cultures 16(2), 209–231.
Ruette, T., D. Geeraerts, Y. Peirsman and D. Speelman (2014). Semantic weighting
mechanisms in scalable lexical sociolectometry. In B. Szmrecsanyi and B.
Wälchli (eds.). Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis:
Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech (pp. 205–230). Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter.
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Speelman, D., S. Grondelaers and D. Geeraerts (2003). Profile-based linguistic
uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers
and the Humanities 37(3), 317–337.
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CHARACTERIZING DIALECT GROUPS: CORRELATION AND INFORMATIVENESS
ASSOCIATED WITH LINGUISTIC FORMS
Gotzon Aurrekoetxea
Universidad del País Vasco
Esteve Clua
UPF Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Aitor Iglesias
UPV/EHU Universidad del País Vasco
Iker Usobiaga
UPV/EHU Universidad del País Vasco
Miquel Salicrú
UB Universitat de Barcelona
Keywords: Dialectometry, MDS, representative and distinctive forms, central and
border populations.
In dialectometry, attention is focused on identifying and characterizing dialects,
interpreting spatial differences, and studying linguistic evolution over time. Based on a
distance in which similarities and differences between populations are highlighted,
fuzzy classification allows perimeters among dialect groups to be established and
border/transition populations to be identified. The characterization of dialectal varieties
requires processing a great deal of information. In this context, obtaining the reference
populations of each group (central or pattern populations) and the most significant and
different forms have allowed for focus to be turned to the most a priori relevant aspects.
On a practical level, the direct application of this approach is questionable, because in
dialectal corpuses which contain many redundant forms, analysis can be reduced to a
set of (very informative and correlated) forms that explain only a part of the variation.
The dependence on information provided by linguistic forms has been shown in
multiple environments; for example, in some Romance languages affinity can be seen,
among others, in certain verbal forms of the present indicative (second and third
person singular and third person plural; first and second person plural,...).
In order to obtain a subset of forms which still maintains a significant percentage of the
global information while presenting less redundancy, we carried the following steps: a)
defining an affinity measure between forms, based on the correlation between
interdistances (d(Fi,Fj)=1-ρ2(Fi,Fj)); b) classifying forms and representing them on a 2D
space (MDS with double label, group and form); c) choosing the most informative form
of the most informative groups; and d) complementing the subset with equivalent forms
(pertaining to the group) whose variation is likely to be governed by different rules from
those of the previously selected most informative forms.
The Basque data used in this contribution has been taken from the “Recueil
des idiomes de la Région Gasconne” compiled by Edouard Bourciez in 1895
(Aurrekoetxea and Videgain (2004)). The features of this corpus, structured as
relational database, can be summarized as follows: 135 lexical concepts, 28 features
of noun morphology, 24 about verb morphology, 23 about syntax and 26 diachronic
features. This corpus has been analyzed as a linguistic atlas in Aurrekoetxea,
Videgain and Iglesias (2004 and 2005) and in a dialectometric way in Aurrekoetxea
and Videgain (2009), among others. Some clean-up processes have been
performed on the data, and have been carried out in different ways: Firstly
removing orthographical differences, secondly removing grammatical suffixes from
the lexic, thirdly standardizing distinct word separations and, finally, repairing
typographical errors.
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References:
Aurrekoetxea, G. and X. Videgain (2004). Haur prodigoaren parabola Ipar Euskal
Herriko 150 bertsiotan. Bilbao: UPV/EHU. Supplement of ASJU, XLIX.
Aurrekoetxea, G., A. Iglesias and X. Videgain (2004). Bourciez Bildumako Euskal
Atlasa (BBEA-2): 1. Lexikoa. [Bourciez Linguistic Atlas: 1. Lexicon], ASJU 38-2
(2004) [ed. 2007].
Aurrekoetxea, G., A. Iglesias and X. Videgain (2005). Bourciez Bildumako Euskal Atlasa
(BBEA-2): 2. Gramatika. [Bourciez Linguistic Atlas: 2. Grammar]. ASJU 39-1
[ed. 2008].
Aurrekoetxea, G. and X. Videgain (2009). Le projet Bourciez: Traitement géolinguistique
d’un corpus dialectal de 1895. Dialectologia 2, 81-111.
Bezdek, J. C. (2013). Pattern recognition with fuzzy objective function algorithms. New
York: Springer Science & Business Media.
Clua, E. and M. Salicrú (2016a). Characterization of dialectal varieties: central and
borders populations. Under review.
Clua, E. and M. Salicrú (2016b). New perspectives for analysis of dialect distance. CILG
2016.
Prokić, J., Ç. Çöltekin and J. Nerbonne (2012). Detecting Shibboleths. In M. Butt and J.
Prokić (eds.) Visualization of Language Patters and Uncovering Language
History from Multilingual Resources.+Workshop at the 13th Conference of the
European Chapter of the Association for computational Linguistics. Avignon,
France, 72-80.
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DISCUSSION
Dirk Geeraerts
162
IS SYNTACTIC VARIATION SPECIAL?
ORGANISER:
Alexandra N. Lenz
University of Vienna
Keywords: Syntactic variation, variationist linguistics, syntax.
While variationist linguistics has been primarily focussed on phonetics/phonology since
its inception, syntactic variation is slowly but increasingly coming into the focus of
research. The research on syntactic variation requires modifications and expansions of
theoretical and methodological approaches of variationist linguistics (cf. Lavandera
1978; Cheshire 2005). Over the last years a broad spectrum of innovative studies on
the variation of syntax has emerged (e.g., Kortmann 2010, Kallenborn 2016, SAND or
SyHD). This research on syntactic variation has broadened the empirical basis of
modern linguistics in general and has shown that syntactic variation provides very
fruitful insights for different linguistic disciplines. The panel aims to discuss results and
problems of current research on the variation of syntax. This discussion will explore the
status quo of research on syntactic variation within variationist linguistics and at the
same time will uncover peculiarities of syntactic variation. The panel will provide
answers to the following questions:
1. Syntactic variation ‘versus’ variation on other linguistic levels:
To what extent is syntactic variation different from variation on other linguistic levels
(e.g., phonology)? What are the socio-pragmatic functions of syntactic variation? What
can variationist linguistics learn from research on syntactic variation? Which ‘traditional’
concepts of variationist linguistics would need to be adapted or expanded in the context
of syntactic research? What, for example, is a ‘syntactic’ variable in comparison to a
phonetic or lexical one? How can empirical evidence for a syntactic variable be
provided?
2. Theoretical ‘versus’ empirical approaches:
What is the relation between (more) empirically and (more) theoretically oriented
research on syntactic variation? What can both approaches (empirical ‘versus’
theoretical ones) learn from each other? What are the potential difficulties in bringing
these approaches together? How can syntactic variation be modelled within structural
or cognitive theories? What is the consequence for the concept of competence? Where
is the locus of variation (lexicon, morphology, syntactic structures)?
3. Syntactic variation within nonstandard ‘versus’ standard varieties:
To what extent does the syntax of nonstandard varieties differ from the syntax of
standard varieties? Does the syntactic level provide evidence for different varieties on
the ‘vertical’ dialect/standard axis (cf. Auer 2005) or is there a syntactic continuum from
the base dialects up to the standard varieties? How do syntactic structures vary along
the vertical axis of nonstandard spectra of varieties? What does the syntax of
‘intermediate‘ varieties between dialects and standard varieties look like?
4. On the survey and analysis of syntactic variation:
Which special challenges are evoked by the elicitation and analysis of syntactic
variation (in comparison with the variation on other linguistic levels)? Which methods
are most suitable for the elicitation and the analysis of which syntactic phenomena?
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Which advantages and disadvantages do elicited versus non-elicited (spontaneous)
data have?
5. Syntactic variation from the perspective of linguists ‘versus’ laymen:
How do speakers perceive syntactic variants, and how do they cognitively structure
and evaluate them? Which attitudinal-affective values are ascribed to syntactic
features? What about the salience of syntactic variants in comparison to variants of
other linguistic levels? How do laymen’s concepts of syntactic variants correspond to
linguistic findings?
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: A
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J.
Geeraerts (eds.). Trends in linguistics: studies and
Perspectives on variation. Sociolinguistic, historical,
Berlin: de Gruyter.
typology of European
van der Auwera, & D.
monographs: Vol. 163.
comparative (pp. 7–42).
Cheshire, J. (2005). Syntactic variation and beyond: Gender and social class variation
in the use of discourse-new markers. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(4), 479–508.
Kallenborn, T. (2016). Regionalsprachliche Syntax: Horizontal-vertikal Variation im
Moselfränkischen. Dissertation. Universität Wien.
Kortmann, Bernd. (2010). Areal Variation in Syntax. In P. Auer & J. E. Schmidt (Eds.),
Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft: Vol. 30.1.
Language and Space. Vol. I: Theories and Methods (pp. 837–864). Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Lavandera, B. R. (1978). Where does the sociolinguistic Variable stop?. Language in
Society, 7(2), 171–182.
Babiers, Sjef et al. (2005/2008). Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten /
Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects. Vol. I-II, Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Syntax Hessischer Dialekte [online]. Syntax of Hessian Dialects. Available at:
www.syhd.info
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1. IS SYNTAX SPECIAL? AN INTRODUCTION. Alexandra N. Lenz. University of
Vienna
2. VARIETY-KNOWLEDGE EFFECTS ON SYNTACTIC SALIENCY. Timo Ahlers.
University of Vienna
3. SYNTACTIC VARIATION AND THE CITY: COMPUTER SUPPORTED
LANGUAGE PRODUCTION TESTS FOR ELICITING TUN-PERIPHRASIS IN
VIENNESE GERMAN. Ludwig M. Breuer. University of Vienna
4. SYNTACTIC
VARIATION
IN
NON-STANDARD
SWEDISH
–A
CASE FOR SYNTACTIC VERNACULAR UNIVERSALS IN GERMANIC?. Henrik
Rosenkvist. University of Gothenburg
5. STRUCTURAL DIALECTOLOGY OF THE DUTCH LANGUAGE AREA. Sjef
Babiers. Uniersity of Leiden
6. DISCUSSION. Jenny Chesire. University of London
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IS SYNTAX SPECIAL? AN INTRODUCTION
Alexandra N. Lenz
University of Vienna
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VARIETY-KNOWLEDGE EFFECTS ON SYNTACTIC SALIENCY
Timo Ahlers
University of Vienna
The perception of syntactic phenomena is different from other linguistic levels, because
syntactic phenomena build up on phonological, lexical and morphological information.
Also the listener’s attention (e. g. chunking distant morphological information to
agreement patterns) and expectations (garden path sentences) are crucial to the
perception of syntactic phenomena, only little is known about the saliency of syntactic
phenomena (a. o. Rose 2005, Chiarcos / Claus / Grabski 2011), specifically regarding
the influence of individual variety knowledge (Ahlers 2016).
For this purpose, the peculiarities of (auditive) syntactic perception will be discussed
and a grounded, first-person perspective model for syntactic saliency (Ahlers 2016) will
be presented. The model integrates, besides bottom-up effects from stimulus
perception, also top-down influences to saliency from the listener’s variety knowledge.
The following questions are addressed: How do perceptual saliency effects occur in
syntax? Do we notice syntactic variants deviating from our individual syntax
knowledge? Does individual variety knowledge have an impact on syntactic saliency?
To answer these questions an empirical auditive listener task was set up via an online
questionnaire: 435 native speakers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland (with either
a competence emphasis in dialect, standard or both) were asked to compare audio
files by dialect speakers from Upper-Austria, Styria and Vorarlberg. The audio files
consisted of syntactic minimal pairs of Bavarian Syntax. Based on the comparison of
syntactic maps (“SynBai” Lenz / Ahlers / Werner 2014 and “AdA” Elspass / Möller
2003ff.) three phenomena of different socio-areal distributions where chosen, such that
corresponding listener groups of different socio-vertical (dialect, standard, both) and
area-horizontal variety knowledge could be compared. The listeners’ reports were
statistically analysed regarding not nameable (covert saliency) and nameable syntactic
differences (overt saliency).
The results show phenomenon specific covert, and to a lesser extent overt differences
in perceived saliency. Regarding the degree of similarity between the variety
knowledge of speaker and listener a clear decrease of perceived syntactic saliency
could be found, the more speakers’ and listeners’ variety knowledge was alike (with
regard to social and areal parameters). Accordingly, false syntactic variants could be
identified easier, if variety knowledge was more similar. The hypotheses raised by the
model could be confirmed. Variety knowledge should be implemented in models of
contact-induced language change and in didactics.
References:
Ahlers, T. (2016): Varietätendimensionierte syntaktische Salienz. In Alexandra N. Lenz
and Franz Patocka (eds.). Syntaktische Variation – Areallinguistische
Perspektiven. Wien: University Press (Wiener Arbeiten zur Linguistik 2), 247–
289.
Chiarcos, C., B. Claus and M. Grabski (eds.) (2011). Salience. Multidisciplinary
Perspectives on its Function in Discourse. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter
(Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 227).
Elspaß, S. and R. Möller (2003ff) [online]. Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA).
Available at: http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/ Accesed on: 29.08.2016.
167
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Lenz, A. N., T. Ahlers and M. Werner (2014). Bairische Syntax im Spannungsfeld
regionaler und generationsspezifischer Variation – eine Pilotstudie. Zeitschrift
für Dialektologie und Linguistik 81/1, 1–33.
Rose, R. L. (2005). The Relative Contribution of Syntactic and Semantic Prominence to
the Salience of Discourse Entities. Dissertation, Northwestern University.
168
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SYNTACTIC VARIATION AND THE CITY: COMPUTER SUPPORTED LANGUAGE
PRODUCTION TESTS FOR ELICITING TUN-PERIPHRASIS IN VIENNESE GERMAN
Ludwig M. Breuer
University of Vienna
Vienna has always been a “colourful linguistic habitat” (cf. Breuer/Glauninger 2012: 2,
transl. by author) in which the diversity of variation of German varieties is ubiquitous.
Hence, research brought forth a number of studies on Viennese German, particularly
on phonology (i.e. Moosmüller 1987, Ernst 2006). Nevertheless, previous research on
the subject lacks syntactic analyses, especially considering syntactic variation of the
modern regional language (as defined by Schmidt/Herrgen 2011) in Vienna. The
dissertation project “Syntactic Variation of the Modern Regional Language in Vienna”
aims at this desideratum. It gathers, describes, and analyses the present linguistic
variation and its functions based on syntactic variation. For the study, data was
collected through online questionnaires (for pretesting and quantitative foundations)
and direct surveys, consisting of interviews (formal situations), directed conversations
among friends (informal situations) and computer supported language production tests
(LPTs). In total, 32 Viennese participated in those direct surveys, resulting in
approximately 100 hours of audio recordings.
After outlining the project, the talk will focus on LPTs used to elicit specific syntactic
variables. The advantages of the employed LPTs are frequent occurrence of desired
variables, the possibility of manipulation and therefore reviewing of hypothetical
determining factors for specific syntactic variants. Furthermore, the “experimental”
setting allows a high comparability of the interpersonal and intrapersonal results (cf.
Kallenborn 2011: 285–286). To show the benefits of these LPTs, the talk will present
test sets on the variation of the tun-Periphrase (tun-periphrasis) located between the
poles “intended standard” and “intended (Viennese) Dialect”. Consisting in total of 14
tasks, the test sets mainly target the following factors: aspect (progressive and
habitual), enumeration and imperative (cf. Schwarz 2004: 48). Depending on the status
of the analyses, the test results will then be compared with data from the online
questionnaires and/or from the interviews / conversation among friends.
References:
Breuer, L. M. and M. M. Glauninger (2012): Editorial. In Tribüne, 2–3.
Ernst, P. (2006): Das Wienerische heute. Ungedrucktes Manuskript. Institut für
Germanistik. Universität Wien, 05.05.2006.
Kallenborn, T. (2011). Ein experimenteller Ansatz zur Erhebung regionalsprachlicher
Syntaxdaten. In B. Ganswindt and C. Purschke (eds.). Perspektiven der
Variationslinguistik. Beiträge aus dem Forum Sprachvariation. Hildesheim,
Zürich and New York: Olms (Germanistische Linguistik, 216–217), 279–304.
Moosmüller, S. (1987): Soziophonologische Variation im gegenwärtigen Wiener
Deutsch. Eine empirische Untersuchung. Zugl.: Wien, Univ., Diss., 1984
u. d. T.: Soziale und psychosoziale Sprachvariation. Stuttgart: Steiner
(Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik: Beihefte, 56).
Schmidt, J. E. and J. Herrgen (2011): Sprachdynamik. Eine Einführung in die moderne
Regionalsprachenforschung. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.
Schwarz, Christian (2004): Die tun-Periphrase im Deutschen. [Magisterarbeit an der
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München].
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SYNTACTIC VARIATION IN NON-STANDARD SWEDISH – A CASE FOR
SYNTACTIC VERNACULAR UNIVERSALS IN GERMANIC?
Henrik Rosenkvist
University of Gothenburg
Swedish is a heavily standardized language, and during the last century many rural
dialects have been lost or substantially eroded. While regional variation concerning the
phonetic and lexical level of Swedish has been studied in detail since the beginning of
the 18th century, not much has been known about the syntactic variation (there are a
few notable exceptions, such as Levander's 1909 study on Övdalian syntax). However,
since 2005, when the project Swedish Dialect Syntax commenced, syntactic variation
in Swedish has increasingly attracted attention (three relevant research projects are
Germanic Referential Null Subjects, Estonian-Swedish Linguistic Structure, and The
Syntax of Negation in Swedish).
In this talk, I will briefly present four case studies: the Estonian Swedish modal verb
mike (‘may-not’), (the northern Swedish auxiliary verb bö ‘need to’, null subjects in
Övdalian, and negative concord. The origin of mike is the collocation må icke
(corresponding to may not); a similar verb can be found in Afrikaans (Biberauer &
Zeiljstra 2012). Bö has developed from the prefix be- in the main verb behöva. This is a
singular development which has been noticed in research on degrammaticalization
(Norde 2009). However, null subjects and negative concord are present also in several
other non-standard varieties of Germanic (for overviews, cf. Rosenkvist 2009, 2015).
The case studies suggest, I argue, that:
a) standardization (and Verschriftligung) (cf. Langer 2001, Auer 2005, Fischer 2007)
affects syntactic variation and change: ”Standardisation inhibits linguistic change”
(Milroy 2000:14).
b) non-standardized linguistic varieties may preserve syntactic features that are ousted
from the standard languages (syntactic archaisms), but – more importantly – they
also often develop brand new syntactic features (syntactic innovations).
c) some syntactic innovations are highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable, being
facilitated by factors such as variety-internal phonetic change or language contact.
d) on the other hand, some syntactic innovations in Germanic vernaculars seem to be
governed, in part, by some type of principles, actualizing a notion of syntactic
vernacular universals (cf. Chambers 2004, Trudgill 2009).
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera and D.
Geeraerts (eds.). Trends in linguistics: studies and monographs: Vol. 163.
Perspectives on variation. Sociolinguistic, historical, comparative, 7–42. Berlin:
de Gruyter.
Chambers, J. K. (2004). Dynamic typology and vernacular universals. In B. Kortmann
(ed.). Dialectology meets Typology. Dialect Grammar from a Cross-Linguistic
Perspective, 127–146. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Fischer, O. (2007). Morphosyntactic Change. Oxford: OUP.
Langer, N. (2001). Linguistic Purism in Action. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
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Norde, M. (2009). Degrammaticalization. Oxford: OUP.
Rosenkvist, H. (2009). Null Referential Subjects in Germanic – an Overview. WPSS
84:151–180.
Rosenkvist, H. (2015). Negative concord in four varieties of Swedish. Arkiv för nordisk
filologi 130:139–166.
Trudgill, P. (2009). Vernacular Universals and the Sociolinguistic Typology of English
Dialects. In Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Heli Paulasto (eds.).
Vernacular universals and language contacts: evidence from varieties of
English and beyond (pp. 302–320). London: Routledge.
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STRUCTURAL DIALECTOLOGY OF THE DUTCH LANGUAGE AREA.
Sjef Barbiers
University of Leiden
The relations between the grammars of Flemish, Brabantish and Dutch. Sjef Barbiers –
Leiden University Dialectology and theoretical syntax have long been almost
completely separate linguistic subdisciplines. Dialectology primarily concentrated on
the description of the geographic distribution and historical development of lexical and
phonetic/phonological properties, while theoretical syntax was looking for syntactic
principles that all languages have in common and that determine the syntactic variation
space for all languages. In the project Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch dialects (2000-2005)
we combined the dialectological, theoretical syntactic and the sociolinguistic
perspectives and methods to systematically describe the syntactic variation in the
Dutch language area. The results, two volumes of the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch
Dialects (SAND I&II; Barbiers et al. 2005, 2008) and online databases with research
tools (www.meertens.knaw.nl/mimore ) now make it possible to address the question
raised by Weinreich (1954) in a seminal programmatic paper: Is a structural
dialectology possible?
The central insight behind this question is structuralist in nature. Since every dialect is
a separate, ‘closed’ system with its own elements and rules, it is not possible to directly
compare, say, sound [A] in dialect X with a similar sound [A] in dialect Y, as this sound
may have entirely different positions within the systems of dialects X and Y. The
consequence of this is that we should describe the geographic distribution of
grammatical (phonological, syntactic) systems rather than the distribution of individual
sounds, morphemes and syntactic properties.
To do exactly this is the main goal of our current project Maps and Grammar
(http://ifarm.nl/maps/home/). This paper (joint work with Marjo van Koppen, Hans
Bennis and Norbert Corver) investigates the grammars of Flemish, South-Brabantish,
North- Brabantish and Dutch with respect to the following properties: subject pronoun
doubling (e.g. Ik ga ’t ik niet doen ‘I go it I not do’, determiner doubling (e.g., den dieën
lit. the that, ‘that one’) , complementizer agreement (e.g., da-n we gaa-n that.PL we
go.PL), partial second person subject incorporation (e.g., Ga-de gij naar huis?
Go.CL2s you home) and D-pronoun fronting in imperatives (e.g., Da doe maar ‘that do
just’). Subject pronoun doubling turns out to strongly correlate with complementizer
agreement, second person subject doubling in inversion turns out to strongly correlate
with determiner doubling and partial second person pronoun incorporation correlates
with D-pronoun fronting.
We provide partial grammars of the dialect areas involved. We show that the
morphosyntactic variation given above can be reduced to variation in the lexical
specifications of the functional elements involved, i.e. variation in the lexicon, and to
variation at the level of spell out (PF). This means that there are no real syntactic
differences between these dialects and that they all share one and the same syntactic
system. South-Brabantish comes out of this analysis as a transitional dialect zone.
Change one feature specification (of the complementizer) and you go from Flemish to
South-Brabantish, change another feature specification (of the subject pronoun) and
you move from South-Brabantish into the North- Brabantish system.
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References:
Barbiers, S. et al. (2005/2008). Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten /
Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects, Vol. I-II. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Weinreich, U. (1954). Is a structural dialectology possible? In Word. 10, 388–400.
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DISCUSSION
Jenny Chesire
University of London
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REVISITING HAUGEN. ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES OF STANDARDIZATION
ORGANISERS:
Gijsbert Rutten
Universiteit Leiden
Rik Vosters
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Keywords: Standardization, language history, historical sociolinguistics.
Half a century ago, Einar Haugen (1966) published his seminal paper ‘Dialect,
language, nation’, in which he introduced selection, codification, elaboration and
acceptance as the four crucial concepts needed to describe the historical process of
standardization. Haugen’s model has been extremely influential, and subsequent
models strongly relied on Haugen’s original proposal, such as Milroy & Milroy (1985),
Joseph (1987), as well as Haugen’s own revisions, in which he replaced the concept of
acceptance by implementation. His model was used as a basis for comparative work
on standardization histories, as in the reference volume on Germanic standardizations
by Deumert & Vandenbussche (2003), where authors were asked to follow Haugen’s
model in the description of individual languages.
While widely used, critical discussions of – and alternatives to – the original concepts
and the underlying model proposed in Haugen (1966) are less common. Thirty years of
historical sociolinguistics, however, have led to more data and far more detailed
descriptions of historical stages of many languages than Haugen could have ever
imagined in the mid-1960s. In this workshop, we want to bring together scholars
working on standardization to reflect on Haugen’s original proposal, and to arrive at a
list of phenomena that should be incorporated into an updated version of a general
theory of standardization. Which results, approaches, insights and methods has
historical sociolinguistic research yielded over the last 30 years, and which of these are
crucial for a revisited understanding of standardization?
Contributions to this panel will start out from (an aspect of) Haugen’s original proposal,
and identify at least one addition, correction or alternative approach to the original
model, illustrating the relevance of their revisiting of Haugen by means of an original
case study. Relevant topics and points for discussion will include:
- alternative sources of data for standardization histories (e.g. language history
from below);
- the role of language ideologies;
- effectiveness of norms, prescriptivism and codifiers;
- the link with technical innovations and production processes;
- invisibilization and the fate of features not selected in standardization;
- the role of language contact and multilingualism in standardization;
- implementation v. acceptance of language norms;
- the link with language planning theory more generally
References:
Haugen, E. (1966). Dialect, language, nation. In A. S. Dil (ed.). The Ecology of
Language. Essays by Einar Haugen (1972) (pp. 237-254). Stanford: Stanford
UP.
Milroy, J. and L. Milroy (1985). Authority in language. Investigating language
prescription and standardisation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Joseph, J. E. (1987). Eloquence and power. The rise of language standards and
standard languages. London: Frances Pinter.
Deumert, A. and W. Vandenbussche (eds.) (2003). Germanic Standizations. Past to
Present. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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1. HAUGEN 2.0: TOWARDS NEW MODELS OF STANDARDIZATION. Gijsbert
Rutten. Universiteit Leiden. Jill Puttaert. Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Rik Vosters.
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
2. THE GOOD MUST BE PUT IN THE DISH: HOW TO SELECT SPELLING
VARIANTS. Anja Voeste. Justus Liebig Universität Giessen
3. RE-EXAMINING CODIFICATION. Raymond Hickey. Universität Duisburg-Essen
4. HOMOGENEITY THROUGH TEACHING: THE IMPLEMENTATION OF
STANDARD DUTCH IN EDUCATION, 1750-1850. Bob Schoemaker. Universiteit
Leiden
5. THE NATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE AND HAUGEN’S THEORY OF LINGUISTIC
STANDARDIZATION. José del Valle. The Graduate Center, CUNY
6. REVISITING HAUGEN’S MODEL OF STANDARDIZATION: CODIFICATION AND
PRESCRIPTION. Wendy Ayres-Bennett. University of Cambridge
7. DISCUSSION. John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
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HAUGEN 2.0: TOWARDS NEW MODELS OF STANDARDIZATION
Gijsbert Rutten
Universiteit Leiden
Jill Puttaert
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Rik Vosters
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Keywords: Standardization, language history, historical sociolinguistics.
In this brief introduction to the panel, the organisers will introduce the topic of the
workshop and its relevance, give a literature review, and lay out the most important
research questions in connection with this.
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HOW TO SELECT SPELLING VARIANTS
Anja Voeste
Justus Liebig University Giessen
Keywords: Spelling variation, standardisation of German, manuscript and print.
It was not until the 17th century, and especially after the Thirty Years’ War, that the
standardisation of German gained momentum: literary societies were founded,
grammars and dictionaries were published, the Baroque period fuelled the creation of
literature, and princely administrations were reinforced. All these developments
considerably increased the amount of written records and the general interest in
questions of norm.
Revisiting the first stage of Haugen’s model of standardisation, my paper will discuss
the intricate problem of selecting a variety in the linguistic landscape of the German
territories during the 17th century. It will be concerned with the following three issues:
the question of pluricentricity (differing local norms), the question of religious
shibboleths (differing norms in protestant and catholic states), and, considered in more
detail, the question of possible differing norms in manuscript and print. When looking at
the example of spelling, it becomes evident that, during this time of increased literacy,
variability did anything but decrease, making the choice of a ‘correct’ variant even more
difficult.
I will illustrate this problem of selection by two case studies: (i) by a theological treatise
that was published by different regional printing shops and (ii) by different versions of a
poem written by one of the most influential poets of the era, Christian Hoffmann von
Hoffmannswaldau (1616–1679), whose works circulated mostly in manuscript and were
only printed posthumously. The first example will show that it was often anything but
obvious which variants could be claimed as protestant or catholic, because regional
and religious spelling features were closely associated or intermingled. Furthermore, I
will argue that, while the grammarians of the day were concerned with the fixing of
spelling in the public domain of printing, the spelling in manuscripts had regularities of
its own.
References:
Osselton, N. E. (1984). Informal spelling systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800.
In N.F. Blake and Ch. Jones. (eds.). English Historical Linguistics: Studies in
Development (pp. 123–137). Sheffield.
Rössler, P. (2005). Schreibvariation, Sprachregion, Konfession. Graphematik und
Morphologie in österreichischen und bayerischen Drucken vom 16. bis ins 18.
Jahrhundert. Frankfurt et al.: Peter Lang.
Takada, H. (1998). Grammatik und Sprachwirklichkeit von 1640–1700. Tubingen:
Niemeyer.
Voeste, A. (2016). Graphematischer Wandel. In U. Domahs and B. Primus (eds.).
Handbuch Laut, Gebärde, Buchstabe (pp. 418–435). Berlin and Boston: de
Gruyter.
Waldenberger, S. (2014). Variation und Spracharbeit: Empirische Untersuchung der
sprachlichen Variation in <identischen> Protokollen. In A. Gerstenberg (ed.).
Verständigung und Diplomatie auf dem Westfälischen Friedenskongress (pp.
225–235). Cologne et al.: Böhlau.
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RE-EXAMINING CODIFICATION
Raymond Hickey
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Keywords: Standardization, codification, supraregionalisation.
The table given at the end of Einar Haugen’ seminal 1964 article ‘Dialect, language,
nation’ lists ‘codification’ as the aspect of language form which is an essential part of
standard languages.
Table 1: Haugen’s criteria for standard languages
Form
Function
Society
Selection
Acceptance
Language
Codification
Elaboration
(Haugen 2003 [1964]: 421)
Of codification Haugen says that it ‘may be defined as minimal variation in form’, so a
reduction of variation in a primarily written norm. This might be true of the end-state of
codification, but as a noun suggesting a process it encompasses much more. The path
from an initial state of more of less equal forms of language to one where there is a
single standard variety which co-exists with other non-standard varieties is the most
interesting aspect of codification.
The present paper will look in detail at the process of codification, i.e. how a single
variety is altered in such a way as to become the publicly accepted, stigma-free variety
of a country or major region. There is both implicit and explicit codification (Hickey, ed.
2012). For Haugen it would seem that he was referring to the latter process in which
there is formal agreement on what features and structures belong to the codified
variety, e.g. by setting these down in a grammar, style usage guide, dictionary, etc. But
the process of implicit codification is, if anything, more common and happens
unconsciously. The result is a variety of a language which bears no stigma in the
society in which it is spoken. Importantly, an implicitly codified variety contrasts with
other co-existing varieties which contain features not in the codified variety. By virtue of
their exclusion from the codified variety these features – vernacular features – are
stigmatised.
The rise of codified varieties involves supraregionalisation (Hickey 2013), a process in
which certain vernacular features are removed from the emerging variety. This variety
is thus increasingly free of strongly local features, hence the term supraregionalisation:
the codified variety is later no longer recognizable as diagnostic of a specific region in
the country in which it has been elevated to an implict standard. An attachment to this
codified variety by weak-tie, educated speakers automatically entails a prescriptive and
normative attitude which censures the vernacular features which have not made it into
the supraregional variety but have remained indicative of local varieties. Whether
explicit codification occurs depends on external factors, e.g. if the country in question
wishes to have prescriptive works, such as a normative grammar or dictionary, for its
codified variety. This has happened in some instances, e.g. in the USA, Canada and
Australia but not in other countries, e.g. Scotland or Ireland where the codified varieties
– Standard Scottish English or Standard Irish English – are not explicitly codified, i.e.
there are no grammars or style guides for these varieties, instead normative works for
English English are used.
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Codified varieties are dynamic entities continually accruing new features and shedding
others, so that they have to be continually redefined, at least for every new generation.
In addition, codified varieties vary by level of language, e.g. the sound level, given its
immediate accessibility for speakers and its place in sociolinguistic assessment, is
especially sensitive to normative attitudes and liable to stigma. These aspects of the
codification complex with be addressed in this paper with pertinent examples.
References:
Haugen, E. (2003 [1964]). Dialect, language, nation. In C. Bratt Paulston and G.R.
Tucker (ed.). Sociolinguistics: The Essential Readings (pp. 411-22). Oxford:
Blackwell.
Hickey, R. (2013). Supraregionalisation and dissociation. In J. K. Chambers and N.
Schilling (eds.). Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Second edition.
Wiley-Blackwell, 537-554.
Hickey, R. (ed.) (2012). Standards of English. Codified Varieties around the World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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HOMOGENEITY THROUGH TEACHING
THE IMPLEMENTATION OF STANDARD DUTCH IN EDUCATION, 1750-1850
Bob Schoemaker
Universiteit Leiden
Keywords: Standardization, implementation, education, Dutch.
Fifty years after its first publication, Einar Haugen’s model of standardization, based on
the central concepts of selection, codification, elaboration and implementation, still
proves to be a useful tool for understanding and comparing standardization histories
(cf. Deumert & Vandenbussche 2003). Standardization studies, however, have focused
unevenly on selection, codification and elaboration, leaving implementation largely
unexplored. At the same time, Deumert & Vandenbussche (2003: 7) call
implementation the ‘Achilles heel’ of the standardization process, because diffusion
across and acceptance by the speech community ‘ultimately decides on the success or
failure of a given set of linguistic decisions made at the stages of selection and
codification’.
One of the issues central to the concept of implementation is the role of education in
the development of standard languages. As Deumert & Vandenbussche (2003: 7)
argue, the development of modern elementary education in the late 18th and early 19th
century was ‘a central force in the diffusion of standard languages and the formation of
a standard/dialect diglossia’. However, they also point out that research on this topic
has ‘so far received only sporadic and unsystematic attention in standardization
studies’ (2003: 459). Vandenbussche (2007: 29) even calls historical pedagogy a ‘black
box’ in our understanding of standardization processes. Elspaß (2002: 45) poses a
number of relevant research questions such as: ‘In what way did people learn the
written standard?’ ‘Which grammars did they use?’ ‘Did teachers master the standard
variety?’. Deumert (2003: 39) argues for, amongst others, a focus on the various
places of learning, styles of learning, traditional classroom practices, social differences
in the educational system, and the extent of passive exposure to the standard norm.
The history of the standardization of Dutch provides an excellent case study for an
investigation into the role of education in the diffusion of standard languages. The first
official codification of the Dutch language in Siegenbeek’s orthography (1804) and
Weiland’s grammar (1805) coincided with the reform of the educational system in the
school laws of 1801-1806. These laws created a broad national school system that
included a thorough system of school inspection, an extensive program for the
improvement of the quality of teachers and the introduction of new pedagogical ideals
and methods. Central to the new school curriculum was the diffusion of reading and
writing skills in the new national standard language.
The archives of the school inspection provide detailed accounts of everyday classroom
practices in the first half of the 19th century. Together with an analysis of schoolbooks
and pedagogical literature, they provide an insight in the different ways the
Siegenbeek-Weiland language norms were diffused through the educational system. In
this paper, I will present an overview of some of the themes and issues encountered in
dealing with Dutch standardization and education, thereby hoping to enrich our
understanding of the implementation-phase in the history of standard languages.
References:
Deumert, A. (2003). Standard Languages as Civic Rituals: Theory and Examples. In
Sociolinguistica, 17, 31-51.
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Deumert, A. and Vandenbussche, W. (eds.) (2003). Germanic Standardizations: Past
to Present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Elspaß, S. (2002). Standard German in the 19th Century?. In Linn, A. R. and
McLelland, N. (eds.) Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Vandenbussche, W. (2007). Shared Standardization Factors in the History of 16
Germanic Languages. In C. Fandrych and R. Salverda (eds.) Standard,
Variation and Language Change in Germanic Languages. Tübingen: Gunter
Narr Verlag.
183
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ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF DATA FOR STANDARDIZATION HISTORIES IN A
VIEW ‘FROM BELOW’
Stephan Elspaß
University of Salzburg
Keywords: Language histories from below, private letters.
In the exegesis history of Haugen’s standardisation model, there has been some
confusion as to whether to interpret it as a descriptive model of standardisation
histories or as a framework for language planning. Haugen himself has contributed to
this confusion, as he applied it to both contexts and had “fiddled a little with the terms”
(Haugen 1983: 269) since the first publication of the matrix model with the fourfold
problem areas of standardisation (Haugen 1966: 933).
I will refer to Haugen’s “four aspects of language development […] in taking the step
from ‘dialect’ to ‘language’, from vernacular to standard”, i.e. “(1) selection of norm, (2)
codification of form, (3) elaboration of function, and (4) acceptance by the community”
(ibid.), thus read his model as an attempt to find a general pattern of standardisation
histories. This was also the idea behind the volume Germanic Standardization. Past to
Present (Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003), which for the first time provided a
comparative overview of standardisation histories of a larger family of the European
languages.
What almost all these accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus
on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the
written form of a language as “a significant and probably crucial requirement for a
standard language” (Haugen 1966: 929; cf. also his definition in Haugen 1994: 4340),
and while print certainly constitutes an important instrument for the dissemination of
codified norms, it remains to be established which role hand-written texts played in
standardisation processes. In 19th century Europe, mass-literacy, which is generally
seen as a precondition of standardisation processes, was only possible because large
parts (or even the majority) of the population learnt to write (and read) hand-written
texts. In the vast volume of private texts that were produced during the various wars
and emigration waves of the 19th century, not only codified norms, but also (regional)
norms of usage were widely transmitted. Private letters and diaries, in particular, have
proved to be a valuable text source for the investigation of such norms and their
diffusion (cf. Elspaß 2012). With examples from a corpus of German emigrant letters, I
will try to demonstrate that grammatical norms of usage, which were literally not visible
in printed texts at the time but which are now considered standard, formed part of the
standardisation process of German.
With a view on the sociolinguistic valuation of such norms of usage, I will finally
address and discuss the notions of ‘intended standard’ and ‘destandardisation’.
References:
Deumert, A. and W. Vandenbussche (eds.) (2003). Germanic Standardizations. Past to
Present. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Elspaß, S. (2005). Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen
Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Elspaß, S. (2012). The Use of Private Letters and Diaries in Sociolinguistic Investigation. In J. M. Hernández-Campoy and J. C. Conde-Silvestre (eds.). The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics (pp. 156–169). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Haugen, E. (1966). Dialect, Language, Nation. American Anthropologist, 68, 922–935.
Haugen, E. (1983). The Implementation of Corpus Planning: Theory and Practice. In
Cobarrubias, J. and Fishman, J. A. (eds.). Progress in language planning: International perspectives (pp. 269–289). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Haugen, E. (1994). Standardization. In Asher, R. E. (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. VIII (pp. 4340-4342). Oxford: Pergamon.
185
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THE NATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE AND HAUGEN´S THEORY OF LINGUISTIC
STANDARDIZATION
José del Valle
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Keywords: Standardization, nationalism, public sphere, consensus, liberalism.
In this study, I begin by examining the theories of nation and the public sphere explicitly
or implicitly invoked in Haugen´s seminal article of 1966 (with additional reference to
articles included in the 1972 collection). I argue that he built his theory of linguistic
standardization on the basis of, first, modernist and constructivist understandings of the
nation and, second, consensual views of the public sphere. I will expose the arguments
through which Haugen links the historical emergence of the nation-state, the
development of a public sphere, and the planning efforts that result not just in a highly
developed language but one that is internally coherent and externally distinctive. I claim
that, ultimately, Haugen presents language standardization and the national public
sphere as conditions of modernity.
I then move to analyze the political philosophy underpinning Haugen´s model. My
reading suggests that, in contrast with mainstream modernist and constructivist
theories of nationalism (e.g., Anderson 1991, Gellner 1983, Hobsbawm 1992) -in which
the historical emergence of the nation-state is inextricably linked to one particular stage
in the development of capitalism-, Haugen embraces a liberal-democratic view of the
nation. Such view is presented through an argument that links the modern nation to the
development of a public sphere grounded in a highly standardized language that
guarantees transparent communication and Everyman´s equal access to the law
(Habermas 1989 and Taylor´s 1997 analysis of John Locke´s theory of language).
The study concludes, first, by praising Haugen´s commitment to interdisciplinarity in his
take on the historical development of linguistic standardization (i.e., sociolinguistics
must proceed in close dialogue with, at least, history and political science) and,
second, by showing the limitations of his model in view of the fundamental social
transformations that have taken place in high modernity and late capitalism (Duchêne
and Heller 2013). The discussion of these limitations will be based on the analysis of
the specific shape that the standardization of Spanish has taken since the nineteen
nineties, when the Spanish government empowered two language agencies -the Real
Academia Española and the Instituto Cervantes- entrusting them, respectively, with the
consolidation of the pan-Hispanic community as a market and the promotion of
Spanish in international linguistic markets (Del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman 2002,
Paffey 2012).
References:
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso.
Del Valle, J. and L. Gabriel-Stheeman (eds.). (2002). The Battle Over Spanish
Between 1800 and 2000: Language Ideologis and Hispanic Intellectuals.
London and New York: Routlegde.
Duchêne, A. and M. Heller (eds.) (2013). Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and
Profit. London and New York: Routledge.
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haugen, E. (1972). The Ecology of Language. Essays by Einar Haugen. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. (1992). Nations and Nationalism since 1780 Programme, Myth,
Reality. Revised Edition. Cambridge: CUP.
Paffey, D. (2012). Language Ideologies and the Globalization of 'Standard' Spanish.
London: Bloomsbury.
Taylor, T. J. (1997). Theorizing Language: Analysis, Normativity, Rhetoric, History.
Amsterdam: Pergamon. Chapter 7.
187
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REVISITING HAUGEN’S MODEL OF STANDARDIZATION: CODIFICATION AND
PRESCRIPTION
Wendy Ayres-Bennett
University of Cambridge
Keywords: Standardization, codification, prescription, purism.
Haugen’s model (1972 [1966]) of standardization has been widely adopted in general
histories of particular languages, such as Lodge (1993) on French or Costa Carrera
(2007) on Catalan, not least because of its clarity and simplicity. Criticisms to date have
often noted its somewhat teleological nature. In this presentation we will focus on its
treatment of codification and prescription, with a view to suggesting possible
refinements of the model. We will illustrate our argument with a number of case studies
both from languages with a global reach and minoritized languages. We will consider
whether it is possible to elaborate a single model of standardization, given the different
linguistic, social and cultural contexts in which standardization takes place
Haugen makes no distinction between codification and prescription either in the original
version of his model, or in the somewhat more elaborate version published in 1987
(Haugen 1987: 64). Indeed, he seems to consider ‘codification’ and ‘prescription’ as
broadly interchangeable, suggesting that the typical products of codification are a
prescriptive orthography, grammar and dictionary. Conversely, in their discussion of the
development of a standard language, Milroy and Milroy (1991: 27) differentiate
Codification and Prescription as two of their seven hypothetical stages. Whilst they
stress these do not necessarily follow in temporal succession, they nevertheless imply
that prescription tends to follow codification.
Furthermore, neither model mentions purism, although Deumert and Vandenbussche
(2003: 463) argue that its role in the history of standardization must be considered. For
some, purism and prescriptivism are used as broad synonyms, whilst others, such as
Walsh (2012), argue the definition of purism only partially overlaps with that of
prescription. We have recently argued (Ayres-Bennett 2016) that it is also important to
distinguish between prescriptive intention, expression and effect since, for example,
prescriptive expression may be underpinned by the description of a dominant variety or
of variation and change.
References:
Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (2016). Codification and Prescription in Linguistic
Standardization: Myths and Models. In J. M. Nadal and F. Feliu (eds.).
Constructing languages: Norms, Myths and Emotions (pp. 99-129). Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Costa Carreras, Joan (2007). Réflexions sur la diffusion de la norme linguistique
catalane. In A. Viaut (ed.). Variable territoriale et promotion des langues
minoritaires (pp. 287-300). Pessac: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
d’Aquitaine.
Deumert, A. and W. Vandenbussche (eds.) (2003). Germanic Standardizations: Past to
Present. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Haugen, E. (1972 [1966]). Dialect, Language, Nation. In J. B. Pride and J. Holmes
(eds.). Sociolinguistics (pp. 97-111). Harmondsworth: Penguin (originally
published in American Anthropologist 68, 922-935).
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Haugen, E. (1987). Blessings of Babel. Bilingualism and Language Planning. Problems
and Pleasures. Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: de Gruyter.
Lodge, R. A. (1993). French: From Dialect to Standard. London and New York:
Routledge.
Milroy, J. and L. Milroy (1991). Authority in Language: Investigating Language
Prescription and Standardization. Second edition. London and New York:
Routledge.
Walsh, O. (2012). Linguistic Purism in France and Quebec. PhD dissertation:
University of Cambridge.
189
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REVISITING MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN STANDARD AND PRIMARY
DIALECTS IN
GALLO-ROMANCE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE – PART 1: LEXICAL FEATURES
ORGANISERS:
André Thibault
Université Paris-Sorbonne
Mathieu Avanzi
Université catholique de Louvain
Keywords: Diaglossia, lexicon, French regional and dialectal variation, Gallo-Romania,
Oïl, Oc and Francoprovençal dialectology.
In French-speaking Europe (now type D in Auer’s model), there is a long history of
contacts between Standard French and its closest cousins, the Gallo-Romance dialects
(‘Oïl’, ‘Francoprovençal’ and ‘Occitan’ families). Traditionally, regional variation in
Standard French used to be entirely explained by substrate effects, contacts with
Gallo-Romance dialects being seen as the unique source capable of triggering
variation in the standard. This vision has been challenged by a large number of authors
(amongst many others, Bloch 1921 or Chambon 1997; see Chambon & Greub 2009 for
an overview) who have shown that French has a dynamism of its own, and that primary
dialects can also be strongly influenced by the standard language with which they have
been coexisting for centuries, in a situation of prototypical diglossia, eventually evolving
into a diaglossia. This panel aims at gathering specialists of Gallo-Romance and
Regional French varieties, to shed new light on mutual influences between these two
linguistic systems across time and space. Some of the general questions that we would
like to address in this panel can be formulated as follows:
-
What criteria can help us to identify the regional vs. dialectal nature of a given
set of data?
-
Can new dialectal data give us relevant information on the history of
Standard/Dialect coexistence in Gallo-Romance, as far as code-switching,
code-mixing and continuum situations are concerned, across time and history?
-
Can the data at our disposal allow us to assess that a situation of diaglossia, so
frequent in other linguistic areas (Italian, German), existed massively at some
point in the past, in the history of Gallo-Romance? Do we have evidence of
inter-linguistic codes being widely used at some point in certain regions? Can
overseas colonial French varieties shed light on these issues?
-
Which methodological precautions have to be taken to assess that the presence
of a given form in a source is due to the direct influence of standard French on
the dialect or vice versa, and not an artefact created by the way that the
material was elicited?
This panel will feature 5 speakers, who will address the questions raised above in the
light of data gathered from the Middle-Ages to the present days, in different areas of
Gallo-Romania. Greub and Baiwir’s talks will raise the issue of the data’s authenticity in
the search of criteria to differentiate Regional from Dialectal varieties, while Bergeron
will deal with the question of knowing whether the variety spoken in Normandy during
17th/18th reflects a situation of diaglossia. Thibault will test the hypothesis according to
which the (non-)pronunciation of some final word consonants can be explained by the
behaviour of these words in the substrate patois. Remysen will explore the way that
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mutual influences between patois and regional French was conceptualized by FrenchCanadian linguists at the early beginning of the last century. The panel will wrap up
with a discussion animated by France Martineau and Yves-Charles Morin.
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: a typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque et al. (eds.). Perspectives on
variation (pp. 7-42). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Bloch, O. (1921). La pénétration du français dans les parlers des Vosges méridionales.
Paris: Champion.
Chambon, J. P. (1997). Les emprunts du français moderne aux dialectes ou patois:
une illusion d’optique en lexicologie française ou historique?. Lalies, 33-53.
Chambon, J. P. and Y. Greub (2009). Histoire des variétés régionales dans la
Romania: français. In G. Ernst, M. D. Gleßgen, Ch. Schmitt, W. Schweickard
(eds.). Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (pp. 25522565). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
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1. THE DIFFUSION OF LITERARY LANGUAGE IN THE MIDDLE-AGES: FRENCH
AND FRANCOPROVENÇAL. Yan Greub. Université de Lorraine
2. TESTING LINGUISTIC PURITY MYTH WITH FIELD SURVEYS. Esther Baiwir.
Université de Picardie
3. DID ‘DIAGLOSSIA’ EXIST IN THE HISTORY OF GALLO-ROMANCE? Myriam
Bergeron-Maguire. Université de Zurich
4. FINAL CONSONANT DELETION AND RESTITUTION: MUTUAL INFLUENCES
BETWEEN FRENCH AND GALLO-ROMANCE. André Thibault. Université ParisSorbonne
5. GALLO-ROMANCE DIALECTS AND THE ORIGINS OF QUÉBÉCOIS FRENCH:
EUROPEAN DIALECTOLOGY THROUGH THE EYES OF THE SOCIÉTÉ DU
PARLER FRANÇAIS AU CANADA. Wim Remysen. Sherbrook University
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THE DIFFUSION OF LITERARY LANGUAGE IN THE MIDDLE-AGES:
FRENCH AND FRANCOPROVENÇAL
Yan Greub
Université de Lorraine
Keywords: Francoprovençal dialects, Oïl dialects, Medieval French.
The aim of this contribution is to examine the particular situation of the written language
in the Middle Ages (13e-14e centuries) in the Francoprovençal area. Francoprovençal is
nowadays unanimously considered as an independent language, alongside French,
Occitan, and maybe Gascon, and therefore as being a part of Gallo-Romance (as long
as this concept is acceptable) on the same foot as them. Yet, it was not recognised as
such an independent entity by the medieval speakers and the written production that
we can unambiguously assign to Francoprovençal is considerably less extent than that
of French or Occitan; the vast majority of the writers associated with the
Francoprovençal region wrote in French in the Middle Ages, and it is not clear whether
they thought they were actually writing in a foreign language or not.
The process of writing one’s own language normally combines influences from the
speaker’s linguistic system and from a model of written language. From our modern
point of view, the model of written language is taken, in this case, from a different
language (French vs Francoprovençal). Some particular models situated in the
Francoprovençal-speaking zone surely exist), but they are not the most common case.
This means that describing the situation of regional French in the region involves two
main problems: 1) if in the Oïl region we have (in the Classic Middle Ages) a situation
of continuum between H-variety and L-variety, this continuum is not so clear in the
Francoprovençal one. 2) We study a written language, and its relationship with French
spoken in Lyon or another Francoprovençal city is very difficult to reach, even more
that it is in the case of the Oïl dialects.
When describing the texts from the region, there is hence a problem in contrasting
French vs Francoprovençal features, as this is not the same thing as contrasting the
vernacular features and those of the H-variety model: the model of the writer has to be
identified if it is not a local tradition commonly shared and usually, it will not be a central
French one, and will rather include south-eastern features. Therefore, south-eastern
features, possibly including also some part of the Francoprovençal zone, may have to
be attributed to the model language.
We will give some examples of an analysis aiming both at distinguishing the
components of a text in this way and to establish some ways of making those
distinctions, on the basis of recent realizations. We will also present some facts that
could assess a conscience of a linguistic difference between dialectal and regional
varieties.
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TESTING LINGUISTIC PURITY MYTH WITH FIELD SURVEYS
Esther Baiwir
Université de Picardie
Keywords: Oïl dialects, Walloon, Picard, Regional French, field surveys.
For a long time, Oïl dialectology has been embarrassed by the heavy weight of
Standard French on its “playground”. The goal of dialect specialists was to gather, as
far as possible, rare or archaic words, and to avoid Gallicisms, which despite of their
efforts appeared nevertheless in field surveys.
In particular, we will question the notion of “good informant” in linguistic geography
studies dealing with the dialects spoken in the North of the Oïl area (Picard and
Walloon dialects, mostly), in order to evaluate the representativeness of the data
gathered in linguistic atlases. Did such material ever reflect the real practices of dialect
speakers? To which degree has the underlying sociolinguistic ideology affected, over
time, the practices of dialect specialists and, as a consequence, the results of their field
investigations? To answer such questions, we will have a closer look at the data
published in atlases such as ALF, ALW and ALPIC.
As for the “standard French words” that appear in these atlases, we think they can be
valuable, even if their presence raises some issues. Thus, as early as 1921, Oscar
Bloch recognized in his survey dealing with the penetration of French in the Southern
Vosges that it was not easy to evaluate the dialectal value of the data gathered through
French questionnaires. He minimized this issue arguing that, due to the large amount
of data, one can disregard without much inconvenience the dubious cases (p. 6).
Should we then deny any individual value to the data gathered in atlases? We will try to
identify the criteria that allow one to operate a partition between the elements
belonging to the target-language and the ersatz generated by the questionnaires. Only
after such an analysis will it be possible to explain which lessons can be learned from
this comparison.
Finally, the study of intertwined connections between French and vernacular varieties
naturally brings us to question the notion of language itself. Can the delimitation criteria
be only scalar? To which extent is the traditional view of dialect history in the Oïl area
wrong, or at least too simplistic? It is important to confront fragile linguistic criteria with
sociolinguistic data. Following Éloy (1997), we will consider alternative scenarios to
incorporate speakers’ representations and linguistic consciousness in dialectal studies.
References:
Gilliéron J. and E. Edmont (1902-1910). Atlas linguistique de la France. Paris:
Champion.
Carton, F. and M. Lebègue (1989-1998). Atlas linguistique et ethnographique du
picard. Paris: CNRS.
Remacle, L., É. Legros et alii (1953-...). Atlas linguistique de la Wallonie. Liège:
Université de Liège.
Baiwir, E. (2006). Les dialectes évoluent-ils ? Un demi-siècle après l'ALW, Les
dialectes de Wallonie, 31-32-33, 9-24.
Bal, W. (1954). Francisation d'un dialecte, Les dialectes belgo-romans, 11, 5-19.
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Bloch, O. (1921). La pénétration du français dans les parlers des Vosges méridionales.
Paris: Champion.
Éloy, J.-M. (1997). La constitution du picard: une approche de la notion de langue.
Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters.
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DID ‘DIAGLOSSIA’ EXIST IN THE HISTORY OF GALLO-ROMANCE?
Myriam Bergeron-Maguyre
Université de Zurich
Keywords: Diaglossia, lexicography, Normandy French and dialect.
This contribution seeks to ascertain the existence of a type C situation (‘diaglossia’ in
Auer’s terminology), so frequent in other linguistic areas (Italian, German), at some
point in the history of Gallo-Romance. To this end, we will examine new lexical data
found in a corpus comprised of original unpublished sources, which includes accounts,
records, personal correspondence and minutes, written between the 17th and the 18th
century in Upper Normandy. The fact that the local range of this type of documentation
has proven to be closely linked to the presence of regionalisms forces us to consider
the following question, to which this communication will try to provide an answer: are
regionalisms that prove to be dialect borrowings only temporary transfers from one
language to another or are these borrowings rather stable? May they be considered as
evidence of a more widely used inter-linguistic code? Most of the time, traditional
sources such as literature, lexicography and regional glossaries do not contain the
borrowings in question for the specified period. Therefore, one may be tempted to think
that these loan words were in fact part of a more or less spontaneous code-switching
stage bound to disappear shortly. As a matter of fact, beyond traditional sources, we
believe that linguistic criteria strictly speaking need to be taken into consideration in
order to establish such an assertion. For instance, we shall evaluate whether some of
the loan words that we found in our corpus were borrowed at an early period when
French was spreading, and if they went through changes that are known to be French
or on the contrary, whether they exclusively followed a dialectal development through
time. Thus, we wish to determine if chronological depth and degree of adaptation
regarding three chosen borrowings may render a type C situation plausible in a specific
area of northern Gallo-Romania.
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: a typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera & D.
Geeraerts (eds.). Perspectives on variation. Sociolinguistic, historical,
comparative (pp. 7-42). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Bergeron-Maguire, M. (forth.). Le français en Haute-Normandie aux 17e et 18e siècles :
aspects lexicaux, phonétiques et grammaticaux. Strasbourg: BiLiRo.
Chambon, J. P. and Y. Greub (2009). Histoire des variétés régionales dans la
Romania: français. In G. Ernst, M.-D. Gleßgen, Ch. Schmitt, W. Schweickard
(eds.). Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (pp. 25522565). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Francard, M. (2005). La frontière entre les langues régionales romanes et le français
en Wallonie. In M. Gleßgen and A. Thibault (eds.). La lexicographie
différentielle du français et le Dictionnaire des régionalismes de France. Actes
du Colloque en l’honneur de Pierre Rézeau (pp. 45-61). Strasbourg: Presses
Universitaires de Strasbourg.
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FINAL CONSONANT DELETION AND RESTITUTION:
MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN FRENCH AND GALLO-ROMANCE
André Thibault
Université Paris-Sorbonne
Keywords: Final
pronunciation).
consonant
deletion
and
restitution,
Buben
effect
(spelling
Final consonant deletion in French is a phenomenon that affected practically all
consonants as early as the 13th century (Fouché 1961, 663). Nevertheless, as a
consequence of literacy, the pronunciation of some (but by no means all) final
consonants was gradually reintroduced in common speech. As a result, final consonant
deletion/restitution in modern French is totally anarchical and cannot really be predicted
or systematized (cf. but [by], [byt]).
Is it possible, though, to identify more precisely its causes: on the one hand, the Buben
(1935) effect, especially with learned or loan words; on the other hand,
adstratic/substratic influences (language contact). Amongst the many factors that may
have triggered final consonant restitution, scholars have mentioned: expansion of the
phonetic body; avoidance of homonymical conflicts; stronger expressivity; better
morphological integration in a derivational family; lexical polarization.
Final consonant deletion in Gallo-Romance dialects shows a different portrait. Whereas
Oïl and Francoprovençal dialects have massively lost their final consonants, most Oc
dialects have maintained them until now. But mutual influences between French and its
Gallo-Romance cousins have affected the general situation. The most spectacular
effect is final consonant restitution in many lexical items, especially in “oïl” and
“francoprovençal” dialects, as can easily be proven by the study of linguistic maps
(Brun-Trigaud et al. 2005, 314-323); but reversely, French influence has also caused
final consonant deletion in many Oc regions, where this feature is not inherited.
What has not really been seen until now, though, is that southern dialects also might
have played a part in the restitution of final consonants in (regional) French – that is,
the same phenomenon, but in a different direction. Exploratory studies based on
crowdsourcing surveys (Français de nos régions; Cartopho) have shown that final
consonant pronunciation in a set of lexical items in regional French (e.g., moins) often
matches the area of the corresponding phenomenon in southern “patois”, where it is
considered inherited. It can therefore be argued that the influence in this particular
situation can be seen as dialect → French, and not the other way around. We will
further investigate this hypothesis through the analysis of selected lexical types and
their representation in both regional and dialectal sources (final -s, as in moins or gens;
final -l, as in persil, nombril, sourcil; final -t, as in but, août, pet).
References:
Brun-Trigaud, G. et al. (2005). Lectures de l’Atlas linguistique de la France de Gilliéron
et Edmond. Du temps dans l’espace. Paris: CTHS.
Buben, V. (1935). Influence de l’orthographe sur la prononciation du français moderne.
Bratislava: Spisy filosofické fakulty, University Komenského v Bratislavě.
Scherrer, Y. et al. [online]. Cartopho. Available at: https://cartopho.limsi.fr
Fouché, P. (1961). Phonétique historique du français, vol. III : Les consonnes et index
général. Paris: Klincksieck.
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Avanzi, M. et al. [online]. Français
https://francaisdenosregions.com/.
de
nos
régions.
Available
at :
Fouché, P. (1961). Phonétique historique du français, vol. III : Les consonnes et index
général. Paris: Klincksieck.
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GALLO-ROMANCE DIALECTS AND THE ORIGINS OF QUÉBÉCOIS FRENCH:
EUROPEAN DIALECTOLOGY THROUGH THE EYES OF THE SOCIÉTÉ DU
PARLER FRANÇAIS AU CANADA
Wim Remysen
Sherbrooke University
Keywords: Gallo-Romance dialects, secondary dialects, Québécois French.
The study of the mutual influences between French and Gallo-Romance in Europe has
traditionally been of great interest for scholars working on the origins of extra-European
varieties of French, such as Québécois French. There has been substantial debate
among scholars on the extent to which Gallo-Romance dialects have influenced the
formation of this variety (Morin 1996, Mougeon/Beniak 1994, Poirier 2014). Many
efforts have been done to document linguistic practices that were common in France at
the colonial time in order to get a better understanding of the development of the
linguistic structures and particularities of Québécois French.
The interest in its origins goes back to the end of the 19th century, thanks to the
pioneering work of Adjutor Rivard and other members of the Société du parler français
au Canada, founded in 1902. Rivard (1914) began to systematically study the historical
relationship between Québécois French and dialects spoken in France. Other
members of this society, such as Louis-Philippe Geoffrion, popularized this work by
studying the subject in language columns published in the press. Thanks to their
studies, it gradually became clearer that Québécois French was not a corrupted
“patois” of some sort, a wide-held belief at that time, but instead a language originated
in Standard French whose roots were to be considered “noble”.
The aim of this talk is to study the discourse held by the Société du parler français au
Canada on the relationship between the French language and Gallo-Romance dialects.
We will do so by studying the use that was made of regional “glossaries” published in
France, i.e. repertoires of dialectal or regional lexical items (Mercier 1996), on the one
hand, as well as the numerous texts published on the subject of European dialectology
in the Bulletin du parler français au Canada, on the other hand. These texts offer
insight into the way Rivard and Geoffrion define (primary) dialects as well as consider
their legitimacy.
References:
Geoffrion, L.-P. (1924-1927). Zigzags autour de nos parlers: simples notes. Québec:
chez l’auteur.
Mercier, L. (1996). L’influence de la lexicographie dialectale française sur la
lexicographie québécoise de la fin du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle. In
T. Lavoie (ed.). Français du Canada – Français de France (pp. 239-255).
Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Morin, Y. C. (1996). The origin and development of the pronunciation of French in
Québec. In H. F. Nielsen and L. Schøsler (dir.). The Origins and Development
of Emigrant Languages (pp. 243-275). Odense: Odense University Press.
Mougeon, R. and É. Beniak (eds.) (1994). Les origines du français québécois. SainteFoy: PUL.
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Poirier, C. (2014). Le lexique du français du Québec : apports méconnus des parlers
provinciaux de France. In Y. Greub and A. Thibault (eds.). Dialectologie et
étymologie galloromanes (pp. 331-353). Strasbourg: SLR/ÉLiPhi.
Rivard, A. (1914). Études sur les parlers de France au Canada. Québec:
J. P. Garneau.
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VARIATION IN COPULA CHOICE
AMONG ROMANI-SPANISH BILINGUALS IN MEXICO
Evangelia Adamou
French National Center for Scientific Research
Cristian Padure
INALCO
Stefano de Pascale
KU Leuven
Keywords:
Copula choice, heritage languages, Romani, Spanish.
Abstract:
Based on evidence from heritage speakers of Spanish in the US who generalize estar
Silva-Corvalán (1986, 1994) argued that bilinguals tend to simplify alternatives. However,
using a large sample from the Iberian Peninsula, Geeslin & Guijarro-Fuentes (2008)
showed that bilingualism does not always lead to simplification. Adamou (2013) further
demonstrated that bilingualism may lead to complexification. It was shown that heritage
speakers of Romani in Mexico developed under the influence of Spanish copulas a
distinction between attributive predications using the copula si, in (1a), and the third
person subject clitic pronouns, in (1b), whereas Romani speakers from Europe only use
the copula (Matras 2002).
(1) a. le
DEF.PL
ʃave
muᴚa
bibiake
si
barbale
children
POSS.1SG
aunt.DAT be.3PL rich
‘My auntʼs children are rich.’(Adamou 2013:1085)
b. o
DEF.M
raklo=lo
felis
boy=3SG.M
happy
‘The boy is happy.’ (Adamou 2013:1075)
In the present study, 60 Romani-Spanish bilinguals from Veracruz, Mexico, responded to a
copula choice task in Spanish (Geeslin & Guijarro-Fuentes 2008) followed by immediate
translation of the target clauses in Romani (Adamou 2013).
A mixed-effects logistic regression, with “Romani copula” as response variable and
“participant” and “experimental item” as random effects, reveals a significant effect of
“Spanish copula” variant, i.e., ser or estar (χ² = 13.67; df = 1; p < 0.001), “generation”, i.e.,
young (ages 17-22), middle (ages 23-45), old (ages 48-90) (χ² = 20.35; df = 2; p < 0.001),
and interaction between linguistic predictors “referent” and “experience with referent” (χ² =
12.25; df = 1; p < 0.001).
Analysis shows that sentences with estar are significantly more frequently translated in
Romani using the clitics, but those with ser correspond to both the Romani copula and the
clitics; see Figure 1. The youngest cohort of participants prefers the clitics significantly
more frequently than the other two generations, including for class referents; see Figure 2.
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The best linguistic predictors are immediate experience with the referent, and class for
ongoing experience; see Figure 3.
Our study illustrates that after the complexification of the heritage language, simplification
is ongoing in Romani, in particular among the younger, Spanish-dominant generation.
Figure 1. Innovative clitic choice in Mexican Romani
with respect to Spanish copula choice (1: ser; 2:
estar)
Figure 2. Innovative clitic choice in Mexican Romani
with respect to generation (1: young; 2: middle; 3: old)
and referent (class or individual)
Figure 3. Innovative clitic choice in Mexican Romani with
respect to referent (class or individual) and experience
with referent (immediate or ongoing)
References:
Adamou, E. 2013. Replicating Spanish estar in Mexican Romani. Linguistics 51:1075–
1105.
Geeslin, K. & P. Guijarro-Fuentes. 2008. Variation in contemporary Spanish: Linguistic
predictors of estar in four cases of language contact. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition 11:365–380.
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Matras, Y. 2002. Romani: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: CUP.
Silva-Corvalán, C. 1986. Bilingualism and language change: The extension of estar in Los
Angeles Spanish. Language 62:587–608.
Silva-Corvalán, C. 1994. Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
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SPANISH RELATIVE PRONOUNS VARIATION: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDY
Esther Álvarez
University of León
José Manuel Igoa
Autonomous University of Madrid
Salvador Gutiérrez
University of León
Keywords:
Variation, relative pronouns, processing, psycholinguistics.
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to analyze the linguistic variation concerning Spanish relative
pronouns from a psycholinguistic perspective. In Spanish, as in many other languages,
it is possible to interchange certain relativizers within the same context without
changing the overall meaning of the phrase: la ciudad en la que vivo, la ciudad en la
cual vivo, or la ciudad donde vivo. This phenomenon has been studied previously, but
always taking into account a variationist methodology (Labov 1982). For instance,
Herrera Santana (1994) studied how certain social characteristics (age, gender, and
education level) influenced relative pronouns variation within the Spanish variety from
Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Our interest, however, does not focus on social factors but on
cognitive ones. More specifically, our hypothesis predicts that the relative pronoun que
could be less demanding in processing terms, as it lacks definite semantic features as
well as grammatical ones. Hereof, our study could be placed inside a new
sociolinguistic framework, named by some authors “cognitive sociolinguistics”
(Caravedo 2014; Moreno Fernández 2015).
In order to analyze our hypothesis, a self-paced reading experiment was conducted, in
a word-by-word moving window display. Results show significant differences in the
processing of relative clauses depending on which relativizer appears at the beginning
of the clause. For instance, when contrasting que vs el cual, or que vs quien, the
pronoun que is read significantly faster, meaning that it is easier to be processed than
el cual or quien (que vs el cual: χ²(1)=4,12 p<0,05; que vs quien: χ²(1)=3,98 p<0,05).
However, these differences do not always head in the hypothesized direction. For
example, relative clauses with donde are read significantly faster than their
counterparts with que (χ²(2)=6,24 p<0,05). This could mean that the ease or the
difficulty to process relativizers could be influenced by their frequency of occurrence.
As our previous corpora-based studies show, que is more frequent than el cual or
quien in the contexts where they vary; however, donde has the same frequency of
occurrence than que and, in certain contexts, it is even more frequent than this
pronoun. In this sense, our results would speak in favor of experienced-based accounts
(Relai & Christiansen 2007).
References:
Caravedo, R. (2014). Percepción y variación lingüística. Enfoque sociocognitivo.
Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Herrera Santana, J. L. (1994). Estudio sociolingüístico de los relativos en el español de
Santa Cruz de Tenerife. University of La Laguna: Servicio de publicaciones.
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Labov, W. (1982). The social stratification of English in New York City (3th ed.).
Washington D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Moreno Fernández, F. (2012). Sociolingüística cognitiva. Proposiciones, escolios y
debates. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
Relai, F. and Christiansen, M. H. (2007). Processing of relative clauses is made easier
by frequency of occurrence. Journal of Memory and Language 57, 1-23.
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LANGUAGE REGISTER IN THE STATE-OF-THE-NATION ADRESSES OF POST
MARTIAL LAW PHILIPPINE PRESIDENTS
Madonna Gregorio Amora
De La Salle University -Dasmariñas
Keywords:
SONAs' language register, speech act, social aspects, speakers' intentions, socioeconomic/political text analysis framework.
Abstract:
This study identified the language registers of the State-of-the-Nation Addresses of
post Martial Law presidents utilizing qualitative approach. A total of 416 topic
sentences representative of the paragraphs that comprised the five SONAs were
analyzed and interpreted to be able to determine the social aspects, the participants
and their roles, the modalities. Situational features in the SONA were organized into a
schema of three parts: Field, Tenor, Mode to be able to account for the function of
language in a particular situation.
Findings revealed that six social aspects represent the Field of the SONAs: political,
economic, education, health, ecology, and spiritual yet only political and economic
were consistently prominent. Spiritual aspect was contained only in the SONAs of
female presidents which is suggestive of the need to further look into the significance of
gender as a dimension in determining language registers in the SONA. Tenor
comprised of the addresser (presidents/speakers) and the addressees (fellow
government officials and the people) being the referents. The repeated use of
pronominals "I", "We", "You", and the nominal "Filipino" (people) revealed the variation
in the level of participation of both the addressers and the addressees including the
speakers' intentions. Notably, the common significant role of the government officials
has to do with democracy preservation and economic convalescence. Mode of the five
SONAs was categorized as formal, written-to-be-spoken type of genre as exemplified
in the use of lexicon (e.g. public officials, economic teams, wang-wang, among others)
and syntax- the frequent use of finite clause. The manner of addressing majority of the
participants was through the use of nominals (e.g. NBI, military, congress Ombudsman
among others). The frequent use of pronominals, "You", "I", and "We" commonly
precede a description of the participants' respective roles and functions.
Based on these findings, the researcher concludes that the values of Field, Tenor,
Mode could describe the language register of the SONA. These are the essential
points that steered the researcher to be able to come up with a methodology on how to
extract the language registers. This methodology is arguably considered as the
significant contribution of this research to the field of language study, A SocioEconomic/Socio-Political Text Analysis Framework. The study recommends that a
large sample of corpora (SONA) may be analyzed to establish the significance of
gender as one of the dimensions in determining the language registers of the SONA.
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DIALECT AND OTHER EXPLANATORY FACTORS IN SUBCONSCIOUS
VERBAL GUISE TESTS
Ragnhild Lie Anderson
Edit Bugge
University of Bergen
Keywords:
Subconscious verbal guise test, dialect change processes, evaluation pattern,
regression analyses, explanatory power.
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to investigate which factors are in play in the subconscious
evaluating process of voices in a verbal guise test, and to investigate the explanatory
power of these factors. This will be done by an exploratory, post-hoc, statistically based
multidimensional analysis of language attitudinal data which tests the validity of verbal
guise experiments as instantiated.
The verbal guise data analysed in this paper was collected from 1244 pupils in
secondary schools in six different localities in Western Norway, as part of the project
Dialektendringsprosessar
(=DEP,
Dialect
change
processes,
http://folk.uib.no/hnohs/DEP/). The six communities consist of three cities and three
rural areas within commuting distance distributed among three different counties along
the Western coast of Norway.
The verbal guise test is made for testing peoples’ subconscious evaluations on
languages or language varieties. The test method used in DEP has been developed in
Denmark, where the test reveals the same result pattern all over the country (cf.
Kristiansen 2009). This on the face of it is a strong indicator that this test is well
designed for this purpose. The results from the verbal guise tests in Western Norway
did however not demonstrate a homogenous evaluating pattern (cf. Anderson 2010,
Fossheim 2010 and Doublet 2012). The Norwegian results have given reason to
believe that not only dialectal variation, but also paralinguistic information will play
when participants are asked to judge personality traits based on voices. It is well known
from other studies that voice manipulations can affect personal factor ratings. This
hypothesis has been verified in various linguistic and social psychological studies (cf.
Brown, Strong and Rencher 1975, Apple, Streeter and Krauss 1979 and Smith, Brown,
Strong and Rencher 1975). Pitch and speech rate are examples of variables that have
had an effect on personal attributions (ibid.).
In addition to dialect, six variables were included in the analysis: Pitch, reference to
geographic locality, number of words per 15 seconds of speech, age of voice,
introduction and the playback order of samples. The mean rank of the individual voice
samples of the relevant test location formed the dependent variables.
Two main research questions were proposed:
1. Which factors seem to influence pupils’ evaluations when they listen to a new
voice sample?
2. What explanatory power do these different factors have in a statistical analysis?
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References:
Anderson, R. (2010). Medvitne og umedvitne haldningar til bergensk, austlandsk og
strilemål hjå ungdomar I Åsane. Danske talesprog bind 10, 80 – 107.
København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag.
Apple, W., L. A., Streeter and R. M. Krauss (1979). Effects of Pitch and Speech Rate
on Personal Attributions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 37,
nº 5, 715 – 727.
Brown, B. L., W. J., Strong and A. C. Rencher (1975). Accoustic determinants of
perceptions of personality from speech. Linguistics 11 – 32.
Dialect Change Processes [online]. University of Bergen. Downloaded June 29 2015.
Available at: http://folk.uib.no/hnohs/DEP/
Doublet, M.-R. R. (2012). Bare frå Bergen, eller frå Fana i Bergen? En intern språkkrig
mellom bergensvarietetene. Bergen: Masteroppgåve.
Fossheim, M. (2010). Språket på Midøya – en sosiolingvistisk oppfølgingsstudie av
talemålene på ei øy i Romsdalen. Bergen: Masteroppgåve.
Smith, B. L., B. L., Brown, W. J., Strong and A. C. Rencher. (1975). Effects of speech
rate on personality perception. Language and Speech 18, 145 – 152.
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USING THE SOCIAL NETWORK THEORY TO UNFOLD VARIATION WITHIN AND
ACROSS LINGUISTIC COMMUNITIES: THE CASE OF ROMEIKA AMONG A
GROUP OF TURKISH CYPRIOTS IN CYPRUS
Spyros Armostis
Charalambos Christodoulou
Elena Ioannidou
Theoni Neokleous
University of Cyprus
Keywords:
Social network, language and identity, dialect variation, Cyprus.
Abstract:
This paper utilizes the sociolinguistic approach of social networks (Milroy, 1980, 2002)
to investigate the linguistic and sociolinguistic characteristics of the variety used by a
community in Cyprus exhibiting a number of intriguing characteristics.
First, the community comprises of Turkish Cypriots who use Cypriot Greek and not the
language of their affiliated group (i.e. Turkish), as a home language. In other respects,
the group is fully immersed in the Turkish Cypriot community on the island. Second,
their mother tongue carries both positive and negative connotations, as it constitutes,
on the one hand, a strong bond amongst members of the community, and on the other,
the language of the other/enemy. Third, the community has had no interference
whatsoever with other (Cypriot) Greek-speaking populations, which makes creates the
ideal experimental setting for both a linguistic and sociolinguistic investigation.
Our investigation was geared towards answering two main questions: (1) what are the
linguistic characteristics retained/exhibited by the Greek variety used in such an
isolated environment, (2) what are the communicative/functional and the symbolic
value of the language of the other/enemy within this community. It should be noted that
we were interested in investigating these issues both within the wider community as
well as across networks and sub-groups/communities nested within the wider
community aiming to shed some light on the observed internal variation.
The social network theory was deemed as the more suitable methodological tool for
such an investigation. Thirty–seven Turkish Cypriots, both male and female, from three
age groups participated in our study and were located through the approach of social
networks as follows: social and family networks were created, by locating “key
informants” and then expanding the network around friends and family. In this way,
eight networks of people who share similar language experiences, but from different
perspectives, were built, each of which was linked to distinct geographical areas.
The analysis conduced unfolded:
a) basilectal phonological, morphological and syntactic phenomena within the
wider community (Newton, 1972),
b) internal variation with respect to phonological and morphological phenomena
between networks; this points to the existence of geographical isoglosses within
Cyprus,
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c) strong correlations as regards issues of identity and the active notion of the self
and other on a communicative/functional and on a symbolic way among all the
members of the wider community.
References:
Beckingham, C. F. (1957). The Turks of Cyprus. The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 87(2), 165–174.
Constantinou, C. M. (2007). Aporias of Identity: Bicommunalism, Hybridity and the
‘Cyprus Problem’. Cooperation and Conflict 42(3), 247–70.
Ioannidou, E. (2011). The Greek Cypriot dialect as a marker of the Self and the Other
in a group of Turkish Cypriots. Paper presented at the 22nd Biennial
International Symposium in Modern Greek Studies (13–16 October). Modern
Greek Studies Association. University of New York, NY, USA.
Milroy, L. (2002). Social networks. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N. Schilling–
Estes (eds.). The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp. 549–72).
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Newton, B. (1972). Cypriot Greek: its Phonology and Inflections. Hague: Mouton de
Gruyter.
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THE PAST PERFECT IN CYPRIOT AND STANDARD GREEK:INNOVATION
IRRESPECTIVE OF CONTACT?
Spyros Armostis
Open University of Cyprus
Spyridoula Bella
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Dimitris Michelioudakis
University of York
Amalia Moser
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Stavroula Tsiplakou
Open University of Cyprus
Keywords:
Past Perfect, Cypriot Greek, Standard Greek, koine, diglossia, contact.
Abstract:
The Cypriot Greek (CG) koine displays structural innovations, arguably as a
result of prolonged contact with Standard Greek (SG), the ‘H’ variety in the
diglossic Greek Cypriot speech community (Tsiplakou 2014). Periphrastic perfect
forms (combinations of the inflected auxiliary exo ‘have’ with a verb form which is
only marked for [+perfective] aspect) are among such innovations, their
semantics earlier encoded by the Aorist (Menardos 1925/1969). In
Melissaropoulou et al. 2013 it was shown that the innovative CypriotPresent
Perfect largely encodes [+past], the difference with the Aorist being one of
register. As regards the Pluperfect, in SGit has the principal readings of past-inthe-past and perfect in the past, as well asan innovative remote pastuse (Klairis
& Babiniotis 2005). In contrast, the CG Past Perfect is largely interchangeable
with the Aorist; it is also arguably deployed for pragmatic purposes, e.g. to mark
an important point in a narrative, possibly due to its relative formality:
(1)
eˈkaman
mːu
ˈintʰːeɾvʝu t͡ʃe
do.PAST.3P
me.CL.DAT
interview
ˈixa
have.PAST.1S
tus
them.CL.DAT
anaˈferi
mention.PERF
tin ˈerevnan
theresearch.ACC
pu
that
ˈekama
do.PAST.1S
and
“They interviewed me, and I had mentioned (: mentioned) to them the
research I did (: had done).”
In recent work it was claimed that this innovation is specific to CG, as speakers
of SG who participated in a related study found such ‘out-of-sequence’ Past
Perfect forms ungrammatical(Tsiplakou et al. 2016, Vasiliou 2014). This paper
revisits this hypothesis on the basis of the observation that (informal, young) SG
also seems to display partly similar patterns:
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(2)
ˈpiɣame
ˈprota
go.PAST.1P first
naðis
wait,
pu
where
sto
vatikaˈno
to the Vatican
ˈixame
have.PAST.1P
cemeˈta
and then
ˈpai
go.PERF
“We went to the Vatican first and then –hang on, where had we gone (: did
we go)?”
Using both naturalistic data and data from an elicitation and a grammaticality
judgement task, we explore (a) whether such variation is sociolinguistically conditioned
and (b) what the semantics and pragmatics of the innovative Past Perfect are in each
variety. The data attest to the complexities of contact-induced innovation; while it may
be assumed that the Cypriot Past Perfect is contact-induced, the innovation does not
necessarily involve all aspects of use and partial semantic/pragmatic similarities may
be treated as independent developments.
References:
Klairis, C. and G.Babiniotis et al. (2005). A Grammar of Modern Greek. Athens: Ellinika
Grammata.
Melissaropoulou, D. et al. (2013). The Present Perfect in Cypriot Gree. In P.Auer
et al. (eds.).Studies in Language Variation-European Perspectives IV,
(pp. 159-172). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Menardos, S. (1925/1969). Cypriot Grammar C: Verbs. Athena 37, 35-79.
Tsiplakou, S. (2014). How ‘mixed’ is a mixed system? The case of the Cypriot
Greek koiné.Linguistic Variation 14, 161-178.
Tsiplakou, S. et al. (2016).Coherence ‘in the mix’? Coherence in the face of
language shift in Cypriot Greek. Lingua 172-173, 10-25.
Vasiliou, E. (2014).The Pluperfect in Standard and Cypriot Greek. M.A.
Dissertation, Open University of Cyprus.
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VOWEL DELETION IN THE DIALECT OF LESVOS (NORTHERN GREECE) FROM
AN ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE
Yoshiyuki Asahi
Dimitris Papazachariou
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, University of Patras
Keywords:
Vowel deletion, high vowel loss, acoustic analysis, sociophonetics.
Abstract:
Unstressed vowel deletion –in particular, the deletion of the unstressed [i] and [u]- has
been characterized as one of the structural and stereotypical characteristics of
Northern Greek dialects (Newton 1972, Kontossopoulos 1994, Trudgill 2003, Dinas
2005).
However, more resent acoustic studies in Kozani Greek (Topintzi & Baltazani 2012,
Lengeris et. al. 2016) and Ipirus Greek (Kainada & Baltazani 2015) showed that vowel
deletion is at least not categorical, neither it results the same vowel system.
Having in our mind the actual diversity of the theoretically common phenomenon at the
Northern dialects, we study the phenomenon of high vowel loss, as it is realized in the
speech of elder women (75 years old and more), and young children, (from nine to
twelve years old).
Through a detailed acoustic analysis, we will show that there are different
realizations/degrees of deletion, that can be grouped in three categories: i) a partial
deletion, which leaves a very small fraction of the vowel (less than 30 msecs, when the
usual time of an unstressed vowel is around 60 -70 msecs), ii) deletion with a trace, in
which, although there is no semi-periodical waveform, the first two formants of the
vowel appear within the waveform of the previous consonant, and iii) a complete
deletion of the vowel, without any trace within the acoustic signal (see also Topitzi &
Baltazani 2012).
Furthermore, with the help of quantitative analysis, we will present the interrelations
between the realizations of the three different variants of unstressed vowel deletion
and the surrounding sounds, the position of the vowel within the prosodic word, its
position in relation to the stress of the prosodic world, as well as the rhythm and the
end of the intonation phrase.
References:
Dinas, K. (2005). Το γλωσσικό ιδίωµα της Κοζάνης [The dialect of Kozani]. Kozani:
Institute of Book and Reading
Kainada, E. and M. Baltazani (2015). The vocalic system of the dialect of Ipiros. In G.
Kotzoglou et. al. (eds.). Proceedings of the 11th international conference on
Greek linguistics (pp. 101-123). Rhodes: Laboratory of Linguistics of the
Southeastern Mediterranean.
Kontossopoulos, N. (1994). Διάλεκτοι και ιδιώµατα της Νέας Ελληνικής [Dialects and
Idioms of Modern Greek]. Athens: Ekdoseis Grigori.
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Lengeris, A., E. Kainada, M. Baltazani and P. Iverson (2016). Vowel raising, deletion
and diphthongization in Kozani Greek. In A. Ralli, N. Koutsoukos and S.
Bompolas (eds.). Proceedings of the 6th Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic
Theory (pp. 93-101). Patras: Univeristy of Patras Press.
Newton, B. E. (1972). The generative interpretation of dialect. A study of Modern Greek
phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Topintzi, N. and M. Baltazani (2012). The acoustics of high-vowel loss in a Northern
Greek dialect and typological implications. In P. Hoole, L. Bombien, M. Pouplier,
Ch. Mooshammer and B. Kü hnert. (eds.). Consonant clusters and structural
complexity (pp. 373-402). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trudgill, P. (2003). Modern Greek dialects: a preliminary classification. Journal of
Greek linguistics 4, 45-64.
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DOCUMENTING REGIONAL VARIATION IN EUROPEAN FRENCH:
SHEDING NEW LIGHT ON THE HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL MEANING
OF THE VIGESIMAL CARDINAL SYSTEM
Mathieu Avanzi
Université catholique de Louvain
André Thibault
Université Paris-Sorbonne
Keywords:
French and Gallo-Romance dialects, linguistic
crowdsourcing, vigesimal cardinal system.
geography,
language
history,
Abstract:
It is a well-known fact that the French cardinal system has a somewhat irregular way of
expressing 70 and 90, namely soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix (= ‘sixtyten’, ‘four-twenty’ and ‘four-twenty-ten’). Nevertheless, Belgian and Swiss French use
another set of cardinals, i.e., septante, huitante (Swiss only) and nonante. These
cardinal determinants, of Latin origin, have a long and complex history in written
French as well as in Gallo-Romance dialects.
Up until now, three major flaws have hindered a good understanding of the causes of
the present configuration. Firstly, gaps in the historical data have made it impossible to
portray the trajectory of these variants in a satisfying way. Secondly, the actual vitality
of septante, huitante and nonante in France has not been documented with precision
until very recently. Moreover, the lexicography of regional French does not offer reliable
information about the actual sociolinguistic status of these variants —which is very
distant from the official one that characterizes the Belgian and Swiss usage.
The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the historical and geographical
whereabouts of this problem, with the help of modern tools. As far as historical
lexicography is concerned, new sources allow for a much more comprehensive
representation of these cardinals’ diatopic and diastratic evolution over time. When it
comes to demonstrating the vitality of our cardinals in modern Gallo-Romance dialects
on the one hand, and regional varieties of French on the other, we have at our disposal
a new generation of resources: dialect atlases that are still underexploited (ALF, among
others), and the brand new results of a large scale crowdsourcing survey conducted
throughout French-speaking Europe in 2015-2016 that has reached over 10.000
people (Avanzi et al. 2016). This survey has given us two types of data: 1) areas and
frequency of use; 2) metalinguistics comments on the sociolinguistic status of the
variants. The dynamics between the two series (decimal and vigesimal) shall thus
receive a new interpretation.
References:
Avanzi, M. et al. (2016). Présentation d’une enquête pour l’étude les régionalismes du
français. Actes du 5ème congrès mondial de linguistique française, 1-15.
Gilliéron, J. and E. Edmont (1902-1910). Atlas linguistique de la France. Paris:
Champion.
Brunot, F. (1966-1972). Histoire de la langue française des origines à nos jours,
nouvelle édition publiée sous le patronage de Gérald Antoine, Georges
Gougenheim et Robert Wagner. Paris : Librairie Armand Colin (t. III, p. 286 et
VI, 1434).
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Damourette, E. and J. Pichon (1911-1927). Des mots à la pensée. Essai de grammaire
de la langue française vol. 6. Paris : D'Artrey
Goosse, A. (1977). Qu’est-ce qu’un belgicisme? Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de
Langue et de Littérature Françaises, t. LV, 3-4, 345-367.
Pierrehumbert, W. (1926). Dictionnaire historique du parler neuchâtelois et suisse
romand. Neuchâtel: Attinger.
Remacle, L. (1952). Syntaxe du parler wallon de La Gleize. Tome I: Noms et articles,
adjectifs et pronoms. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Thibault, A. (1997). Dictionnaire suisse romand. Genève: Zoé.
216
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AMBITIOUS DANES AND HARD-WORKING POLES: EVALUATIONS OF FOREIGNACCENTED ICELANDIC
Stefanie Bade
University of Iceland
Keywords:
Foreign accent, attitudes, language purism, stereotypes.
Abstract:
While Iceland had been in relative linguistic isolation through the centuries, thereby
generating both a puristic attitude towards the Icelandic mother tongue and a purismoriented language policy, migration has brought about increasing ethnic diversity in
Iceland during the last years. This newly-emerged situation amounts to a whole new
linguistic situation in the country.
In contrast to other countries, Icelandic research on language attitudes is still scarce.
Studies have been carried out in order to investigate attitudes towards the use of
English and loanwords (Ewen & Kristiansen 2006; Árnason 2006; Óladóttir 2009) as
well as towards certain innovations (Friðriksson 2008). Margrét Guðmundsdóttir has
investigated attitudes towards phonological variation (Árnason & Guðmundsdóttir 2014)
and Stefanie Bade and Vanessa Isenmann have conducted qualitative studies on
attitudes towards standard Icelandic in relation to deviations from the standard variety,
both in general and with focus on foreign-accented speech and computer-mediated
communication (Bade and Isenmann, forthcoming 2017). Although results from those
focus-group discussions show that Icelanders seem to be tolerant towards nonstandard speech, there are visible tendencies towards the evaluation of foreign accents
according to nationality or ethnic background of their speakers. It can, therefore, be
hypothesized that foreign-accented speech is differently assessed than traditional
Icelandic. That could lead to a new evaluation system, substantially influencing the
linguistic climate in Iceland, apart from various potential consequences for the status of
immigrants in Iceland (cf. Kinzler et al 2009).
In this paper, I will report on results of the research project “Covert attitudes: A
quantitative investigation of foreign-accented Icelandic and linguistic stereotyping”.
Making use of the verbal guise technique, this representative study had 530 native
speakers of Icelandic evaluate eight audio stimuli (with native and non-native speech)
on semantic differential scales. Results show that evaluations are, firstly, highly
dependent on the speaker’s first language, secondly, that background variables such
as age, gender, education, and residency tend to display great within-group variation
depending on certain accents but not others, and, thirdly, that Icelandic respondents
generally misplace a non-native speaker when asked to assign the speaker a country
of origin.
References:
Árnason, K. (2006). Island. In T. Kristiansen and L. S. Vikør (eds.). Nordiske
språkhaldningar. Ei meiningsmåling (pp.17-39). Oslo: Novus.
Árnason, K. and M. Guðmundsdóttir (2014). Language variation and folk linguistics:
Individual knowledge and evaluation of local pronunciation characteristics in
Iceland. Paper presented at Hugvísindaþing. Reykjavik, Iceland.
217
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Bade, S. and V. Isenmann (2017). Good and not so good Icelandic. Standard Icelandic
and evaluations of linguistic variation with focus on foreign-accented speech
and computer-mediated communication. Manuscript in preparation.
Ewen, H. B. and T. Kristiansen (2006). Island. In T. Kristiansen (ed.). Nordiske
sprogholdninger: en masketest (pp. 33-48). Oslo: Novus.
Óladóttir, H. (2009). Shake, sjeik eller mjólkurhristingur? Islandske holdninger til
engelsk spåkpåvirkning. Oslo: Novus.
Kinzler, K. D., K. Shutts, J. De Jesus and E. S. Spelke (2009). Accent trumps race in
guiding children’s social preferences. Social Cognition 27, 4, 623-634.
218
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ITALIANO POPOLARE AND LINGUISTIC SIMPLIFICATION: EVIDENCE FROM A
CORPUS
Silvia Ballarè
University of Bergamo
Eugenio Goria
University of Bologna
Keywords:
Italian sociolinguistics, substandard variety, linguistic simplification, morphosyntax,
spoken data.
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to verify with a corpus-based research some of the
assumptions about the variety of Italian known as italiano popolare; most of the existing
descriptions are based on written texts, while we focus on spoken data. Particular
attention is given to the phenomenon of linguistic simplification (Sampson, Gill & Trugill
2009).
In Italian sociolinguistics, italiano popolare (Berruto 2012 [1987]) refers to a social
variety spoken by poorly educated people who have an Italo-Romance dialect as their
L1 and use Italian only in formal situations. Due to the structure of speakers’repertoire
(Cerruti & Regis 2014), italiano popolare is geographically marked, but many of the
features that characterise this variety transcend the diatopic dimension and some of
them are produced by linguistic simplification (Berruto 1983).
We have selected in the whole ParVa corpus (Guerini 2016), a collection of war
memories from people who took part in the Resistance movement in Northern Italy
during World War II, a subcorpus representing only speakers belonging to lower social
classes (Cerruti 2016).
We consider qualitatively the realisation of four substandard linguistic features. The first
one (1) has already been described in literature and could be considered in relation to
vernacular universals (Chambers 2004):
(1) absence of number agreement in the locative/existential/presentative
construction
e
poi
c’è
le
munizion-i
and
then there is
the
ammunition-F.PL
(vs Standard Italian ci sono le munizioni)
The other features, (2), (3) and (4), emerged in the analysis of the corpus:
(2) absence of gender/number agreement between the copula and the
predicative
l-a
strad-a
era
pericolos-o
the-F.SG road-F.SG
was dangerous-M.SG
(vs Standard Italian la strada era pericolosa)
(3) loss of clitics in pronominal verb construction
io
almeno
sono
ritir-at-o
piano
1sg.SUBJ at least
be.3sg:AUX retreat-PP-M.SG
slowly
(vs Standard Italian io almeno mi sono ritirato)
219
piano
very
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(4) auxiliary deletion
il
Piotti non
più
neanche
visto
ART
Piotti NEG no longer
not even
seen
(vs Standard Italian il Piotti non fu più neanche visto)
This work should thus broaden our knowledge about the nature of italiano popolare and
the process of simplification.
References:
Berruto, G. (1983). L’italiano popolare e la semplificazione linguistica. Vox Romanica
42, 38-79.
Berruto, G. (2012) [1987]. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo. 2nd edn. Roma:
Carocci (1987: Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica).
Chambers, J. K. (2004). Dynamic typology and vernacular universals. In B. Kortmann
(ed.). Dialectology meets typology: Dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic
perspective (pp. 128–145). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Cerruti, M. (2016). Costruzioni relative in italiano popolare. In F. Guerini (ed.). (pp. 77116). Roma: Aracne.
Cerruti, M. and R. Regis. (2014). Standardization patterns and dialect/standard
convergence: A North-Western Italian perspective. Language in Society 43 (1),
83–111.
Ferguson, C. (1971). Absence of copula and the notion of simplicity: A study of normal
speech, baby-talk, and pidgins. In D. Hymes (ed.). Pidginization and creolization
of languages (pp. 141-150). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guerini, F. (2016). Italiano e dialetto bresciano in racconti di partigiani. Roma: Aracne.
Sampson, G., G. David and T. Peter (2009). Language complexity as an evolving
variable. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
220
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A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF NOMINALIZATIONS AND TEXT-TYPES IN
ENGLISH SCIENTIFIC REGISTER IN THE LATE MODERN PERIOD
Iria Bello
Heidelberg University
Keywords:
Nominalizations, scientific register, text types.
Abstract:
Science and the language of science mutually complement each other. In English, the
Scientific Revolution triggered a series of changes in the language of science.
According to Halliday (2004: 172), present-day English scientific register is the result of
a process that started 400 or 500 years ago and since then the language of science in
English has developed into more complex ways of nominalizing processes. The
difficulty of the language of science is usually paired with the abundance of specialized
vocabulary at the lexical level and the adoption of certain lexicogrammatical features,
namely passives and nominalizations. The tendency to establish abstractions,
objectivize and stratify the processes they refer to makes nominalizations prone to
appear in written genres (Downing 1997: 151). However, due to valency reduction
processes, nominalizations are usually more ambiguous than verbal encodings and
therefore they make texts more difficult to process, especially for non-specialized
audiences. Even if scholars have devoted great attention to the use and functionality of
nominalizations in scientific register (Albentosa Hernández & Moya Guijaro, 2000;
Banks 2005a, 2005b; Halliday 2004; Halliday & Martin, 1993, few studies have dealt
with their form and function in different types from a diachronic perspective. Thus this
work will study deverbal nominalizations formed by suffixation in texts aimed at
specialized and non-specialized audiences. The objective will be to verify if there are
correlations between the use nominalizations and text type in late Modern English
scientific writing.
The corpus material for this study was taken from four of the subcorpora of the Coruña
Corpus: the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA) (Moskowich et al., 2012),
the Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT), the Corpus of English History Texts
(CHET) and the Corpus of English life Sciences Texts (CELiST). The time-span of the
corpus covers the 18th and 19th centuries. Each subcorpora contains two texts per
decade written by English-speaking authors and each sample text contains around
10,000 words (1600,000 analyzable words in total).
References:
Albentosa Hernández, J. and A. Moya Guijarro (2000). La reducción del grado de
transitividad de la oración en el discurso científico en lengua inglesa. Revista
Española de Lingüística 30(1), 445-468.
Banks, D. (2005). Emerging scientific discourse in the late seventeenth century.
Functions of Language 12(1), 65-86.
Banks, D. (2005). On the historical origins of nominalized process in scientific text.
English for Specific Purposes 24(3), 347-357.
Downing, A. (1997). Encapsulating discourse topics. Estudios Ingleses de la
Universidad Complutense 5, 147-168.
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Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). On the language of physical science. In J. Webster (ed.). The
Language of Physical Science (pp. 162-178). London: Continuum.
Halliday, M. A. K. and J. Martin (1993). Writing Science. London: The Falmer Press.
Moskowich, I., I. Lareo, G. Camiña Rioboo and B. Crespo (eds.) (2012). A Corpus of
English Texts on Astronomy (CETA) (CD ROM). Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
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EVIDENCE OF LEVELLING PROCESSES IN BRITISH ENGLISH CROWDSOURCED
USING THE 'ENGLISH DIALECTS APP'
Tam Blaxter
University of Cambridge
David Britain
University of Bern
Marie-José Kolly
University of Zurich
Adrian Leemann
University of Cambridge
Keywords:
Big data, English dialects, levelling, mobile phone applications, data collection.
Abstract:
Traditional data collection methods in dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics have
difficulty in gathering sufficient quantities of data from a sufficient range of localities to
map variation at a national or even regional scale: dialectological surveys typically
sample few informants per locality; sociolinguistic interview corpora typically sample a
relatively low number of localities. By contrast, online surveys, whether browser-based
or in the form of smartphone apps, allow researchers to gather much larger quantities
of data very quickly. Such methods also typically achieve very different samples of the
population than traditional methods: where traditional methods are often biased
towards NORMs, or at least to non-mobile individuals, digital survey respondents are
typically younger, more mobile and more educated than the population at large.
We present results from data collected through such a smartphone app, the 'English
Dialects App' (EDA) (Britain, Leemann & Kolly 2015), which surveyed English speakers
in England. Using the model of previous apps and websites for other language areas
such as Leemann & Kolly (2013), Katz & Andrews (2013) and Leemann et al. (2015),
EDA asks the user 26 questions about their language use and uses their responses to
predict the origin of their local dialect. Users are then invited to submit the actual origin
of their dialect and other metadata to accompany these responses; EDA gathers richer
metadata than any previous comparable survey, asking respondents about their and
their parents' education, mobility, age, gender and ethnicity. The EDA prediction
function was originally based on the Survey of English Dialects (Orton & Dieth 1962)
but was later updated to reflect the distribution of usage from the first 30,000 responses.
Using these data, we will present findings on levelling processes in modern English
English. Lexical and morphological variables, such as the word for 'splinter' ('splinter' vs
'spell' vs. 'spelk', etc.) and the 3sg. present (-s vs. -Ø vs. do-support) are found to be
highly levelled, with few respondents reporting use of non-standard variants in the vast
majority of localities. Phonological and phonetic variables are more resistant to levelling
but show different rates of such levelling in different parts of the country. Variants
associated with the south west and south coast are highly levelled, with the majority of
respondents typically reporting standard-like usages. Salient variants which
distinguished the English of the north of England from the south show a more mixed
picture, with the FOOT-STRUT split isogloss moving northwards but the TRAP-BATH
isogloss robustly stable. The north east of England, especially Newcastle, Sunderland
and Middlesbrough, show especially high rates of non-standard forms, with traditional
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local variants consistently found to be the most frequent responses across many
variables.
We link these regional trends to demographic change. In the south, where levelling is
most dramatic, geographical mobility has been especially high: counterurbanisation
has, for example, strongly shaped the demography of southern England since WW2.
We propose that this mobility is key to understanding regional differences: levelling
takes place in those areas where mobility is at its greatest, and counterurbanisation
triggers levelling in rural areas which once maintained distinct dialects.
References:
Britain, D., A. Leemann and M. J. Kolly (2015). The English Dialects App. Presentation
at ICLaVE 8. University of Leipzig.
Katz, J. and W. Andrews (2013). How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk. New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html
Leemann,
A.
and
M.
J.
Kolly
(2013).
Dialäkt
https://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/dialakt-app/ id606559705?mt=8
Äpp.
IOSDe.
Leemann, A., M. J. Kolly, M. Brupbacher, T. Grossenbacher and D. Wanitsch (2015).
Grüezi,
Moin,
Servus:
Wie
wir
wo
sprechen.
http://www.spiegel.de/static/happ/wissenschaft/2015/sprachatlas/v2/dist
Orton, H. and E. Dieth (1962). Survey of English dialects (5 vols.). Leeds: E. J. Arnold.
224
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SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE VARIATION AND VERBAL
INTERPRETATION VARIABLES
Nikolay Nikolayevich Boldyrev
Tambov State University
Olga Georgievna Dubrovskaya
Tyumen State University
Keywords:
Verbal interpretation variables, selection, classification, evaluation.
Abstract:
The phenomenon of language variation has long served as a focus for academic
research interests in linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. Generally,
language variety is described as “a set of linguistic items with similar social distribution”
(Hudson 1996). While building on the solid foundations of research in language
variation, broader perspectives should study the processes that underpin it. It has
become obvious, that linguistic variability due to sociological variables (class, ethnic
origin, sex, status differences, religious affiliation, etc.) require not only an
extralinguistic accounting but a linguistic description and explanation as well.
In the talk, we argue that language variation is deeply involved with interpretation
which, in turn, activates knowledge a participant acquires as a member of a particular
socioculture. The central argument is built around the fundamental Cognitive
Semantics premise that language as an experiential phenomenon is related to general
cognitive abilities of human beings, linguistic interpretation included. Inspired by a
sociocultural understanding of human thinking (L.Vygotsky), we suggest that
interpretation involves selection, classification and evaluation and argue that selection
provides profiling, classification triggers the assignment of the profiled meaning to
groups within a system of categorization, evaluation implies assessment within a set of
norms, values, and other standards that construe a participant’s world view (Boldyrev &
Dubrovskaya 2016).
For example, in the process of language use, the word university activates the
sociocultural knowledge of a particular speaker: for the driver it activates ‘a point in
space’ (to the passenger: Can I stop the car at the University?); for the architect – ‘a
piece of art’ (The University is in need of a refurbishment); for the child – ‘sad
experience’ (I am lonely when my mother goes to the University), etc. Thus,
sociological variables for the driver and the architect (occupation and social status; the
latter is higher in case of the architect) lead to verbal interpretation variables (within the
domains SPACE and ART for the driver and the architect, respectively). Age,
community contact and community dependence on a parent as sociological variables
for the child in the above example presuppose the child’s verbal interpretation variable
of university within the domain FEELINGS and EMOTIONS. Overall, one and the same
word “university” due to diverse sociological variables activates different verbal
interpretation variables: the driver, the architect and the child select, classify and
evaluate the world (the university, in the examples) differently.
In the talk, these theoretical issues and related empirical evidence will be reviewed,
while also addressing the implementation of the method of cognitive-discursive
interpretant analysis with which linguistic variability is exemplified.
Acknowledgements: This work is supported by research grant 15-18-10006 “A
cognitive study of anthropocentric nature of language” of the Russian Science
Foundation at Tambov State University named after G.R. Derzhavin.
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References:
Boldyrev, N. N. and O. G. Dubrovskaya (2016) [online] Sociocultural Commitment of
Cognitive Linguistics via dimensions of context. Available at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n1p173.
Hudson, R. A. (1996). Sociolinguistics (3d ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press.
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MODAL COMBINATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN SCOTLAND: SYNTAX
AND FREQUENCY
Anthony Raymond Bour
Hermann Paul School of Linguistics
Keywords:
Combinations, modals, syntax, Scots, dialectal.
Abstract:
Southern Scotland contains many fascinating non-standard grammatical features
belonging to Scots dialects and Scottish-English varieties. For eight years, I have been
working on some of these particular vernacular constructions called Multiple Modals
(MMs). They are of two types:
- Double Modals (two adjacent modals: might could, will can, may can, should ought
to…)
and
- Triple Modals (three adjacent modals: will should can, might used to could, should
might better…)
The purpose of my research is to describe and analyze the current syntactic and
semantic development of Modal Combinations in the Lowland Scots area. My
presentation will focus on the results obtained in the Scottish Borders region from 2010
to 2013. Four field surveys were carried out in South-Eastern Scotland in which I
distributed 231 structured-type questionnaires inspired by a methodology that the
French sociolinguist Louis Jean Calvet explained in his book on dialectal enquiries
(Calvet: 1999). The presentation will be composed of two main parts:
Firstly, I will show you the current development of two specific modal combinations
when they are put in negative and interrogative syntactic environments.
Secondly, a global overview of the oral and written frequencies of use of MMs tested in
the field will be described by means of histograms. It will be accompanied by a scale of
preference of Modal Combinations in the Scottish Borders. I conceived this scale at the
end of the study inspired by Quirk’s scale of modal expressions (Quirk: 1985).
This kind of survey has been conducted in the Southern United States since the 1970’s
without taking into account the territory where they originate, i.e. the Lowland Scots
area. With a significant quantity of data gathered through these field surveys, I intend to
obtain a complete description of the Folks Southern Scottish grammar of MMs in the
21st century.
References:
Aitken, A. (1980). New Scots: The problems. In D. McClure (ed.). The Scots Language:
Planning for Modern Usage (pp. 45-63). Edinburgh: The Ramsay Head Press.
Bour, A. (2014). Description of Multiple Modality in Contemporary Scotland: Double
and Triple Modals in the Scottish Borders. PhD thesis. Freiburg-im-Breisgau,
Germany:
Albert
Ludwig
University.
<http://www.freidok.unifreiburg.de/volltexte/9900/>
Brown, K. (1991). Double modals in Hawick Scots. In P. Trudgill and J. Chambers
(ed.). Dialects of English Studies in Grammatical Variation 8, 74-103.
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Calvet, L. and P. Dumont (1999). L’Enquête Sociolinguistique. París: L’Harmattan.
De La Cruz, J. (1995). The Geography and History of Double Modals in English. Folia
Linguistica Historica, XVII1-2, 75-96.
Macafee, C. (1980). Characteristics of non-standard grammar in Scotland.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzVAfXkKg9UlV2dwNERCbUwtSGc/edit?pli=1
Nagle, S. J. (1992). Quasi-Modals, Marginal Modals, and the Diachrony of the English
Modal Auxiliaries. Folia Linguistica Historica IX/2, 93-104.
Nagle, S. J. (1994). The English Double Modal Conspiracy. Diachronica XI:2, 199-212.
Nagle, S. J. and M. Montgomery (1994). Double Modals in Scotland and the Southern
United States: Trans-Atlantic Inheritance or Independent Development? Folia
Linguistica Historica XIV/1-2, 91-107.
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svarvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar
of the English Language. London: Longman.
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UNDERSTANDING THE DIACHRONIC DEVELOPMENT OF POLITE FORMS OF
ADDRESS IN DUTCH THROUGH IBERO-ROMANCE DIALECTOLOGY
Miriam Bouzouita
Anne Breitbarth
Jacques Van Keymeulen
Ghent University
Keywords:
Ibero-Romance, Dutch, forms of address, agreement.
Abstract:
It is well-known that in the history of Dutch, u, the oblique case of the pronoun gij ‘you’,
became the polite form of address, or V-form (van der Horst 2008, Rutten & van der
Wal 2014), apparently helped by the existence and wide-spread use of the so-called
epistolary forms of address, viz. ue. (< u edele/uw edelheid ‘your honour’) and ul. (<
uwe(r) liefde ‘your love/kindness’). Gij was originally 2PL, but replaced the inherited
2SG pronoun du in many dialects as the T-form. While the rise and spread of u as a
polite form of address is well-studied sociolinguistically (e.g. Rutten & van der Wal
2014), the question of what form the verbal inflection appears in is not broached at all
in the literature, as far as we are aware. Although 2SG(/PL) and 3SG(/PL) are syncretic
in most verbs in Dutch, hebben ‘have’, zijn ‘be’ and zullen ‘shall’ have different forms,
as illustrated below.
(1)
jij hebt/bent/zult (dialectal gij hebt/zijt/zult) vs. hij heeft/is/zal
The expectation based on the literature would be that nominative u, because of its
establishment in the system via polite (or epistolary) 3SG forms in the 17th century (van
der Horst 2008: 1094), viz. first ul. and increasingly ue. (Rutten & van der Wal 2014),
initially appeared only with 3SG agreement on the finite verb, and gradually becomes
available with 2SG, as it becomes reanalysed as a 2SG pronoun. Contrary to this
expectation, our study of the unambiguous verb forms of hebben, zijn en zullen in
combination with ul./ue./u in diachronic sociolinguistically enriched corpora, such
NeberLab, Brieven-as-Buit and CGN, reveals a different picture: surprisingly, 2SG
forms, particularly with zijn/zullen, are significantly more frequent in the 17th century,
when these forms first appear, than in the 18th century.
This pattern of variation becomes much less mysterious when looking at comparable
developments in southern Ibero-Romance dialects, such as Andalusian Spanish (e.g.
Lara Bermejo 2016), where the replacement of 2PL pronoun vosotros by the 3PL
ustedes affects agreement phenomena in different stages following a wave model in
time and space. Initially, only the reflexive pronoun system is affected, and only at a
later stage does the verbal agreement align. We can therefore interpret the diachronic
variation in Dutch as a reflex of such a transition, in which after the shift in the forms of
address paradigm, the verb still shows variation between 2SG and 3SG. Our findings
are also relevant for the interpretation of the diaphasic variation in spoken Belgian
Dutch concerning the Standard Dutch use of jij (interpreted as a V-form) and u (in
nominative use T-/V-form), given that some dialects still make a clear distinction
between gij (nominative) and u (oblique) as T-forms.
This paper explores the similarities/differences between these case studies, but also
demonstrates, once again, that synchronic dialectology offers us a window onto
diachronic change, even across language families.
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LEXICAL CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER IN SPANISH L3 PRODUCTION
Nikolina Bozinovic
Barbara Peric
RIT Croatia
Keywords:
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI), lexical transfer, error analysis, formal similarity, calques.
Abstract:
This paper examines the role of previously acquired languages in the acquisition of a
third language (TLA). It is focused on lexical cross-linguistic influences (CLI) in Spanish
third language (L3) acquisition by learners with Croatian first language (L1) and English
second language (L2). According to De Angelis (2007), multilinguals have knowledge
of more than two languages by definition so the possible sources of influence
automatically increase with the number of languages the individual is familiar with.
Empirical evidence indicates that transfer can occur from the L1 as well as the nonnative languages and that the native language does not always have a privileged
status. Through error analysis this study provides evidence that the type of transfer
episodes observed may be related to formal similarity between specific features or
components of languages. Due to the fact that a significant portion of the English
vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources and that Spanish and English
share many cognate words we can conclude that there are more lexical similarities
between Spanish and English than between Croatian and Spanish. According to this,
we argue that in the area of lexicon, English language will be the preferred source of
language transfer. The results of our study also indicate that the production of calques
is closely related to L3 proficiency.
References:
Bayona, P. (2009). Crosslinguistic influences in the acquisition of Spanish L3. UMI
Dissertations Publishing.
Bouvy, C. (2000). Towards the Construction of a Theory of Cross-linguistic Transfert. In
J. Cenoz and U. Jessner (eds.) (2000). English in Europe. The Acquisition of a
Third language (pp. 143-156). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Cenoz, J., B. Hufeisen and U. Jessner (eds.) (2001). Cross-linguistic Influence in Third
language Acquisition: Psycholinguistic Perspectives. Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters.
Cenoz, J. (2003). The role of typology in the organization of the multilingual lexicon. In
J. Cenoz, B. Hufeisen and U. Jessner (eds.) (2003). The multilingual lexicon
(pp. 103-116). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
De Angelis, G. (2007). Third or additional language acquisition. Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters.
Hammarberg, B. (2001). Roles of L1 and L2 in L3 Production and Acquisition. In J.
Cenoz, B. Hufeisen and U. Jessner (eds.) (2001). Cross-linguistic Influence in
Third Language Acquisition: Psycholinguistic Perspectives (pp. 21-41).
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
James, C. (1998). Errors in Language Learning and Use: Exploring Error Analysis.
London: Longman.
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Marian, V., H. Blumenfeld and M. Kaushanskaya (2006). The Language Experience
and Proficiency Questionnaire (OLEAP-Q): Assessing Language Profiles in
Bilinguals and Multilinguals. Toronto: Conference on Second Language
Acquisition and Multilingualism. York University.
Ringbom, H. (1983). Borrowing and lexical transfer. Applied Linguistics 4, 207-212.
Williams, S. and Hammarberg, B. (2009). Language switches in L3 production:
Implications for a polyglot speaking model. In B. Hammarberg (ed.) (2009).
Processes in third language acquisition (pp. 28-73). Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
231
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ROUTINISED MOBILITY AND VOWEL CHANGE IN THE NORTH EAST OF
ENGLAND
Almut Braun
Peter French
Carmen Llamas
Duncan Robertson
Dominic Watt
University of York
Keywords:
North East England, mobility, schwa.
Abstract:
The link between mobility and the spread of supralocal speech forms has long been
recognised in sociolinguistics. Equally, the connection between immobility and the
preservation of traditional, localised forms is a well-established cornerstone of work
done in traditional dialectology. The extent to which people move around as part of
their routine lives is clearly implicated, therefore, in the progression of sound changes.
In this paper we explore the patterns of routinised mobility at the level of the individual
speaker, and we assess the effects of individual mobility (or lack of it) on variation and
change at the community and regional level.
The project we report on investigates phonological variation in the three major urban
varieties of the North East of England - Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough.
The TUULS project (‘The use and utility of localised speech forms in determining
identity: Forensic and sociophonetic perspectives’; ESRC ES/M010783/1) examines
how variation at the individual level relates to generalised patterns of variation within
the three accent groups as well as across the northeastern region as a whole.
We focus here on spectral and durational variability in word-final schwa in words of the
lettER, commA, NEAR and CURE lexical sets (Wells 1982). In the North East of England,
schwa is known to vary quite markedly even over short geographical distances (Beal et
al. 2012; French et al. 2012). Our preliminary results indicate quality differences across
the three varieties with Newcastle speakers producing open realisations, those in
Middlesbrough generally using a non-localisable central vowel, and Sunderland
speakers tending towards an intermediate or a fronted form. Results also demonstrate
that in Newcastle, schwa may be up to 40% (+3dB) louder than the vowels of primary
stressed syllables in the same words, and may be sustained for around twice the
duration of stressed phonologically long vowels; these patterns are not observed to the
same degree among speakers from the other two sites.
We examine age-correlated variation in read speech produced by male speakers of the
three varieties to look for differences suggestive of change in progress. Evidence for
convergent or divergent trends across the localities is assessed in combination with the
individual speakers’ self-reported mobility patterns within the region and beyond.
References:
Beal, J. C., L. Burbano-Elizondo and C. Llamas (2012). Urban North-Eastern English:
Tyneside to Teesside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
French, J. P., C. Llamas, D. Watt and L. Roberts (2012). Tyneside Open Schwa:
Acoustic and phonological aspects. Poster presented at the Annual Colloquium
of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians (BAAP). Leeds.
Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
232
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GALICIAN VERSUS PORTUGUESE VERSUS SPANISH: COMPARING DATA
FROM NAÏF AND NON-NAÏF APPROACHES
Fernando Brissos
Centre of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon
Keywords:
Language documentation, dialectometry, perceptual dialectology, Spanish Portuguese
border area dialects, Galician versus Portuguese versus Spanish.
Abstract:
Despite having little tradition, the linguistic study of the Spanish-Portuguese frontier is
of significant interest for both languages, due to five main reasons:
(i)
this border is one of the oldest and most stable state boundaries in history,
(ii)
having been throughout time, however, an area of intense economic and cultural
interchange;
(iii)
it has suffered recent decisive developments, due to the creation of the
«Schengen space» and the acute depopulation of the interior part of both
countries following the post-war period;
(iv)
despite its stability, the political/national limits of the Spanish-Portuguese border
have a relevant number of mismatches with the actual linguistic limits of
Galician/Portuguese/Spanish (e.g. Carrasco 1996-1997), making it imperative to
accomplish a full cartography of the dialects of that area;
(v)
both Portuguese and Spanish standard varieties and most important urban areas
are located far from the border, which makes it more probable for the dialects
belonging to that area to be conservative. As a consequence, those dialects are
of special interest in order to reconstruct the history of both languages.
New data, however, is being brought to light by the FRONTESPO project
(http://www.frontespo.org/), whose «aim […] is the comprehensive linguistic
documentation of the frontier area between Spain and Portugal». Presently,
FRONTESPO has already documented the language of 57 localities (= 238 speakers,
178 interviews with c. 300 hours of audio-video recordings) throughout ten zones (see
map 1). A linguistic-ethnographic questionnaire containing 163 questions (relating to
traditional, rural life) plus a sociolinguistic appendix (inquiring on speakers’ opinions
about their own language and its relation to neighbouring varieties) was conducted in
all localities.
It was found that Portuguese speakers from the Galician-Portuguese border area
frequently stated that their dialect is closer to its Galician neighbouring dialect than to
distant Portuguese dialects, such as standard Portuguese. In the Spanish-Portuguese
border area, this perception was not commonly encountered.
In this talk, I will a) briefly present the FRONTESPO project and its theoretical and
methodological foundations, and b) compare speakers’ general perceptions to actual
linguistic variation, using, in this case, a dialectometrical approach (Goebl 2006, Goebl
2010). This study comprises the two northwesternmost FRONTESPO’s inquiry zones
(map 1) – representing the Galician-Portuguese border area –, the two
southeasternmost zones – Spanish-Portuguese –, and the standard varieties of both
languages. The respective dialectometrical clusters, along different cutting lines, will
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allow us to better understand (i) the exact correspondence between speakers’
perceptions and a non-naïf, quantitative linguistic approach, and (ii) the geolinguistic
clash between Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish.
References:
Carrasco González, J. (1996). Hablas y dialectos portugueses o galaico-portugueses
en Extremadura (Parte I). Anuario de Estudios Filológicos XIX.
Carrasco González, J. (1997). Hablas y dialectos portugueses o galaico-portugueses
en Extremadura (Parte II y última). Anuario de Estudios Filológicos XX.
Goebl, H. (2006). Recent advances in Salzburg dialectometry. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 21(4), 411-435.
Goebl, H. (2010). Introducción a los problemas y métodos según los principios de la
Escuela Dialectométrica de Salzburgo. In G. Aurrekoetxea and J. Ormaetxea
(eds.). Tools for linguistic variation (pp. 3-39). University of País Vasco.
Map 1 – FRONTESPO’s inquiry zones
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KOINEIZATION IN MEDIEVAL ITALY
Josh Brown
Stockholm University
Keywords:
Koineization, middle ages, Italy, standardisation.
Abstract:
Renaissance Italy sees the creation of the Italian language, and of most major
European standard languages. In Italy, no political centre dominated the entire
peninsula, and so a standard language was not immediately obvious. The dialect
chosen for the standard came from the literary tradition, Florentine. The existing
literature has shown how Florentine emerged as a dominant variety, but this has
focussed on literary texts, leaving an entire period of language history unexplored.
Before Florentine had become established as the standard, koineization was taking
place throughout the whole of north Italy in what can be seen as a parallel
development. The phenomenon of koineization has been left largely unexplored in
studies of the linguistic history of Romània. Tuten’s (2003) account on medieval Spain
is the best study that remains for Romance, while the comprehesive but somewhat
dated essays in Sanga (1991) provide a heterogenerous treatment of the issue. This
paper builds on the methodologies developed in these accounts, as well as more
recent work by Kerswill (2013) and Britain (2010, 2012), to adapt these models to the
sociolinguistic landscape of late medieval Italy. Using data from the letters of an early
15th century nun from Milan, the paper considers language variation in a corpus which
has been described as being ‘notably dialectal’. The paper concludes by reflecting on
the explanatory power of koineization for varieties of language that did not standardize.
References:
Britain, D. (2010). Supralocal Regional Dialect Levelling. In C. Llamas and D. Watt
(eds.). Language and identities (pp. 193-204). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Britain, D. (2012). Koineization and cake baking: Reflections on methods in dialect
contact research. In B. Wä lchli, A. Leemann and A. Ender (eds.). Methods in
Contemporary Linguistics (pp. 219-238). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kerswill, P. (2013). Koineization. In J. K. Chambers, N. Schilling and P. Trudgill (eds.).
Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp. 669-702). Oxford: Blackwell.
Sanga, G. (ed.) (1991). Koinè in Italia. Dalle origini al Cinquecento. Bergamo: P.
Lubrina.
Tuten, D. (2003). Koineization in medieval Spanish. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
235
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RESULTS FROM A VERBAL GUISE TEST IN THE FAROE ISLANDS
Edit Bugge
University of Bergen
Keywords:
Verbal guise test, psycolinguistics.
Abstract:
This paper presents results from a verbal guise test that was carried out in October
2015 in six test localities in the Faroe Islands including 203 Faroese 15-year-old test
takers. The voice samples used in the verbal guise test included 15 voices
representing five different geolectal varieties of Faroese, and the pupils were asked to
evaluate the voice samples by giving each voice a rating on eight different nonlinguistic personal traits. When the verbal guise test was completed, the purpose of the
test was revealed, and the pupils were asked to fill out a questionnaire, collecting data
on the pupils’ conscious statements about dialect variation in the Faroes.
The verbal guise test was developed to test subconscious evaluations on language
varieties. The test method used the Faroese project has been developed in Denmark,
where the test reveals consistent result patterns in all Danish test localities, in which
Danish pupils give voices with standard varieties and urban Copenhagen varieties
more positive ratings compared to voices with non-standard rural or regional dialects
(cf. Kristiansen 2009).
The Faroe Islands represents an interesting sociolinguistic test location in the Nordic
region. It is a small country, with a total population of 49 188, but with a conciderable
geolectal variation. There is no official spoken standard variety of Faroese, and dialect
use is accepted (and expected) in public and private domains, resulting in a usage
pattern that resembles that of the neighbouring country Norway. Though the capital
Tórshavn represents a growing financial power centre, the relative status of the
Tórshavn dialects in a dialect prestige hierarchy remains unclear (Jacobsen 2012).
As the Faroe Islands is a part of the Danish kingdom and has considerable social and
cultural contact with Denmark, one could suspect that Faroese language views were
influenced by the Danish language ideology with its strong devaluation of non-standard
varieties.
The test results presented in this paper from the conscious evaluations of dialectal
status indicate an image of a national dialect hierarchy that favours the dialect of
Tórshavn. However, the reaction patterns of the verbal guise test reflect no such
hierarchy, revealing what appears to be a random ranking pattern, in which geolectal
variation does not account for the variation in the evaluation pattern. The results from
the Faroese verbal guise test is thus similar to the one found in the verbal guise tests in
Western Norway (Anderson and Bugge 2014; Anderson 2010).
References:
Anderson, R. (2010). Medvitne og umedvitne haldningar til bergensk, austlandsk og
strilemål hjå ungdomar i Åsane Danske talesprog bind 10, (pp. 80 – 107).
København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag.
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Anderson, R. and E. Bugge (2015). Dialect and other explanatory factors in
subconscious verbal guise tests. Acta Linguistica Hafnensia. Taylor and Francis
Online.
Jacobsen, J. í L. (2011). Dialektbrugere i spændetrøje? In A. Gunnstein and E. Bugge
(eds.). Vestnordisk språkkontakt gjennom 1200 år. Tórshavn: Fróðskapur.
Kristiansen, T. (2009). The macro-level social meanings of late-modern Danish
accents. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41, 167–192.
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AGE ESTIMATION IN FOREIGN-ACCENTED SPEECH
Daniel Bürkle
University of Central Lancashire, NZILBB
Ksenia Gnevsheva
Australian National University
Keywords:
Speech perception, age estimation, foreign-accented speech.
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that listeners are generally fairly accurate in
estimating people’s age from their speech (e.g., Moyse, 2014). However, most age
estimation studies have been based on American English, and very few have
explored cross-language effects. While Braun and Cerrato (1999) found no effect of
language when presenting listeners with German and Italian voices, Nagao and
Kewley-Port (2005) conducted an age estimation study with stimuli presented in
English and Japanese and found that listeners were more accurate at estimating age
in the familiar language. The current study sets out to test whether such a
sociolinguistic effect may extend to foreign-accented speech.
In our perception experiment 28 English first language participants listened to
randomly presented audio-stimuli and were asked to estimate the speakers’ age.
The audio stimuli were 40 clips of 20 English English speakers and 20 Japanese
first language speakers reading the ‘Please call Stella’ passage in English, retrieved
from the Speech Accent Archive (Weinberger, 2015). The age range of speakers
was from 18 to 70s. With the audio stimuli available, the best attempt was made
to get a balanced age distribution and also age-match the speakers in the two
language groups. The participants’ age estimate and reaction times were recorded.
Our statistical analysis shows that Japanese first language speakers were estimated
to be younger than their English age-matched counterparts with no age by first
language interaction. Additionally, participants were significantly slower in
reacting to clips recorded by Japanese speakers. These results suggest that
listeners may not only differ in how they estimate the age of speakers in different
languages but also in how they estimate the age of speakers with different
accents. These findings have theoretical implications as they highlight that
even such a seemingly universal phenomenon as age may be expressed or
perceived differently by speakers of different languages. The practical implications
include our need for awareness of such differences when age estimation is used
for decision-making puposes in real life (e.g., forensics).
References:
Braun, A. and L. Cerrato (1999). Estimating speaker age across languages. Proceedings of ICPhS 99 (pp. 1369-1372). San Francisco: CA.
Moyse, E. (2014). Age Estimation from Faces and Voices: A Review.
Psychologica
Belgica 54 (3), 255-265.
perception. Poster presented at the International Research Conference on
Nagao, K. and D. Kewley-Port (2005). The effect of language familiarity on
Aging and Speech Communication. Bloomington: Indiana.
age
Weinberger, S. (2015). [online]. Speech Accent Archive. George Mason University.
Available at: http://accent.gmu.edu. 238
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THE SAME NEED CONVEYED IN DIFFERENT WAYS: VARIATION IN EARLY 19TH
CENTURY ENGLISH WOMEN’S PETITIONS
Nuria Calvo Cortés
Complutense University of Madrid
Keywords:
Late Modern English, letters and petitions, formal and informal texts, prescriptivism.
Abstract:
Many studies concerning the practice of letter writing in the 18th and 19th centuries have
arisen in the last decade (Dossena et al., 2008; Dossena et al., 2012; Auer et al.,
2015). In addition, different corpora have been compiled for linguistic analysis,
including the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension and the Corpus of
Late Modern English Prose, and there has also been specific research on letters
written by individuals of the time, such as Jane Austen (Tieken-Boon van Ostade,
2014).
However, some marginal groups of society do not seem to have received much
attention. They include women who did not always have enough literacy skills and
often had to communicate through somebody else’s writing.
The present study aims at analysing a set of letters written as petitions by two women
convicts who were about to be transported to Australia. Both women wrote, or had
somebody to write for them, formal and informal petitions to men who were in a
superior position and whose influence could possibly grant them their needs. The two
women seem to have shared their time in prison and one of the letters is signed by
both of them.
In a time when letter writing manuals and grammarians dictated the rules on how to
write correctly, the analysis of these petitions can offer some information about the
linguistic practices of this period. The research questions that arise include the
differences and/or similarities between the formal and the informal petitions; the
influence of the linguistic prescribers of the time; and the way politeness was
expressed.
Apart from the clues that the handwriting can provide, there are other linguistic features
contributing to the conclusions. They include spelling and punctuation, as well as
syntactic, pragmatic and stylistic characteristics that make the letters similar or
different.
The conclusion will show that only one of the two women might have been the
authoress of many of the informal letters; it will also prove the possible influence of the
prescriptive books in the formal petitions, probably written by a more literate person;
and that the level of formality of the petition did not condition their politeness because
of having the same needs and addressing the same people in a situation of despair.
References:
Auer, A., D. Schreier and R. J. Watts (2015). Letter Writing and Language Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dossena, M. and T. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.) (2008). Studies in Late Modern
English Correspondence. Bern: Peter Lang.
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Dossena, M. and G. del Lungo Camiciotti (2012). Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2014). In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the
Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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ITALIAN AND ITALO-ROMANCE DIALECTS:
A VARIATIONIST STUDY OF CONVERGENCE IN BILINGUAL SPEECH
Massimo Cerruti
University of Turin
Keywords:
Variationist sociolinguistics, convergence, code-switching, Italian and Italo-Romance
dialects.
Abstract:
Grammatical research has investigated bilingual speech in Italo-Romance mainly
against the backdrop of Carol Myers Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame. Studies have
shown that what Myers Scotton calls ‘classic code-switching’ fails to explain codeswitching between Italo-Romance dialects and Italian, in that neither of the two
grammars prevails over the other and nothing constraints code-switching apart from
the requirements of either grammar (Berruto 2005). In this paper I will focus on the kind
of bilingual speech that Myers Scotton terms ‘composite code-switching’ (that “the MLF
model alone does not account completely for”; Jake & Myers Scotton 2009: 234), i.e.
code-switching in which both languages contribute not only surface forms but also
aspects of the underlying grammatical frame. Such is often the case when prolonged
interaction between languages has led to grammatical convergence, just like in ItaloRomance.
I will argue that detecting and analyzing ‘composite code-switching’ requires comparing
inherent variability in the languages in contact and relating the individual grammar to
the group grammar. This is all the more true in Italo-Romance, where long-lasting
contact between Italo-Romance dialects and Italian has resulted in a continuum of
intermediate varieties between the base dialects and the standard, and even socially
homogeneous groups may display extensive inter-individual variation (Cerruti in press).
Moreover, I will contend that contact between Italo-Romance dialects and Italian
confronts grammatical approaches to code-switching not only with the necessity of
identifying which sets of rules bilingual speakers switch between, but also with the
problem of determining whether certain groups of bilingual speakers really switch
between two distinguishable sets of rules (cf. Gardner-Chloros & Edwards 2004).
In this context, I will rely on the ‘comparative variationist method’ (Poplack & Meechan
1998; Tagliamonte 2002) to investigate a specific case of interaction between
grammars in Italo-Romance. The case in point will be the use of the negative particle
MICA (Latin MICA "crumb" > Italian mica, dialect ['mia]) in a bilingual corpus of
spontaneous speech data from Italian and bresciano (an Eastern Lombard ItaloRomance dialect), the so-called ParVa Corpus (www.mediling.eu). Different structures
(Neg+Verb+MICA, Verb+MICA, MICA+Verb) and different functions (canonical and noncanonical negation) are available for MICA, and may coexist in the same grammar
(Parry 2013). A mixed-effects logistic regression analysis will be carried out to explore
whether differences in patterning between Italian and bresciano are found to occur;
and, if so, whether the behaviour of MICA in bilingual utterances patterns according to
the rules of either monolingual grammar. Evidence of convergence will be searched for,
both in bilingual speech and in monolingual speech; that might lead us to verify
whether speech in ‘bilingual mode’ displays a higher degree of convergence than
speech in ‘monolingual mode’.
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References:
Berruto, G. (2005). Dialect/standard convergence, mixing, and models of language
contact: the case of Italy. In P. Auer, F. Hinskens and P. Kerswill (eds.). Dialect
change. Convergence and divergence in European languages (pp 81-97).
Cambridge: CUP.
Cerruti, M. (2017). Morphosyntactic variation: individual grammar and group grammar
in the ‘de-dialectalization’ of Italian. Sociolinguistic studies 11/1.
Gardner-Chloros P. and M. Edwards (2004). Assumptions behind grammatical
approaches to code switching: when the blueprint is a red herring. Transactions
of the Philological Society 102/1, 103-129.
Jake, J. and C. Myers-Scotton (2009). Which language? Participation potentials across
lexical categories in code-switching. In L. Isurin, K. De Bot and D. Winford
(eds.). Multidisciplinary approaches to code switching (pp. 207-242).
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Parry, M. (2013). Negation in the history of Italo-Romance. In D. Willis, C. Lucas and A.
Breitbarth (eds.). The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the
Mediterranean (pp. 77-118). Oxford: OUP.
Poplack, S. and M. Meechan (1998). Introduction: How languages fit together in
codemixing. Special issue of International Journal of Bilingualism 2/2, 127-138.
Tagliamonte, S. (2002). Comparative sociolinguistics. In J. Chambers, P. Trudgill and
N. Schilling-Estes (eds.). The handbook of language variation and change (pp.
729-763). Malden: Blackwell.
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VARIATION IN MALAGA: IS (T) REALISED AS [T], [TH], [T͡S] OR [T͡Ʃ] A NEW
VARIABLE?
Nadine Chariatte
University of Cape Town
Keywords:
Malaga, perceptual dialectology, sociophonetics, language change, social meaning.
Abstract:
Considerable research has been done on the Spanish spoken in Malaga, especially in
terms of phonetics, (cf. Villena Ponsoda 1996; 2008; Villena Ponsoda & Ávila Muñoz
2014). Hence, there is a more or less established set of variables which are usually
examined and which have also been reported from other Andalusian places. One of
the lesser-studied phenomena is the realisation of -st- as dental-alveolar affricate (cf.
Moya Corral 2007). However, in this paper a redefinition of this variable is proposed as
(t) in postconsonantal position. In the city of Malaga the standard variant [t] and the
nonstandard variants [th], [t͡s] or [t͡ʃ] have been observed for this variable. The goal of
this paper is twofold: first, it aims to present an impression of the local people’s
perception and beliefs of this particular feature and to link these folklinguistic ideas with
a variationist analysis of production data; second, it has the ambition to show that (t)
constitutes a distinct variable, which is worth to be analysed in detail. This study is
based on recordings of naturally occurring speech (120 speakers) and on perceptual
dialectology surveys (120 participants). The data collected was analysed according to
third wave sociolinguistic considerations in order to obtain an idea of the social
meanings of the different variants of (t) and how they are employed as social practices.
Results show that young women most frequently use the nonstandard variants of (t)
and that in Malaga these variants are strongly associated with (young) women.
Moreover, people claim this feature as typically malagueño, e.g. as a feature that has
recently emerged in Malaga and is unique to this city. In other words, people in Malaga
consider the nonstandard variants of (t) as a distinguishing feature from speakers from
the rural surroundings of Malaga and other places in Andalusia. These findings give
evidence that the Spanish spoken in Malaga is undergoing change concerning the
realisation of (t) and that, thus, (t) is a (new) variable of great interest for the study of
variation in Malaga.
References:
Moya Corral, J. A. (2007). Noticia de un sonido emergente: la africada dental
procedente del grupo -st- en Andalucía. Revista de Filología 25, 457-465.
Villena Ponsoda, J. A. (1996). Convergence and divergence in a standard-dialect
continuum: Networks and individuals in Malaga. Sociolinguistica 10, 112-137.
Villena Ponsoda, J. A. (2008). Sociolinguistic patterns of Andalusian Spanish.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 193/194, 139-160.
Villena Ponsoda, J. A. and Ávila Muñoz, A. M. (2014). Dialect stability and divergence
in southern Spain. In K. Braunmüller, S. Höder and K. Kühl (eds.). Stability and
Divergence in Language Contact. Factors and Mechanisms (pp. 207-238).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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OPTIONAL REALIZATION OF THE FRENCH NEGATIVE PARTICLE (NE) ON
TWITTER: CAN BIG DATA REVEAL NEW SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS?
Jean-Pierre Chevrot
Lidilem, Université Grenoble Alpes
University of Lyon
Eric Fleury
University of Lyon
Márton Karsai
University of Lyon
Yannick Léo
University of Lyon
Jean-Philippe Magué
University of Lyon
Paul Mangold
University of Lyon
Aurélie Nardy
Lidilem, Université Grenoble Alpes
Julie Peuvergne
Lidilem, Université Grenoble Alpes
Keywords:
Variation in French, negation deletion, Twitter, big data, thick data.
Abstract:
From the outset, sociolinguistics has taken the question of data seriously (Labov,
1975). It is thus not surprising that the field recently joined the movement of
computational social sciences (Lazer et al., 2009) that results from the ability to collect
and model vast digital datasets concerning the behavior of individuals in collective
contexts. The emerging field of computational sociolinguistics (Nguyen et al., 2016)
works on data resulting from the use of sensors (proximity sensors, wearable
recorders) or the digital communication that permits automatic, ongoing and
unsupervised recording through the collection of traces on the web, social media or
portable terminals. This paper aims at illustrating how large datasets including
language and social links reveal sociolinguistic patterns that could remain invisible with
smaller samples. More precisely, the dataset includes 100 million of tweets authored by
1 million of users, combined with the follower links between them. The tweets are
written in French and the sample represents 10% of the production in the GMT+1 time
zone between June 2014 and July 2016. We examine (ne), a sociolinguistic variable of
French: optional realization of the first morpheme of the negation (Je fume pas vs. Je
ne fume pas, I do not smoke) for three reasons : (ne) is a well-documented
sociolinguistic marker of spoken French (Armstrong et Smith, 2002, inter alia) ;
realization and omission of (ne) are visible in the written tweets; (ne) is always realized
in the standard writing, which allows an assessment of the adherence of the users to
the writing norm.
We will present the empirical procedures for extracting the tweets that include a
negative construction and for constructing a social network based on the reciprocal
mentions between users. We will then focus on three results: 1/ The overall score of
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(ne) realization and its regional variation in France (approx. 16% in the North and 28%
in the South); 2/ A never before seen pattern showing a very regular variation of (ne)
realization according to the time of day, every day in the week (increase in the morning,
decrease during the night); 3/ The observation that users with high scores interact
frequently with each other. The discussion focusses on the sociolinguistic meaning of
the results, including the close examination of the risk of bias. Finally, we will defend
that thick data should combine with big data in order to explain such patterns (Wang,
2013).
References:
Armstrong, N. and A. Smith (2002). The influence of linguistic and social factors on the
recent decline of French ne.Journal of French Language Studies 12, 23-41.
Labov, W. (1975). What is a linguistic fact? Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press.
Lazer, D., A.S. Pentland, L. Adamic, S. Aral and M. Van Alstyne (2009). Life in the
network: the coming age of computational social science. Science 323 (5915),
721-723.
Nguyen, D., A.S. Doğruöz, C.P. Rosé and F.M.G. de Jong (2016). Computational
Sociolinguistics: A Survey. Computational Linguistics 42 (3), 537-593.
Wang, T. (2013) [online]. Why Big Data Needs Thick Data. Ethnography Matter.
Available at: https://medium.com/ethnography-matters.
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USES OF VAGUENESS IN YOUTH SPEECH. EPISTEMIC AND APPROXIMATING
EXPRESSIONS IN DANISH
T. K. Christensen
University of Copenhagen
Keywords:
Vagueness epistemicity approximation youth speech functional.
Abstract:
Adolescents have always been accused of ruining the language of their parents and
grandparents by being sloppy and imprecise in their speech (and writing, for that
matter).
However, it has long been argued that so-called ’vague’ language may serve a range
of interactional functions (e.g. Kempson 1977; Dines 1980; Channell 1994; Gassner
2012). For instance, vagueness may arise because of unclear reference between a
linguistic expression and a class of objects; because a speaker lacks requisite
knowledge of the matter at hand; or simply because precision is uncalled for in the
context. Many studies of vague language revolve around the semantics-pragmatics
interface, but because vague expressions come in such great variety, sociolinguists
have also studied some types under the heading of discourse variation (e.g. Cheshire
2007; Tagliamonte & Denis; Pichler 2010).
In this talk, I review data and results from a series of research projects related to two
very different types of vague expressions in modern spoken Danish, i.e. on the one
hand epistemic expressions (both epistemic adverbials such as måske ‘maybe’ and
epistemic phrases such as tror jeg ‘I think’), and on the other hand approximating
expressions (both general extenders such as og sådan noget ‘and stuff like that’ and
the highly productive derivational affix –agtig ‘-ish’).
The material I draw upon is the large and richly annotated LANCHART database of
sociolinguistic interviews compiled during the 80s and early 2000s. On the backdrop of
distributional data, I exemplify and discuss some representative uses of vague
expressions in youth speech. One particularly interesting context is the elicitation of
language attitudes. The task of categorizing other people on the basis of their speech
clearly poses a threat to one’s own and the interlocutor’s face (Brown & Levinson
1987), and informants orient to this by couching their descriptions in vague terms (1-2).
(1)
altså måske er de lidt mere landlige ovre i Jylland men jeg ved det ikke rigtigt
I-mean maybe they are a-bit more rural over in Jutland but I don’t really know
(2) det er sådan lidt mere … slang … og bare … go with the flow-agtigt … end det
der andet
it is like a-bit more … slang … and just … go with the flow-ish … than the other
one
While I have not coded for all vague expressions found in such examples, it is clear
that they are highly prevalent in this context (other examples are lidt mere ‘a bit more’
and sådan ‘like’).
This testifies to the challenging nature of offering language attitudes, but also (and
especially for the use of agtig ‘ish’) to a creative and experimental language use that
goes counter to the frequent accusations of sloppiness. Other discourse contexts in the
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LANCHART corpus (cf. Gregersen et al. 2009) shows such linguistic creativity to an
even higher degree.
References:
Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage
vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Channell, J. (1994). Vague language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cheshire, J. (2007). Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal
of Sociolinguistics 11(2), 155-193.
Dines, E. R. (1980) Variation in Discourse: ”And Stuff like That”. Language in Society
9, 13-31.
Gassner, D. (2012). Vague Language That Is Rarely Vague: A Case Study of “Thing”
in L1 and L2 Discourse. International Review of Pragmatics 4(1), 3-28.
Gregersen, F., S. Beck Nielsen and J. Thøgersen (2009). Stepping into the same river
twice: on the discourse context analysis in the LANCHART project. Acta
Linguistica Hafniensia 41(1). 30-63.
Kempson, R. M. (1977). Semantic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pichler, H. (2010). Methods in discourse variation analysis: Reflections on the way
forward. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14, 581-608.
Tagliamonte, S. A. and D. Denis (2010). The stuff of change: General extenders in
Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics.
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THE HISTORICAL VARIATION OF THE PRAGMEME ‘GREETING’ IN
ROMANIAN
Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu
University of Bucharest
Keywords:
Greeting, pragmeme, allopract, intercultural appropriation.
Abstract:
The presentation focuses on greeting in Romanian language as a pragmeme (Mey
2001): a greeting is an utterance whose goal is to produce different types of effects –
“social gratification”, “rights/obligations and social bonds” (Capone 2005: 1357).
Various allopracts (‘instantiated individual pragmatic acts’, Mey 2001: 221) in
Romanian will be taken into consideration, as a greeting can be verbal, nonverbal or
having both verbal and nonverbal features. The data analysis is based on a corpus of
written and oral Romanian, from the seventeenth century to the present-day.
In the Romanian culture one can notice readiness for intercultural appropriation (Kádár
forth.): intercultural appropriation means the adoption by a society of a set of rituals
belonging to another society, while making sure that the adopted rituals are
inter/culturally adequate. The corpus points out the possibility to discern the adequate
behaviour adopted from another culture according to the interlocutor, to the
relationship, as well as to the goals of the performer. Studying the intercultural
appropriation and the ritualization that could emerge in interaction within the new
cultural setting reveals both the complexity of the intercultural contact and the historical
sociopragmatic characteristics of a ritual (Kádár forth.).
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nonverbal allopract (temenea ‘bow’)
shows the intercultural appropriation from the Ottoman culture (as the Romanian
principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were vassal states to the Ottoman Empire).
Starting with the nineteenth century a rapid orientation towards Western European
cultures and languages is prominent, which also leads to a different intercultural
appropriation, visible mainly in the verbal allopract (bonjour, bonsoir, ciao, servus).
Thus, some of the previous allopracts became historicized.
One should not overlook the fact that communication is a dynamic process, thus the
individuals have a special relationship with the societal conditions, being constrained
by them but also shaping them (Kecskes 2010: 2890). In intercultural interactions,
when the linguistic code is not shared by the participants, gestural performativity seems
to prevail in Romanian. In intracultural interactions, there are variations between verbal
and gestural performativity, according to the nature of the interpersonal relationship.
References:
Capone, A. (2005). Pragmemes (a study with reference to English and Italian). Journal
of Pragmatics 37, 1355–1371.
Kádár, D. Z. (forth.). Historical intercultural socio-pragmatics: A study on ritualisation.
Journal of Historical Pragmatics.
Kádár, D. Z. and M. Haugh (2013). Understanding politeness, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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Kecskes, I. (2010). Situation-bound utterances as pragmatic acts. Journal of
Pragmatics 42, 2889–2897.
Mey, J. (2001). Pragmatics: An Introduction, 2nd revised ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Terkourafi, M. (2001). The distinction between generalized and particularized
implicatures and linguistic politeness. In P. Kuhnlein, H. Rieser and H. Zeevat
(eds.). Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Formal Semantics and
Pragmatics of Dialogue (pp. 174-188). Bielefeld: Zif.
Terkourafi, M. and D. Z. Kádár (forth.). Convention and ritual. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh
and D. Z. Kadar (eds.). Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Politeness.
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ARE DIALECT FEATURES LOST IN A STABLE ORDER? TESTING THE FIXED
ROUTE HYPOTHESIS
Michael Daniel
National State University Higher School of Economics
Nina Dobrushin
National State University Higher School of Economics
University of Lyon
Darya Ignatenko
National State University Higher School of Economics
Polina Kazakova
National State University Higher School of Economics
Ruprecht von Waldenfels
University of Zurich
Keywords:
Dialect loss, fixed route hypothesis.
Abstract:
As a dialect speaking community moves toward the standard, it gradually loses dialect
features. In this paper we ask whether this happens along a fixed route, that is, whether
the certain features are consistently lost before others on the level of individual speakers,
cf. Trudgill (1986: 20) on speakers of British English accommodating to American English
who “will almost certainly accommodate phonologically by acquiring features in a certain
order” (see also discussion in Rickford 2003). Such an order is apt to shed light on
relevant linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in the dialect attrition process.
We consider the dynamics of dialect loss among speakers of the North Russian dialect
spoken in Mikhalevskaya, a village in the south of Arkhangelskaja Oblast’ (northern
Russia) as represented in the Ustja River Basin Corpus (URB, Daniel et al. 2013-2016), a
corpus of spontaneous speech from more than 50 speakers of different ages with more
than 0.5 mln tokens.
The speech of the villagers in the corpus is highly heterogeneous in terms of its
assimilation to standard Russian. While the oldest speakers (born in 1920 to 1940) show a
high degree of dialect preservation, those born in 1960 to 1996 have lost the dialect almost
completely.
We investigate a number of binary phonological and morphological variables that are well
represented in the data and lend themselves to a clear interpretation of dialect loss. These
include [e] for etymological [a] between palatalized consonants; dialectal realizations of the
postfix -sja; dialectal realization of the particle -to; absence of the initial n- in oblique forms
of the third person pronouns; and others. The main research question is: are the variables
being lost in a specific order?
To answer this we analyze and compare dialectal vs. standard realizations of each pair of
variables for each pair of speakers using standard statistical tests, and aggregate over the
resulting matrix to establish a measure that indicates which, if any, features are lost before
others, and to what extent this is a consistent phenomenon. The results support the
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hypothesis that there is a certain order in which (dialectal) features are acquired or lost in
the community.
While it thus seems that the fixed route hypothesis holds, note that individual variables
follow different diachronic trends. For some variables, the curve of loss is steeper than for
others, i.e., some are lost quicker than others. The differences in variable preservation for
each individual speaker may result simply from different rates of loss, making for a much
less interesting phenomenon than if systemic relations between the variables are the root
cause of an ordered transition to a new varieties. In the talk, we will discuss the validity of
this results and possible ways to expand on it.
References:
Daniel, M., N. Dobrushina and R. von Waldenfels (2014, 2015) [online] The language of
the Ustja river bassin. A corpus of North Russian dialectal speech. Bern, Moscow.
Available at: www.parasolcorpus.org/Pushkino.
Rickford, J. R. (2003). Implicational Scales. The Handbook of Language Variation and
Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
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WHO’S OLDER THAN THE OLD? (ALIAS СЕДИНА В БОРОДУ, ДА БЕС В
РЕБРО)
Michael Daniel
Polina Kazakova
National State University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation
Keywords:
Quantitative methods, corpus-based sociolinguistics, dialect loss.
Abstract:
Building on data from a larger project on dialect loss in Northern Russia, we discuss
the problem of quantitative analysis of age group outliers, i.e. consultants whose
linguistic behavior is significantly more or significantly less dialectal than that of their
age peers in the condition of dialect loss. Isolating outliers may be useful for various
purposes (see, for instance, Britain 2003), such as modelling age groups. Whereas the
discussion on consistency in being innovative or conservative in sociolinguistics is
mostly connected to the study of gender (e.g., Maclagan et al. 1999), in this paper, we
want to address the following issue: Are outliers consistently ahead or below their age
peers by all variables, or can a speaker be highly innovative in some variables while
being highly conservative in others?
Our data come from a large corpus of dialect interviews recorded in 2011-2016 in
Mikhalevskaya, Arkhangelskaja Oblast’, and available in the Ustja River Basin Corpus
(URB, Daniel et al. 2013-2016), a corpus of spontaneous speech from 62 speakers of
different ages with more than 0.5 mln tokens. An important issue we encounter in the
analysis of the data consists in individual speakers showing statistical tendencies of
use rather than categorical choices in respect to variables, and different degrees of
representativeness of the data which is due to very numbers of observations per
individual speaker. This makes the comparison of the speakers an uneasy task.
These methodological issues in mind, we use an algorithm that sets up an ‘optimal’
order of speakers. This order is initially based on age and subsequently changed, so
that it reflects not only the age of speakers but also their dialect preservation. The
default assumption is that a younger speaker is less dialectal; whenever the opposite is
statistically significant in our data (calculated as exact Fisher test based on
occurrences of dialectal vs. standard realization of a variable compared in two
speakers), we reverse the order. As a result, we obtain an ‘ideal’ order for each
variable where for each pair of speakers it is true that the one who stands to the left of
the other must be either older or more conservative than the other. By comparing this
dialect age orders in different variables, we see whether these orders are consistent.
This answers the question of whether one may be either conservative or innovative in a
consistent way.
Preliminary results suggest that, indeed, speakers are NOT consistently conservative
or progressive. In the talk, we will discuss this method and similar approaches and
present results based on the data in the URB.
References:
M. Daniel, N. Dobrushina and R. von Waldenfels (2014 – 2015) [online]. The language
of the Ustja river bassin. A corpus of North Russian dialectal speech. Available
at: www.parasolcorpus.org/Pushkino
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Maclagan, M.A., E. Gordon and G. Lewis (1999). Women and sound change:
conservative and innovative behaviour by the same speakers. Language
Variation and Change 11, 19-41.
D. Britain. (2003). Exploring the importance of the outlier in sociolinguistic dialectology.
Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill. Queen Mary. University of
London: John Benjamins.
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THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF TEACHER IDENTITIES: FLEMISH
TEACHERS' PERCEPTIONS OF STANDARD DUTCH
Steven Delarue
Chloe Lybaert
Ghent University
Keywords:
Teacher identities, Standard Dutch, Flanders.
Abstract:
In recent studies, the linguistic landscape of Flanders is often described as diaglossic
(Auer 2005), with a range of intermediate varieties between Standard Dutch and the
dialects. These intermediate varieties are often captured under the term tussentaal (lit.
'in-between-language'). Tussentaal enjoys rapid expansion, but is also heavily
stigmatized by members of the political and cultural elite, who remain loyal to the
official standard language ideology (SLI) and propagate the use of Standard Dutch.
While the status of the standard in Flanders is problematic, due to its both nonendogenous (the standard was imported from the Netherlands and imposed on the
community) and non-vital character (as Standard Dutch in Flanders is "a virtual
colloquial variety [...] rarely spoken in practice" (De Caluwe 2009:19)), Flemish
language-in-education policies insist on Standard Dutch as the only acceptable norm in
schools, adequate to respond to 'problems' of language deficiency and multilingualism,
and the inequality and discrimination which ensue from them (Delarue & De Caluwe
2015).
This heavily polarized landscape presents Flemish teachers with increasing difficulties:
while most of them indicate they feel more at ease in tussentaal, they are expected to
adhere to Standard Dutch at all times. In this paper, we analyse a number of illustrative
interview extracts from a corpus of interviews with 82 Flemish primary and secondary
school teachers, in order to (1) discuss how Flemish teachers perceive (the importance
of) Standard Dutch and other, non-standard varieties of Dutch, and (2) show how these
perceptions discursively shape teacher identities of authenticity, authority and
professionalism.
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe's sociolinguistic unity, or a typology of European
dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. Van Der Auwera and D.
Geeraerts (eds.). Perspectives on variation (pp. 7-42). Berlin and New York: De
Gruyter.
De Caluwe, J. (2009). Tussentaal wordt omgangstaal in Vlaanderen. Nederlandse
Taalkunde 14, 8-25.
Delarue, S. and J. De Caluwe (2015). Eliminating social inequality by reinforcing
standard language ideology? Language policy for Dutch in Flemish schools.
Current Issues in Language Planning 16(1-2), 8-25.
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A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF LEXICAL UNIFORMITY IN THE
STANDARDIZATION OF ITALIAN
Stefano De Pascale
Stefania Marzo
Dirk Speelman
University of Leuven
Keywords:
Standard Italian, lexical variation, standardization, uniformity.
Abstract:
One of the fundamental aspects that defines the standardization phase of many
European languages, is the development towards more uniformity and less variability
(Milroy, 2001). Although it is still debated which degree of variability is acceptable in
order to consider a linguistic situation to be standardized (Soares da Silva, 2010),
lexicon-oriented quantitative standardization research has devised specific measures
to grasp these dynamics (Daems, Heylen, & Geeraerts, 2015).
The Italian situation is not different from other European languages, in that nation
building efforts after the political unification in 1861 led to the programmatic reduction
of lexical variation. But the peculiarity of Standard Italian is the historical
overabundance of formal variants of the same word, sometimes called allotropi
(D’Achille, 2010), whose single etymological base developed along different paths and
whose reflexes eventually (re-)entered the Italian language from different sources and
in different periods (borrowings, Latinisms and analogical formations). Well-known
examples are the doublets ‘gioco/giuoco’ (IŎCUS “game”) and ‘veduto/visto’ (VĬSUM
“seen”). Earlier corpus-based investigations have mainly focused on a limited number
of alternations and have only briefly touched on the sociolinguistic distribution of these
variants (Thornton, 2012).
The goal of this study is to frame this phenomenon more explicitly in previous
quantitative standardization research, and to scale up the analysis by looking at 5 sets
of roughly 10 lexical variables that exemplify a particular alternation type (eg.:
absence/presence of: orthographical rendition of syntactic gemination, mobile
diphthongs, raised vowels in Latin prefix ‘re-’, etc.). The frequencies of each variant will
be extracted from the DiaCORIS (28 mln tokens), a diachronic corpus of Italian texts
which covers a period from 1861 to 2001, and that includes multiple written genres
sampled from different areas in Italy. The data will be analyzed by building different
mixed-effects logistic regression models per alternation set and compare them.
Given the evident reduction of formal lexical variability in the Italian language over the
past century and a half, the central research question to be answered is whether the
influence of typical sociolinguistic dimensions can help explain the specific dynamics of
this process of reduction. Which areas of the peninsula lead this development to more
uniformity, and which lag behind? Do variants associated with literature supplant more
informal variants, or did the opposite happen? As to the internal factors that played a
role, we also ask whether this reduction is associated with the loss or acquisition of
certain fixed lexical patterns that involve these variants.
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References:
D’Achille, P. (2010). L’italiano contemporaneo (2nd [2003]). Bologna: Il Mulino.
Daems, J.,K. Heylen and D. Geeraerts (2015). Wat dragen we vandaag: een hemd met
blazer of een shirt met jasje? Taal En Tongval 67 (2), 307–342.
Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (4), 530–555.
Soares da Silva, A. (2010). Measuring and parameterizing lexical convergence and
divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese. In D. Geeraerts, G.
Kristiansen and Y. Peirsman (eds.). Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (pp.
41–84). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Thornton, A. M. (2012). Reduction and maintenance of overabundance. A case study
on Italian verb paradigms. Word Structure 5 (2), 183–207.
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LEXICAL CHANGE IN GERMAN-SPEAKING EUROPE: 1970 VS. 2015
Curdin Derungs
University of Zurich
Timo Grossenbacher
Swiss National Television, Data Unit
Adrian Leemann
University of Cambridge
Keywords:
Language change, lexicon, big data, German, Swiss German.
Abstract:
One of the most seminal publications on lexical variation in German-speaking Europe
is Eichhoff’s Atlas (1977-2000), which documents variation in German regional
varieties for 402 localities. More recently, Elspass & Möller (2001-2015) have
conducted online surveys examining predominantly lexical variation as well. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that lexical variants have evolved since the 70s, but proof for such
changes is thin. Elspass (2005) performed first qualitative analyses of lexical change
and reports leveling, with dominant variants from the 70s to be diffusing; yet regions
differed as to the rate of leveling. In the present contribution, we present first largescale comparisons to Eichoff’s data using a new dataset from 670,000+ speakers.
In 2015, we launched a web-app with SPIEGEL ONLINE and Tagesanzeiger
(Leemann et al. 2015). The app asked users 24 questions about their language use –
14 of which also appear in Eichhoff. After completing all features, the app presents a
map which indicates the localities that best fit the user’s variety. Users then assess the
validity of the result and provide metadata. More than 670,000 speakers from 18,000
localities (Google reverse geocoding) participated. Using these data, we ran
comparisons to Eichhoff’s data for 14 variables. Space prevents a comprehensive
description of this procedure; we devised a geographically informed way of comparing
the few historical measurements to the wealth of contemporary data.
Results revealed leveling to vary as a function of (a) the variable and (b) the region
under investigation. Figures 1 and 2 show variables where relatively little has changed
(Fig. 1) and where change has taken place (Fig. 2). Fig. 1 indicates the distributions for
‘10:15am’: the hexagons show the 2015 data – the darker the hexagon the more
dominant the variant. Superimposed are the dots representing the historical variants;
the larger the dot, the less this variant exists in the contemporary data at this particular
locality, i.e. the greater the change. The inset map (top right) shows this change as
voronoi polygons – the darker the color, the greater the degree of change. Fig. 1
reveals that regional distributions are largely unchanged. Fig. 2 (‘Second breakfast’),
however, reveals substantial leveling in Northern Germany.
Overall, our analyses revealed less change for southern parts of German-speaking
Europe, with traditional local variants found to be the most frequent responses across
many variables; variants associated with northern Germany, however, levelled more
substantially. We link these trends to (a) higher dialect competence and (b) more
prestigious non-standard varieties in southern German-speaking Europe. Results
further suggest stability for some variables, where isoglosses appear to follow national
borders. This is consistent with patterns reported in Elspass (2005), which he attributes
to German being a pluri-centralistic language (Clyne 1984).
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References:
Clyne, M. G. (1984). Language and Society in the German-speaking Countries.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eichhoff, J. (2000). Wortatlas der deutschen Umgangssprachen. Berlín: De Gruyter.
Elspass, S. (2005). Zum Wandel im Gebrauch regionalsprachlicher Lexik. ZDL.
Elspass, S. and R. Möller (2003). Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache. Universität
Augsburg.
Leemann, A., M. J. Kolly, M. Brupbacher, T. Grossenbacher and D. Wanitsch. (2015).
Grüezi, Moin, Servus.
Figure 1: Distribution of ‘10:15am’ variants across German-speaking Europe – hexagons show the
localities from the 2015 survey, the dots those of Eichhoff (1977-2000); the larger the dot, the less this
variant exists in the contemporary data at this particular locality, i.e. the greater the change over time. The
top right map indicates the degree of change that has taken place comparing the two datasets.
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Figure 2: Distribution of ‘Second breakfast’ variants across German-speaking EU – hexagons show the
localities from the 2015 survey, the dots those of Eichhoff (1977-2000); the larger the dot, the less this
variant exists in the contemporary data at this particular locality, i.e. the greater the change over time. The
top right map indicates the degree of change that has taken place comparing the two datasets.
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VARIATION IN THE MIRROR OF ELICITATION, CORPUS AND EXPERIMENT
Nina Dobrushina
National Research University Higher School of Economics
Keywords:
Imperative, elicitation, corpus, experiment, East-Caucasian.
Abstract:
Archi is a minority language of Daghestan (East-Caucasian family). The language is
spoken in one village (about 1,200 speakers). Archi was extensively studied in 1970s by
Alexandre E. Kibrik, and in 1977 a comprehensive grammar of Archi was published. This
paper deals with formal grammatical variation in Archi imperatives – the use of a suffix of
plural of the addressee.
Archi Imperative is used as a second person command, as in (2), but it also can be used
with 3rd person subject with the meaning of blessing or cursing, as in (1):
(1) lobur χ:wa:ra-ši zaba
child.PL be.glad-CVB come.IMP
‘May children come back in joy!’ (lit. ‘Children joyful come back’)
Archi intransitive imperative can mark the plurality of the addressee with the suffix –r.
The Archi plural marker -r is optional (reported already by Kibrik 1977). Most speakers
allow both marked and unmarked form when referring to plural addressee:
(2) žwen
arha(-r)
buwa-s
Χir
you.PL
LCTR.think.IMP(-IMP.PL )
mother-DAT
About
‘You all, think about your mother.’
The aim of the study was to find out which volitional utterances are more likely to use the
suffix -r, and what are the formal factors that contribute to this variation. Three methods
were available for this research: elicitation, corpus study, and experiment. Elicitation only
showed the presence of grammatical variation. Most speakers accept both forms in all
contexts. In the corpus of narratives, imperatives addressed to many people are not a
frequent form (25 examples). The corpus contains almost exclusively verbs of movement
(Come! Enter!), and these always have plural marking.
During the experiment, I suggested the sentences with intransitive imperatives in Russian
to the respondents who were asked to translate them into Archi. The presence or absence
of -r was registered for each example, with each speaker. 34 speakers took part in the
experiment. There was a total of about 1400 translated contexts where -r may (potentially)
occur.
All sentences were annotated for the following parameters expected to play a role in the
choice: the meaning of movement, control, blessing or cursing, 3rd person subject, 3rd
person inanimate subject ('May this amulet suit you'), and the verbs etymologically derived
from the transitive verb bos 'speak'.
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According to logistic regression analysis, the strongest contribution comes from the
following 'r-prohibiting' factors: the bos-verbs, 3rd person subjects and non-human
subjects. While the use with or without the plural addressee -r suffix is significantly
different for different constructions, from none to all, on the level of individual constructions
the variation across speakers was not very significant. Most constructions either almost
always take -r, or almost never do. This result is in accordance with what we saw in the
corpus: from nine lexemes found in the corpus only one showed variation.
To sum up, the comparison of the three methods – elicitation, corpus and experiment shows that elicitation may distort the existing tendency, revealing the variation for the
lexemes which, in natural discourse, do not show it.
References:
Kibrik, A. E. (1977). Opyt strukturnogo opisanija archinskogo jazyka vol. II. Izdatel’stvo
Moskovskogo universiteta.
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ADDRESS TERMS IN GERMAN YOUTH SLANG: SOCIAL INTERACTION AND
INDEXICALITIES
Pepe Droste
University of Münster
Keywords:
Address terms, social interaction, indexicality, enregisterment, youth slang.
Abstract:
Previous research on youth slang shows salient tendencies of a frequent use of address
terms and address term-like metapragmatic markers (e.g., Kiesling 2004 on dude;
Bucholtz 2009 on güey; inter alia): Address terms like güey are used 1 nearly every 10
seconds (Bucholtz 2009: 151). Within their sociocultural context, address terms have
shown to serve as important devices of discourse organization, stance-taking and identity
(re)construction. In contrast, metapragmatic models (Agha 2007) of such address terms
involve simplification and erasure, usually fueled by processes of mediatization. On the
one hand, however, systematic regularities of different functions of address terms in
conversational interaction still remain obscure. On the other hand, the motivations for the
intra-situationally varying use of lexically distinct address terms in conversation call for
further inquiry.
This paper contributes to this research by studying how forms, conversational functions
and social meanings of the high-frequent address terms Alter ‘dude, man’, Digga ‘dude’,
and Mann ‘man’ in German youth slang are shaped both from the bottom up, as they are
used in social interaction, and from the top down, through the workings of broader cultural
ideologies. First, the paper reconstructs milestones and driving forces of the
enregisterment of the three address terms in question with data of larger metadiscourses
in German media and pop culture. Second, it draws on data of ethnographic fieldwork
among a multi-ethnic youth group in Nordhorn, a small city in the Emsland, in
Northwestern Germany. Distinct forms of use are identified and conversational functions
systematically reconstructed by analyzing conversational data with the help of methods of
Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis. Third, the paper examines the local
motivations and meanings of lexically alternating between Alter, Digga, and Mann in
conversation by a combination of ethnographic data, interview data and conversational
data.
The paper adds to current research on forms, use and social meanings of address terms
in social practice, enriching our understanding how and why specific social groups use
address terms and why they are so important for specific social styles. In conclusion, the
paper calls attention to the need to analyze both interactional practices and broader
cultural ideologies in investigating the reflexive relations of language in society.
References:
Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Agha, A. (2015). Tropes of Slang. Signs and Society 3.2, 306-330.
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Bucholtz, M. (2009). From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican
immigrant youth slang. In A. Jaffe (ed.). Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp.
146-170). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heyd, T. (2014). Dude, Alter! A tale of two vocatives. Pragmatics and Society 5.2, 271295.
Kerswill, P. (2013). Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in
London. In P. Auer, M. Hilpert, A. Stukenbrock and B. Szmrecsanyi (eds.). Space
in Language and Linguistics: Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive
Perspectives (pp. 128-164). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Kiesling, S. (2004). Dude. American Speech 79.3, 281-305.
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VERB PLACEMENT VARIATION AS A SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLE?
NORWEGIAN VERB SECOND IN THREE DIFFERENT CONTACT SITUATIONS
Kristin Melum Eide
NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Hilde Sollid
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Keywords:
Verb second, variation, syntactic registers, language contact.
Abstract:
Norwegian is a Germanic language where verb second (V2) is obligatory in declarative
main clauses. Multilingual societies gives rise to language practices where this
“obligatory” verb second rule may be violated, thus giving rise to word order variation
where non-V2 is used as a signal of “the stranger” or “the outsider” (a phenomenon
utilized e.g. in Scandinavian literature depicting immigrants; e.g. Khemiri 2003, Navarro
Skaranger 2015). In Eide & Sollid (2011) we discussed whether and how language
users may exploit this verb placement variation as a sociolinguistic variable in contexts
otherwise seen as obligatory V2 contexts for most speakers of the standard varieties of
Norwegian. This time we extend our empirical domain to include three different contact
situations: The multilingual Norwegian-Kven-Saami language societies in the far north
of Norway where the inhabitants were subjected to a strict Norwegian-only policy since
the 1850s (Sollid 2005); the Norwegian spoken by descendants of Norwegian
immigrants into the American Midwest who immigrated there in the 19th century (Eide &
Hjelde 2015), and the interlanguage of contemporary immigrants into Norway, i.e. adult
second language learners of modern Norwegian (and to some extent their adolescent
descendants). In our discussion we hence compare speakers of Norwegian as a
heritage language with speakers of Norwegian as a second language and speakers of
a Norwegian contact variety to a Norwegian “baseline”; i.e. to monolingual speakers of
a standard Norwegian variety. In this discussion we draw on the approach of “multiple
grammars in one mind” put forth by Roeper (1999) and more recently Amaral & Roeper
(2014), allowing for viewing syntax as a set of subgrammars (on a par with subsets of
vocabulary). If grammars, like lexical items, can be subjected to (more or less
conscious) selection, it follows that this may give rise to intraspeaker variation
depending on the specific syntactic registers required by the situation at hand.
References:
Amaral, L. and T. Roeper (2014). Multiple Grammars and Second Language
Representation. Second Language Research 30(1), 3-36
Eide, K. M. and A. Hjelde (2015). Verb Second and Finiteness Morphology in
Norwegian Heritage Language of the American Midwest. Moribund Germanic
Heritage Languages in North America.
Eide, K. M. and H. Sollid (2011). Norwegian main clause declaratives: variation within
and across grammars. Linguistic Universals and Language Variation.
Roeper, T. (1999). Universal bilingualism. Bilingualism, Language and Cognition (2),
169-186.
Solid, H. (2005). Språkdannelse og -stabilisering i møtet mellom kvensk og norsk.
Oslo: Novus forlag.
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MAPPING AND ANALYZING DATA WITH THE ONLINE APPLICATION REDE
SPRACHGIS
Robert Engsterhold
Hanna Fischer
Juliane Limper
Philipps-University Marburg
Keywords:
Mapping data, GIS, language variation.
Abstract:
Creating linguistic maps of data for publications and research projects is a central task for
linguistics studying variation. The REDE SprachGIS online application (available via
www.regionalsprache.de) offers numerous options to generate linguistic maps quickly and
easily. The application is available free of charge, as it is funded by the Mainzer Akademie
der Wissenschaften und der Literatur.
Usually, linguistic data is organized in tables and databases. Mapping this data is only a
few clicks away when using the REDE SprachGIS application. External data can be
imported easily using a step-by-step import tool with csv data or Excel sheets, which offers
automatic delimiter detection. Furthermore, the system is able to detect geographic
coordinates and reference systems and either map them to controlled system geometries
or import them as new ones. In addition, the application offers a myriad of individual
locations and other areas (e.g. administrative areas and pre-defined linguistic spaces) that
can be used to create a base map or a net of locations for mapping data. The data is
stored in the map geometries and can be viewed and re-edited with an in-system editor, if
necessary.
Once the data has been imported, the REDE SprachGIS offers several visualization
possibilities including point-symbol maps (1a), pie charts (1b), bar graphs, and choropleth
maps (1c).
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Fig. 1a point-symbol-maps
Fig. 1b pie-chart-map
Fig. 1c choropleth-map (after
voronoi tessellation)
Fig. 1a–c: Different visualizations of imported datasets (for example, the pronunciation of /g/ vs. /ch/ in specific
words according to the Wenker-questionnaires in the former Grand Duchy of Baden)
The system tries to detect the type of data and adjusts the visualization possibilities
accordingly. Of course, manual adjustments are possible. The system also offers a simple
group function to aggregate the data by selected columns. This enables data to be split
according to certain categories, e.g. gender. The deviation analysis tool allows the user to
compare two datasets and create maps that visualize the deviating datasets. The maps
can then be exported easily and also published online in the system. Initially started as a
mapping system focused on German-speaking areas, the SprachGIS has developed into a
worldwide mapping application and will also be made available with an English user
interface. Researchers dealing with any language or linguistic area are invited to use this
system to map and publish their own space-related linguistic data.
This talk will introduce the REDE SprachGIS application and demonstrate a wide range of
possibilities to visualize space-related linguistic data.
References:
Schmidt, J. E., J. Herrgen and R. Kehrein. (eds.) (2008): Regionalsprache.de
(REDE). Forschungsplattform zu den modernen Regionalsprachen des
Deutschen. Marburg: Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas.
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SOCIO-PHONETIC VARIATION OF /R/ IN BASQUE DIALECT NAMED
ZUBEROTAR
Xantiana Etchebest
UPPA, France
EHU, Bilbao
Keywords:
Basque, variation, sociophonetics.
Abstract:
This contribution shows the variation of the pronunciation of the /r/ in Zuberotar, an
Eastern dialect of the Basque language. The pronunciation of this consonant is
changing and depends on different social factors.
There are two consonants: alveolar tap /?/ and alveolar trill /r/. While the first consonant
can be pronounced or can disappear between vowels (hari vs hai 'wire'), the second
one can be pronounced as a vibrant or trill (/r/) or as a fricative uvular (/?/). Therefore,
people who speak this dialect have different options : no pronunciation of the
consonant, pronunciation as alveolar tap, as an alveolar trill or as an uvular. These
options depend on social factors surrounding the speaker or on the features of the
wordssuch as its origin and the adaptation into dialect structure. For instance, in the
word euro, which is borrowed from French - «r»is always pronounced.
Data for the research was recorded during interviews led by a questionnaire. The
participants were asked to produce the same sentences. They were selected according
to the age (young / adults / older), sex (male and female), native or familiar tongue
(Basque vs. French), language used in professional context and if they lived abroad for
more than 4 months...
Data have been analised linguistically and statistically using PRAAT software. In this
way, the results will supply the reader with the direction of the variation of this
consonant in Zuberotar.
References:
Coyos, J. B. (1999). Le parler basque souletin des Arbailles – Une approche de
l'ergativité. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Geze, L. (1973). Eléments de grammaire basque, dialecte souletin suivi d'un
vocabulaire basque-français & français-basque. Bayonne: Lamaignère.
Larrasquet, J. (1932). Phonétique du Basque de Larraja. Revista Internacional de los
Estudios Vascos.
Mitxelena, L. (1961) Fonética Histórica Vasca. San Sebastián: Publicaciones del
Seminario Julio de Urquijo de la Excma. Diputación Provincial de Guipúzcoa.
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RUSSIAN NATIVE SPEAKERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS NON-STANDARD
SPEECH: NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES AND PROBLEMS OF COMMUNICATION
Kapitolina Fedorova
European University at St. Petersburg
Keywords:
Language attitudes, stereotypes, registers, foreigner talk, baby talk.
Abstract:
The proposed paper deals with Russian native speakers’ stereotypes and prejudices
concerning different kinds of non-standard use of the Russian language. Language
attitudes in sociolinguistics are usually studied through standard language vs. dialects
analysis but in the case of Russian this approach is not fully appropriate due to the
higher level of speech standardization and comparatively small dialect variation in
Russia. Russian speech culture is strictly normative and does not tolerate any serious
deviation from the standard, being it grammatically incorrect speech of non-native
speakers, baby talk, or incorrect spelling. Certainly, negative attitudes towards what is
seen by speakers as “broken language” are typical for most cultures (e.g. common
prejudices about pidgins and creoles; see Todd 1990), and a certain standard
language bias (see Milroy 2001) presents in most western societies, but even in this
universal context Russian speakers tend to look less linguistically tolerant. Their
normative orientation can be seen both in verbalized stereotypes and in actual lingual
behavior when speakers try to avoid using non-standard forms or react to others’
usage of them.
In my presentation I will address both metalinguistic and behavioral aspects of the
situation using different kinds of data and analytical frameworks on the base of several
studies conducted in St. Petersburg and in Zabaikalskii Krai bordering on China. First,
I will deal with stereotypes revealed in interviews and questionnaires where native
speakers from different age groups (including children and adolescents) directly
express their negative attitudes towards e.g. “syusyukanje” (making sound changes
when communicating with infants; can be used metaphorically for any kind of baby talk).
Second, I will describe verbal strategies used by native speakers of Russian when
communicating with foreigners with equal or higher social status. Instead of employing
such typical foreigner talk traits (see Ferguson & DeBose 1977) as shorter sentences
or ungrammatical speech, Russian speakers tend to resort to unnaturally explicit and
correct grammar forms with longer sentences. Third, I will concentrate on
communication between Russian and Chinese speakers in border areas where people
from China are usually treated as socially inferior. I will demonstrate how different
verbal strategies employed by Russian speakers (e.g. breaking rules of politeness,
ignoring their interlocutors’ communicative needs, or using “broken language”)
represent more general negative ethnic and linguistic stereotype. Finally, discussing
these different kinds of data, I will try to make some connections between these
attitudes towards others’ speech, self-image of Russian speakers, and problems they
often experience in public communication known nowadays as “public muteness
syndrome” (Vakhtin & Firsov 2016 ).
References:
Ferguson, Ch. and DeBose, Ch. (1977). Simplified registers, broken language, and
pidginization. In A. Valdman (ed.). Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (pp. 99-125).
Bloomington.
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Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization.
Journal of Sociolinguistics vol. 5 (4), 530-555.
Todd, L. (1990). Pidgins and Creoles. Routledge.
Vakhtin, N. and B. Firsov (ed.) (2016). Public Debate in Russia. Edimburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CODE-SWITCHING IN THE PAST:
A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO GREEK/LATIN BILINGUALISM
Chiara Fedriani
University of Bergamo
Maria Napoli
Arizona State University
Keywords:
Historical code-switching, Greek/Latin bilingualism, corpus-based approach.
Abstract:
The aim of this talk is to examine code-switching (CS) as evidenced from an annotated
corpus of Late Latin literary texts showing different contact phenomena with Greek.
This corpus has been conceived of for the study of such phenomena, grouped under
the label of “textual bilingualism”, and includes Latin texts belonging to different literary
genres from the 3rd to the 7thcentury AD. The corpus is already available online as a
new tool for historical sociolinguistics focusing on bilingualism in the ancient
Mediterranean world and on historical code-switching.
In the first part, we will discuss our methodology for the linguistic analysis of textual
bilingualism from a historical perspective, which implies a systematic assessment of
the quality of data at our disposal and of the specific characteristics of language
contact as attested in ancient texts. To get at the heart of the specific nature of CS in
our corpus, we will discuss the individual features of written CS as distinct from
conversational CS. As is known, written CS has to be considered as a special instance
of language mixing: since it does not provide uncontroversial direct representations of
speech (see Schendl/Wright 2011: 28), its study requires a number of methodological
cautions. In particular, it needs to be described and analyzed within the larger scenario
of the literacy practices of which it is a part, also including graphical and philological
issues. At the same time, written CS in the past has different characteristics from
contemporary written CS, above all for the specific nature of the available material,
since for ancient contexts we mostly rely on texts as literary products (opposed to, e.g.,
modern digital genres such as emails, blogs, chat; see Sebba 2012). Other important
issues include the reliability of the data, because the transmission of a text over
centuries may have partially altered the way in which data themselves are presented
(e.g. a scribe may have changed the script), and difficulty in reconstructing linguistic
attitudes, contextual factors and the socio-historical setting in which texts were
produced and circulated.
In the second part, we will illustrate the development of the multi-layered tagset specific
to contact phenomena with Greek worked out for our corpus. Drawing on a case study
on forms, functions and textual distribution of CS in our literary texts, and illustrating,
then, our first results, we will show how this tool can be used for various types of
qualitative and quantitative research on contact phenomena in the past.
The originality of this research lies on the development of a new resource for historical
sociolinguistics which permits a corpus-based methodology on a wide selection of
ancient texts, also promoting networking between the scholars interested in
bilingualism in the ancient world.
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References:
Schendl H. and Wright L. (2011). Code-switching in early English: Historical
background and methodological and theoretical issues. In Id. (eds.). Code
switching in Early English. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Sebba M. (2012). Researching and theorizing multilingual texts. In M. Sebba, S.
Mahootian and C. Jonsson (eds.). Language Mixing and Code Switching in
Writing (pp. 1-26). New York: Routledge.
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INDIVIDUAL, ACCOMMODATION, SYNCHRONISATION. THE USE OF EMOJIS IN
WHATSAPP COMMUNICATION
Samuel Felder
Beat Siebenhaar
University of Leipzig
Keywords:
Accommodation, emoji, individual, synchronisation, WhatsApp.
Abstract:
Currently, WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging application for
smartphones. The huge amount of messages exchanged via WhatsApp on a daily
basis opens the possibility for linguists to analyse a dynamic form of written
communication. In order to do so, a corpus of WhatsApp chats was collected in
Switzerland in the summer 2014 and in Germany in the winter 2014/15, containing a
total number of about 1.2 million speech bubbles, some dating back to 2010. For this
presentation, this dataset is used to answer questions about how individuals use
emojis to interact with communication partners. Emojis are of special interest for
linguistic analysis because, even though they are broadly used in mobile
communication, they are not yet part of a written standard. Qualitative analyses of the
data shed light on the functions in which individuals use different emojis in interaction,
possibly being influenced by how their chat partners use emojis (cf. Functions of
adjustments in the Communication Accommodation Theory, Dragojevic, Gasiorek &
Giles 2016). The intensity of this influence depends on the degree to which the
individuals have developed certain habits in their emoji use. Where individuals change
their communicative patterns in the direction of their chat partners, this can be seen as
instances of microsynchronisation in the sense of the linguistic dynamics approach (cf.
Schmidt 2009). With quantitative approaches to the emoji use in specific chats we
show how in a process of mesosynchronisation sequences of microsynchronisations
can result in a stabilisation on the level of two individuals or within a chat group. A
further look at the whole corpus may even point to a stabilisation in the communication
community that could be a new orientation point for macrosynchronisation that
retroacts on the individual use. Analysing emoji use is a new and interesting field of
research for linguists where it is possible to investigate how norms emerge in
interaction and to analyse language dynamics and change.
References:
Dragojevic, M., J. Gasiorek and H. Giles (2016). Accommodative Strategies as Core of
the Theory. In H. Giles (ed.). Communication Accommodation Theory.
Negotiating Personal Relationships and Social Identities across Contexts (pp.
36–59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmidt, J. E. (2009). Language and space: The linguistic dynamics approach. In P.
Auer and J. E. Schmidt (eds.). Language and Space: Theories and Methods. An
International Handbook of Linguistic Variation (pp. 201–225). Berlin and New
York: Walter de Gruyter.
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THE EXTENSION OF THE ANALYTIC PERFECT TENSE IN TIME AND SPACE –
GERMAN DIALECTS AND AND CROSSLINGUISTIC EVIDENCE
Hanna Fischer
Universität Marburg
Keywords:
Tense, aspect, preterit loss, grammaticalization, perfect tense.
Abstract:
A semantic and functional extension of analytic perfect tenses can be found in several
European languages. Well-known in this context is the case of German dialects, in
which the so-called Oberdeutscher Präteritumschwund (loss of the preterite tense
forms in Upper German) took place. Despite numerous publications on the
Präteritumschwund, our knowledge about the actual distribution of the tense forms in
German dialects is rudimentary and the explanations are contradictory. In my talk, I will
present the results of my extended research on the distribution of preterite forms in
German dialects. This data will then be interpreted with an integrative historical and
theoretical approach that can also be applied to the extension processes in other
European languages.
References:
Bybee, J. L., R. D. Perkins and W. Pagliuca (1994). The evolution of grammar. Tense,
aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Dentler, S. (1997). Zur Perfekterneuerung im Mittelhochdeutschen. Die Erweiterung
des zeitreferentiellen Funktionsbereichs von Perfektfügungen. Göteborg: Acta
Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
Fischer, H. (2015). Präteritumschwund in den Dialekten Hessens. Eine
Neuvermessung der Präteritalgrenze(n). In M. Elmentaler et al. (eds.).
Deutsche Dialekte. Konzepte, Probleme, Handlungsfelder (pp. 107-133).
Stuttgart: Steiner.
Lindgren, K. B. (1957). Über den oberdeutschen Präteritumschwund. Somalaisen
Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia. Sarja-Ser. B Nide-Tom 122,1. Helsinki.
Rowley, A. R. (1983). Das Präteritum in den heutigen deutschen Dialekten. Zeitschrift
für Dialektologie und Linguistik 50/2, 161–182.
Sapp, C. D. (2009). Syncope as the cause of Präteritumschwund. New Data from an
Early New High German corpus. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 21/4, 419–
450.
Ternes, E. (1988). Zur Typologie der Vergangenheitstempora in den Sprachen
Europas (synthetische vs. analytische Bildungsweise). Zeitschrift für
Dialektologie und Linguistik 55/3, 332–342.
Thieroff, R. (2000). On the areal distribution of tense-aspect categories in Europe. In
Dahl, Östen (eds.). Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe (pp. 265–305)
Empirical approaches to language typology. EUROTYP 20-6. Berlin and New
York: De Gruyter Mouton.
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ATTITUDES TOWARD ACCENT AND REGIONAL STEREOTYPES IN SPAIN
Juan Carlos Gallego
Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University
Keywords:
Dialects, sociolinguistics, attitudes, stereotypes.
Abstract:
This study investigates what Spaniards think about their own and ten other regional
varieties of Spanish in Spain, including their perception of regional stereotypes. It is
inspired by the work of Huguet, Lapresta and Madariaga (2008) on language studies and
political correctness, and on a study on attitudes toward Canarian and Castilian Spanish,
by González Cruz (2006), among others.
42-item questionnaire containing statements about language attitudes and regional
stereotypes were administered to 1400 randomly selected subjects.
The study proposed to answer the following research questions:
1What do Spaniards think about different varieties of Spanish in Spain, their own
included?
2How do age, gender, and level of formal education relate to the attitudes of
speakers toward different varieties of Spanish in Spain?
3Have the attitudes of Spaniards toward regional varieties of Spanish changed in
recent years?
4To what extent do Spaniards agree or disagree with stereotypes about people from
different regions in Spain, their own included?
5How do age, gender, and level of formal education relate to the way Spaniards
regional stereotypes in Spain?
Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical measures. Using 3-way
factorial ANOVA, comparisons were made across language varieties, and by age, gender,
and level of formal education. Findings for Castilian speakers reveal that they like their
own variety of Spanish better than almost any other, but that they also show a positive
attitude toward other varieties. For that group, age appears to be a significant variable, in
particular, with regard to Catalan Spanish, with the oldest and the youngest groups
showing a slight dislike of that variety. Also, age, gender, and level of education seem to
make a difference when analyzing responses to stereotypes. Results for speakers of other
varieties have also been analyzed and will be reported. The findings in this study enable
us to better understand how speakers of standard and non-standard dialects perceive
themselves and each other, and to what extent their perceptions may change over time.
These findings can also serve as a starting point to effect language and educational policy
changes.
References:
González Cruz, I. (2006). Subjective reactions to two Spanish accents: a sociolinguistic
survey of ULPGC students. In I. González Cruz (ed.). Lengua, sociedad y cultura.
Estudios interdisciplinares (pp. 53-77). Gran Canaria: Universidad de Las Palmas
de Gran Canaria.
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Huget, A., C. Lapresta and J. Madariaga (2008). A study of language attitudes toward
regional and foreign languages by school children in Aragon (Spain). International
Journal of Multilingualism 5, 4, 275-293.
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TOW-ROADS AND TOLL ROADS: A DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE
CHANGE IN WEST SOMERSET FROM THE MID-20TH CENTURY TO PRESENT
DAY
Victoria Garnett
Trinity College Dublin
Keywords:
L-Vocalisation, population movement, somerset, survey of English dialects.
Abstract:
Over the past 60 years the population of Somerset in the South West of England has
changed considerably. Increased mobility, both socially as well as physically has
brought with it changes to regional accents, in some cases ‘levelling’ out to reduce
some of the more idiosyncratic features, and adopting new ones (Britain, 2002) (Britain,
2004) (Kerswill, 2003).
The rural area of West Somerset is particularly interesting as it sits in close proximity to
the M5, a major motorway that runs from Exeter to just north of Birmingham, and the
A39 running from west to east, connecting Truro in Cornwall with Bath in North East
Somerset. It has also, in the past 50 years, had an increase in population from outside
the county, mainly due to the building and running of the Hinkley Point Nuclear Power
Station, commissioned in the early 1970s. Conversely, as the area does not have a
University, those who wish to gain a third level qualification may have to leave and
move to Exeter, or Bristol, or further afield. We could say that in-migration is ‘passive’
and out-migration is ‘active’ among the local residents.
This increase in mobility into the region for economic reasons is also joined by
increased in-migration among older people who have moved into the area for
retirement, or second homes. Census data has shown that, for the most part, these
people have come from the South East of England (Smith, 2010).
L-vocalisation is recognised as a typical feature of the South East of England, in
particular London (Wells, 1970) and Estuary variants of English. However, this feature
has also increasingly been seen in parts of the South West, as the ongoing “English
Dialects App” project conducted by David Britain and his team at the University of Bern
have seen. Grossenbacher showed details of this in her Master’s thesis investigating
L-vocalisation in Bristol (Grossenbacher, 2016). L-Vocalisation has been noted as an
occasional feature of south-west accents, often alongside fronted vowels in an
unstressed post-vocalic position (Wakelin, 1986).
This research, which is part of a wider PhD project investigating language change
across the county of Somerset, looks at how allophones of /l/ have changed in West
Somerset, particularly in a post-vocalic position, since the mid-20th century. Comparing
recently obtained data from my own study with that from the Survey of English Dialects
(Orton, Dieth, & Wakelin, 1967) (Orton, Sanderson, & Widdowson, 1998), as well as
that gathered in 2000 for an Oral histories collection at Exmoor Heritage Centre
(Hussey, Johnson, & Rattenbury, 2004), I show how allophones of /l/ have changed in
the West Somerset area since 1956. Furthermore, taking information from my
informants on their backgrounds and personal mobility as well as information gathered
about the speakers from the secondary resources, combined with UK Census data
from each decade, I will then discuss whether this change is due to active or passive
mobility coming from dialects further east, or is a pre-existing feature that has
increased in use.
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References:
Britain, D. (2002). Diffusion, levelling, simplification and reallocation in past tense BE in
the English Fens. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (1), 16–43.
Britain, D. (2004). [online] Space and Spatial Diffusion. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill
and N. Schilling-Estes (eds.). The Handbook of Language Variation and
Change
(pp.
603–637).
Oxford:
Blackwell.
Available
at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470756591.ch24/summary.
Grossenbacher, S. (2016). From East to West? Dialect diffusion between Swindon and
Bristol. (MA Thesis). Bern: Universität Bern.
Hussey, S., B. Johnson and M. J. Rattenbury (2004). Reflections: Life Portraits of
Exmoor.
Kerswill, P. (2003). Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English. Social
Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill (pp. 223–243). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Orton, H., E. Dieth, and M. F. Wakelin (1967). Survey of English Dialects. B, the Basic
Material: Vol. IV: the Southern Counties (Vol. IV). University of Leeds: Arnold.
Orton, H., S. Sanderson and J. Widdowson (1998). The linguistic atlas of England.
Psychology Press.
Smith (2010) [online]. Portrait of the South West. Regional Trends, 42 (1), 43–59.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/rt.2010.4.
Wakelin, M. F. (1986). The southwest of England (Vol. 5). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Wells, J. C. (1970). Local accents in England and Wales. Journal of Linguistics 6 (2),
231–252.
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ASSESSING THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR MAPPING LEXICAL VARIATION IN
BRITISH ENGLISH
Jack Grieve
Aston University
Chris Montgomery
University of Sheffield
Andrea Nini
University of Manchester
Keywords:
British English, corpus linguistics, lexical variation, social media.
Abstract:
Numerous recent studies have shown that regional patterns in lexical choice can be
mapped through the analysis of large regionalised corpora of social media (Gonçalves
and Sánchez, 2014; Huang et al. 2016). Corpus-based approaches to dialectology
clearly address several issues with traditional approaches to data collection, which rely
on survey-based methods. Perhaps most notably, a corpus-based approach is not
affected by the unreliability of informant judgments or the necessity of pre-selecting
linguistic features for analysis. Despite these advantages, questions have been raised
about corpus-based approaches to dialectology, including whether the results of these
studies can be used to identify general patterns of regional lexical variation in everyday
language use or if they are only representative of forms of computer mediated
communication.
In this paper, we use a multi-billion word corpus of geo-coded Tweets from across the
UK (see Huang et al. 2016; Grieve et al. 2016) to assess the generalisability of using
social media data for mapping regional lexical variation. To this end, we map numerous
lexical alternations (e.g. ‘nesh’, ‘nithered’, and ‘parky’ for the concept of ‘cold’, and
‘splinter’, ‘spool’, ‘spile’, or ‘spell’ for ‘splinter’) with known distribution based on
previous British dialect surveys. In particular, we compare our results to lexical data
from the BBC Voices project (Wieling, Upton & Thompson 2014) and the English
Dialects app project (Leemann et al. 2016), as well as traditional dialect surveys (e.g.
Upton, Parry & Widdowson 1994).
Our results show that the maps obtained through a corpus-based analysis of Twitter
data generally agree with the results of dialect surveys. Based on these results we
argue that large-scale corpus-based dialect research of internet data can be used
together with or, possibly, in alternative to traditional survey methods for lexical
dialectology.
References:
Grieve, J., A. Nini and D. Guo (2016). Analyzing lexical emergence in Modern
American English online. Forthcoming in English Language and Linguistics.
Gonçalves, B. and D. Sánchez (2014). Crowdsourcing dialect characterization through
Twitter. PLOS ONE 9: e112074.
Huang, Y., D. Guo, A. Kasakoff and J. Grieve (2016). Understanding U.S. regional
linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis. Computers, Environment and
Urban Systems 59, 244–255.
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Leemann, A., M. J. Kolly, R. Purves, D. Britain and E. Glaser (2016). Crowdsourcing
Language Change with Smartphone Applications. PLOS ONE 11: e0143060.
Upton, C., D. Parry and J. D. A. Widdowson (1994). Survey of English Dialects: The
Dictionary and Grammar. London: Routledge.
Wieling, M, C. Upton and A. Thompson (2014). Analyzing the BBC Voices data:
Contemporary English dialect areas and their characteristic lexical variants.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 29, 107–117. 279
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ALL ACCENTS ARE EQUAL (IF THE LOW PRESTIGE ONES ARE NOT TOO BROAD).
THE SOCIAL MEANING OF ACCENT STRENGTH IN NETHERLANDIC STANDARD
DUTCH
Stefan Grondelaers
Paul van Gent
Roeland van Hout
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Keywords:
Regional accent variation, standard language (ideology), matched-guise experiment,
subjective accent strength estimation, prestige.
Abstract:
Although the causal relation between language perception and production has often been
questioned, there is growing evidence that the ubiquity of regional accent variation in
Netherlandic Standard Dutch (Adank et al. 2007) is motored by, or at least correlated with,
a positive evaluation of (some) regional accents. In a series of matched-guise
experiments, Grondelaers et al. (2010) and Grondelaers & Van Hout (2010) found that the
undisputed standard flavour of Netherlandic Dutch, the Randstad accent, was evaluated
as the most prestigious. The other regional accents, however, were not systematically
rejected as non-prestigious. While speakers of the peripheral Limburg area were
downgraded on speaker status measures, the Limburg accent was not considered
inappropriate for formal communication, in spite of tenacious low prestige stereotypes. All
in all, the available data suggest considerable relaxation in the standard language ideology
which frames spoken Dutch (Grondelaers & Van Hout 2015).
In the cited experiments, stimulus speakers were selected on the basis of their regional
origin, but not in terms of the strength of their accents. Since accent broadness has been
found to be a major evaluation determinant since Giles (1972), we decided to manipulate
this variable in a new experiment, but were confronted with the absence of a reliable
method to quantify regional accent strength, and we were set back by the small bandwidth
of strength variation in the speech of the teachers from which we had extracted our clips
(all stimulus materials came from the Teacher Corpus, a stratified database of interview
speech).
The first problem was addressed in Grondelaers et al. (2015), in which it was shown that
lay raters can reliably determine minute accent strength differences. In the first of the two
new experiments reported in this talk, untrained listeners evaluated 126 read aloud
sentences produced by male and female speakers from the Randstad and Limburg areas
in terms of the regional origin and accent strength of the speaker. Speech clips were
extracted from the Sprekend Nederland-corpus, a media-supported and smartphoneelicited giga-base of speech (Van Leeuwen et al. 2016) which has a much wider accent
strength range than the Teacher Corpus.
16 clips produced by the male and female Randstad and Limburg speakers who were
found to be the least and most accented in the previous experiment were subsequently
entered in a new matched-guise experiment with 153 listener-judges recruited in the same
areas. Ratings correlated robustly into a Superiority, a Dynamism, and an Integrity
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component, and on both Superiority and Dynamism, accent strength was by far the most
influential determinant. Crucially, the weak Limburg accent was found to be no less
prestigious than the strong Randstad accent, and the strong Limburg accent was found to
be the only non-dynamic flavour.
Our new data are strongly indicative of ideological change: they reveal that regional
accents in The Netherlands are being mapped onto a strength scale which partly
neutralizes prior prestige differences, and resets the standardness of the accents in (more)
quantitative terms.
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REDEFINING (DE)STANDARDIZATION. EVIDENCE FROM BELGIAN AND
NETHERLANDIC DUTCH
Stefan Grondelaers
Roeland van Hout
Paul van Gent
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Keywords:
Standardization, destandardization, standard language ideology, prestige, uniformity,
codification.
Abstract:
The growing variability in Europe’s standard languages has spawned widely shared
accounts of destandardization (see Kristiansen & Coupland 2011 and Kristiansen &
Grondelaers 2013 for overviews), as well as premonitions of the death of the very idea
of a standard language (Van der Horst 2008). In this talk, we propose an alternative to
these views by demonstrating that the “classical” standardness criteria (prestige,
uniformity, and codification – as proposed in for instance Deumert 2010, Auer 2011
and Hinskens & Taeldeman 2013) – have become too restricted to define standard
varieties in our Late Modern era of democratization and digitalization.
Rather than rejecting the existing criteria, however, we revise and extend them in
function of contemporary language dynamics. Our extensions are grounded in new
conceptions of variability as a tool for self-profiling in an era which celebrates
individualized and self-monitored identity (Eckert 2008; Giddens 1991), and of
(standard) languages as practical real-life varieties rather than the virtual outcome of
an ideological desire for makeable perfection (Deumert 2010). Building on experimental
perception data, and corpus & discourse analysis, we will
(1) demonstrate an ongoing change in the concept of prestige, the main perceptual
correlate of the superiority of standard languages. We will show that traditional
prestige sources – high birth, good education, professional competence, social
success – are extending to include (digital) media credibility and cool as new
prestige determinants (Kristiansen 2001, 2009). Since traditional and new
prestige respectively motivate the vitality of standard and stigmatized nonstandard variants, prestige continues to be a coherence-regulator in the multiindexical assemblages (Eckert 2008) standard languages are increasingly
becoming.
(2) argue that the uniformity condition on standard languages should be
reformulated as “perceptual harmony”, an intuitive agreement between
speaker and hearer on how much and which socially meaningful non-standard
variants are admissible in a specific context. In standard language, perceptual
harmony pertains to finding a balance between neutrality or superiority profiling
(the traditional social meanings of the standard) and the flagging of other social
meanings through linguistic means. Harmony relocates the consensus inherent
in the uniformity criterion from community norms to the social exigencies of
unfolding interaction.
(3) demonstrate that codification as the referee of right and wrong in standard
languages should be complemented with media licensing. Since
standardization remains a largely conscious process which minimally requires
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some form of public consensus, and since the multi-indexical variability which is
increasingly allowed in standard languages is difficult to codify, we propose the
occurrence of a given non-standard variant on the national radio as a practical
proxy for codification.
While the application of the original prestige, uniformity, and codification criterion to the
language repertoires in Flanders and The Netherlands would have resulted in a verdict
of massive destandardization, the extended criteria presented in this talk delimit a
much wider and more diverse “standard language space” than the one previously
occupied by the virtual varieties Belgian News Dutch and Neutral Netherlandic
Standard Dutch.
283
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AN ACOUSTIC DESCRIPTION OF THE VOWELS OF YOUNG URBAN
GOTHENBURG SWEDISH
Johan Gross
University of Gothenburg
Therese Leinonen
University of Turku
Keywords:
Vowels, Swedish, urban, youth, youth language.
Abstract:
At the heart of variationist sociolinguistics is the assumption of inherent variability
(Labov 1972), i.e. that variation in language is something that should be seen as an
inherent property and therefore should be taken into account when modeling a theory
of language. This has usually been approached by examining how single variables are
treated by different groups. In this paper, we will try different ways to take the whole
vowel system into consideration instead of a single variable when modeling the
variation in Gothenburg youth language. This is especially important when it comes to
vowels, as they are often involved in chain shifts and as the shape of the system and
the relative distribution of the vowels to each other has been shown to carry
sociolinguistic information (Adank et al. 2007).
We analyze data from 52 students aged 16-19 at two schools in Gothenburg: one in
the city center and one in the suburbs. The schools were chosen to reflect
demographic factors characterizing both areas. While most students in the suburbs
have parents who were born outside Sweden, the distribution of students with
Swedish, foreign or mixed background is more even in the central school. The data
used for acoustic analysis come from map-task recordings, where each speaker
produced on average ten tokens of each of nine long vowels. The vowels were
analyzed acoustically applying PCA to Bark-filtered spectra.
Statistical analyses were carried out with the acoustic measures as dependent
variables and vowel, school, gender, and parents place of birth as independent
variables. School and parents place of birth turned out to be significant factors for
vowel pronunciation. The two close front vowels /i:/ and /y:/ are pronounced more
fronted in the suburb school and more centralized in inner city school. At the inner city
school, speakers with foreign-born parents have a more fronted pronunciation than
speakers with both parents born in Sweden. A variable that has previously been shown
to separate adolescents with foreign-born parents from those with Swedish-born
parents in Gothenburg is the opening of /ɛ:/ to [æ:] with the result that the allophonic
rule /ɛ:/ > [æ:] _/r/ is lost (Gross et al. 2016). Our results are in line with this, and since
we have data from the whole system we can see that /ø:/, which has a similar
allophonic rule, shows a similar distribution. While the youth with foreign-born parents
show a tendency to adjust to changes observed in the greater central-Swedish dialect
area, the speakers with Swedish-born parents have more regional features in their
vowel system.
References:
Adank, P., R. Van Hout, and H. V. D. Velde (2007). An acoustic description of the
vowels of northern and southern standard dutch II: Regional varieties. Journal
of the Acoustical Society of America 121 (2), 1130-1141.
284
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Gross, J., S. Boyd, T. Leinonen and J. A. Walker (2016). A tale of two cities (and one
vowel): sociolinguistic variation in Swedish. Language Variation and Change
28, 225-247.
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
285
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THE SOCIO- AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS OF A CONSONANT MERGER: SESEO IN
SEVILLE, SPAIN
Duna Gylfadottir
University of Pennsylvania
Keywords:
Spanish, andaluz, merger, seseo, contrast.
Abstract:
Germanic vowel mergers are well documented in the sociolinguistic literature (e.g.,
Johnson 2007). Splits are thought to be rare; only a few cases have been documented,
(e.g. Baranowski 2006). Turning to consonant changes in other languages can give us
an opportunity to observe splits in progress. How can we characterize the phonological
systems of participating speakers?
We examine a demerger in progress in the Spanish dialect of Seville, which
traditionally has had only one anterior fricative phoneme /s/ (Carbonero 2003).
Pressure from the standard has led to an emerging contrast in Seville between /s/ and
/θ/, heretofore undocumented to our knowledge, and many speakers appear to vary
between merger and distinction. Eastern Andalusia underwent demerger in the 20th
century (Villena-Ponsoda 2008), and has been documented recently in Huelva where
the single phoneme was /θ/ (Regan 2014).
The current study combines a socio- and psycholinguistic approach: sociolinguistic
interviews with 12 men and 12 women ages 20–35, with and without higher education
will be acoustically analyzed for sociolin- guistic patterns, and additionally each
individual’s data will be compared to their performance in two sets of psycholinguistic
tasks. The first set evaluates the ability to distinguish the two sounds in isolation. The
second set evaluates representations of lexical items that standardly contain /θ/, by
examining the degree to which standard and nonstandard pronunciations of these
words elicit priming.
Preliminary results from five participants reveal a production rate of [s] in words with
etymological /θ/ ranging from .24 to .89, with no hypercorrections ([θ] for /s/). From a
lexical decision task, a linear regression of response times to words immediately
preceded by related words with etymological /θ/ (e.g. mano ‘hand’ after hearing brazo
‘arm’) reveals a significant semantic priming effect resulting from these words (B=.008
s, p=.032). Those produced with [s] (vs. [θ]) showed a greater degree of priming for
only one participant, the speaker with the most merged production (t=2.08, p<.05). The
other participants showed no difference. All participants distinguished [s] and [θ], with a
mean accuracy of .92. These results suggest that at least some Sevillans are
unmerged in perception and easily able to process merged and unmerged
pronunciations, but are nevertheless variable in their production of words like brazo,
raising important questions about the nature of phonological contrast and the
perception/production link.
References:
Baranowski, M. A. (2006). Phonological variation and change in the dialect of
Charleston, South Carolina. PhD thesis. University of Pennsylvania.
Carbonero, P. (2003). Estudios de sociolingüística andaluza. Sevilla: Universidad.
286
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Johnson, D. E. (2007). Stability and change along a dialect boundary: The low vowels
of Southeastern. New England.
Regan, B. (2014). I speak with ceceo a lot and my wife corrects me.’ spousal coaching
towards the standard in Western Andalucía. Paper presented at the 113th
American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting. Washington DC.
Villena-Ponsoda, J. A. (2008). Sociolinguistic patterns of Andalusian Spanish.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 193/194, 139–160.
287
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COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND HISTORICAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS: THE
EVIDENCE OF SPELLING IN MEDIEVAL AUTHOGRAPHS
Martina Häcker
University of Siegen
Abstract:
This paper analyses spelling variation in fifteenth-century letter writers, in particular that
of the Celys (ed. by Hanham) and the Pastons (edited by Davis). The data challenges
current cognitive theories of language change. It contains what appear to be
spontaneous switches in spelling which are neither random nor in line with a gradual
spelling change. Thus the letters contain switches between onderstond and
wndyrstond (‘understand’), qwher and wher (‘where’), or hour and our (‘our’) in letters
by one and the same individual. The paper argues that the shifts in spelling are not
erratic but reflect shifts in the specific pronunciation that is accessed at the time of
writing. It suggests that the memory of a past episode can trigger the recall of the
pronunciation associated with the situation, that is, a pronunciation that was either
heard or produced then. At a time when spelling was phonemic, a switch in the
pronunciation that is accessed by the writer would then result in a corresponding switch
of spelling. The spelling of the individuals producing the switches thus provides
evidence for theories that argue that social as well as linguistic factors play a role in
access to stored pronunciations. The data refutes theories that rely on frequency as the
only factor determining the choice between variants, and supports a model that
emphasises the role of salience in a sense that goes beyond linguistic prominence and
includes emotional and cognitive prominence as an important factor determining the
choice between variants. The model proposed constitutes an extension of network
theories such as those proposed by Bybee (2000, 2001, and 2010).
References:
Bybee, J. L. (2000). Lexicalization of Sound Change and Alternating Environments. In
M. B. Broe and J. B. Pierrehumbert (eds.). Papers in Laboratory Phonetics V:
Acquisition and the Lexicon (pp. 250-268). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bybee, J. (2010). Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Davis, N. (ed.) (1971). Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Hanham, A. (ed.) (1975). The Cely Letters: 1472-1488. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
288
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THE RHOTIC PRODUCTION OF ANGLO-ENGLISH AND PUNJABI-ENGLISH
BILINGUAL SPEAKERS IN WEST YORKSHIRE
Chad Patrick Hall
University of Oxford
Keywords:
Punjabi, language contact, Yorkshire, British Asian, rhotics.
Abstract:
In this paper, the /r/ production of adolescent Anglo-English and Punjabi-English
Bilingual speakers in West Yorkshire was analysed from speech data collected in
2000. A clear difference was found between Anglo-English speakers who used the
standard British rhotic, the postalveolar approximant [ɹ̠], exclusively, and the PunjabiEnglish Bilingual speakers who used both British rhotics and a number of different
variants influenced by the Punjabi retroflex flap [ɽ]. The influence of the retroflex flap [ɽ]
was proven by formant and duration results, as well as qualitative observations of the
speaker spectrograms. It is predicted that Punjabi-English speaker preference for
either Punjabi influenced rhotics or British rhotics depended on if they identified as
culturally integrated “British Asians” or culturally alienated “Asians”. This study also
considers the possibility of a progression in the rhotic production of West Yorkshire
Punjabi-English speakers over the last 15 years. As well as expanding on the findings
of West Yorkshire Asian English, the findings implicate that social identity is a key
aspect affecting the speech of bilingual speakers who are often part of more than one
culture.
Examples/Illustrations:
Figure 1: Graph of the Percentage of Variants Used by Each Speaker Group
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Figure 2: Table of the Percentage of Variants Used by Each Punjabi-English Speaker
Figure 3: Table of the Mean Average Formant Values for Postalveolar, Retroflex and Labiodental Rhotics
by Each Speaker Group
Figure 4: Table of the Mean Average Duration Values for Postalveolar, Retroflex and Labiodental Rhotics
by Each Speaker Group
Figure 5: Table of the Mean Average Duration Values for the Different Manners of Retroflex Rhotics by the
Punjabi-English Speakers
References:
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Petyt, T. K. (1985). Dialect and accent in industrial West Yorkshire. Amsterdam: J.
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Stuart-Smith, J., Timmins, C. and Alam, F. (2011). Hybridity and ethnic accents: A
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293
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THE PERCEPTION OF THE /Æ/-/Ɛ/ VOWEL CONTINUUM IN BRITISH AND UNITED
STATES ENGLISH SPEAKERS
Chad Patrick Hall
University of Oxford
Keywords:
U.S. English, British English, vowels, perception, categorical perception.
Abstract:
In this paper, the perception of the /æ/-/ɛ/ vowel continuum was analysed in British and
United States English speakers by testing their word identification across the pan-pen
continuum. A clear difference was found between the two speaker groups, with the
U.S. speakers continuing to perceive ‘pan’ beyond the British speakers, presumably
due to /æ/-tensing in U.S. dialects, particularly before nasal codas (Labov et al., 2006).
It was found that the amount of /æ/-tensing across phonetic environments in a U.S.
speaker’s dialect as well as their exposure to British English affected how they
perceived the continuum. The results prove Bell Berti’s (et al., 1979) argument that
speech production and perception are closely related, and the steep drop in perception
from ‘pan’ to ‘pen’ displayed by both speaker groups may prove that vowel perception
is categorical, in contrast to popular opinion (Fry et al., 1962), though a discrimination
task would have to be run before any reliable claim can be made.
Tables and Figures
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References:
Bell-Berti, F., L. J. Raphael, D. B. Pisoni and J. R. Sawusch (1979). Some relationships
between speech production and perception. Phonetica 36, 373-383.
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295
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Fridland, V. and T. Kendall (2012). Exploring the relationship between production and
perception in the mid front vowels of U.S. English. Lingua 122, 779-793.
Fry, D. B., A. S. Abramson, P. D. Eimas and A. M Liberman (1962). The identification
and discrimination of synthetic vowels. Lang Speech 5, 171-189.
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H. Henningsen (2000). Handedness and hemispheric language dominance in
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Kosinski, R. J. (2008). A Literature Review on Reaction Time. Clemson University.
Labov, W., Ash, S. and Boberg, C. (2006). Chapter 13: The short-a and short-o
configurations. In W. Labov, S. Ash and C. Boberg. The Atlas of North
American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lass, R. (2000). Chapter 3: Phonology and Morphology. In R. Lass (ed.). The
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Niedzielski, N. (1999). The effect of social information on the perception of
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Nygaard, L., S. Sidarasand and J. Duke (2005). Perceptual learning of accented
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Sumner, M. and A. Samuel (2009). The effect of experience on the perception and
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Thomas, E. (2001). An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English.
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297
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VOWEL SPACE, SPEECH RATE AND LANGUAGE SPACE
Beat Siebenhaar
Matthias Hahn
University of Leipzig
Keywords:
Vowel space, speech rate, language space, phonetic reduction.
Abstract:
Weiss (2008) shows general relations between higher speech rate and
phonetic reduction based on the analysis of the Kiel corpus of spontaneous
speech. In the SpuRD project (Sprechtempo und Reduktion im Deutschen) we ask
how speech rate and phonetic reduction can be traced back in the geographical space.
Our database (cf. Kleiner 2015) are automatically segmented and annotated (cf.
Kisler et al. 2016) recordings of Aesop's fable „the northwind and the sun“. Local
high-school graduates from 167 cities in the whole German speaking area were asked
to read the text. After their first lecture, they were asked to reread the text in a higher
speech rate. The data set considered in this study comprises the recordings of the
two male speakers per location. First results show clear regional differences of the
general articulation rate and the general reduction rate (Hahn/Siebenhaar 2016).
Acceleration of speech rate is often said to be correlated with a reduction of the vowel
space, which can be explained by the undershoot hypothesis, first formulated by
Lindblom 1963. A monocausal explanation of the vowel space reduction by
speech rate is surely too simplistic, however, speech rate seems to be one central
factor (Siebenhaar 2014, van der Harst 2011). With our regionally balanced database
of German we will present geolinguistic maps of
a) the different sizes and centres of the vowel space and
b) different changes of the sizes and centres of the vowel space when comparing
normal and accelerated speech rates.
These maps show that we not only have a general effect of speech rate (cf. Weiss
2008), but we can put these changes down to geographically distributed reduction
strategies.
References:
Hahn, M. and B. Siebenhaar (2016). Sprechtempo und Reduktion im Deutschen
(SpuRD). In O. Jokisch (ed.). Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2016.
Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation 81 (pp. 198-205). Dresden: TUDpress.
Kleiner, S. (2015). „Deutsch heute“ und der Atlas zur Aussprache des deutschen
Gebrauchsstandards. In R. Kehrein, A. Lameli and S. Rabanus (eds.).
Regionale Variation des Deutschen–Projekte und Perspektiven (pp. 489-518).
Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Kisler, T. et al. (2016). BAS Speech Science Web Services - an Update of Current
Developments. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on
Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016). Paper ID 668. Portorož,
Slovenia.
Siebenhaar, B. (2014): Instrumentalphonetische Analysen zur Ausgestaltung des
Sprechlagenspektrums in Leipzig. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 81,
151–190.
298
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van der Harst, S. (2011). The Vowel Space Paradox. A Sociophonetic Study on Dutch.
Utrecht: LOT.
Weiss, B. (2008). [online]. Sprechtempoabhängige Aussprachevariationen. Berlin. (=
Diss. HU Berlin). Available at: http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/dissertationen/weissbenjamin-2008-05-28/PDF/weiss.pdf.
299
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PHONOLOGICAL MERGING IN ARGENTINA DANISH IN THE LIGHT OF
LINGUISTIC ATTRITION
Gert Foget Hansen
Jan Heegård Petersen
University of Copenhagen
Keywords:
Phonological merging, interspeaker variability, heritage language, attrition.
Abstract:
In this paper we examine the phonetic realization of rounded, mid back vowels /o oː/
and /ɔ ɔː/ in Argentina Danish, i.e. Danish as spoken by descendants of the Danish
immigrants from the period 1850-1920. Up to the 1970s, Danish has been the first
language for this group of speakers, but it has now lost ground to Spanish which has
now become the preferred language in most domains of usage.
Standard Danish /oː/ and /ɔː/ are in contrast in all phonological contexts, whereas
there are only few phonological contexts where /o/ and /ɔ/ constitute minimal pairs. The
phonetic distinction between /o oː/ and /ɔ ɔː/ is maintained in all contexts in stressed
position, /oː/ [oː o̞ː], /o/ [o o̞], /ɔ/ [ɔ̝ ɔ], and /ɔː/ [ɔ̝ː ɔː], where the phonemeinternal variation may be considered free. However, in Argentina Danish the two
phonemes may have partly overlapping realization, [o o̞ ɔ̝] and [o̞ ɔ̝ ɔ],
irrespective of length, indicating a process of phonological merging.
We investigate this process by use of acoustic measurements of the realization of /o
oː/ and /ɔ ɔː/ in five phonological contexts as produced by 10 speakers. The acoustic
measurements indicate stronger overlapping between the realizations of /o/ and /ɔ/ by
speakers of Argentina Danish compared to speakers of Danish in Denmark but there is
also a considerable interpersonal variation. Some speakers have overlapping
realization, other speakers maintain the phonetic distinction between the phonemes.
The paper presents the results of the phonetic analysis with a special focus on the
individual variation in relation to three non-linguistic factors: (a) Danish settlement
patterns (Misiones in the north vs. the capitol Buenos Aires vs. the rural settlement in
the south of Provincia Buenos Aires), (b) contact with Denmark and (c) immigrant
generation (2nd immigrant generation vs. older). We discuss the observed
development and variation in relation to the theory of linguistic attrition (Montrul 2009;
Schmid & Fägersten 2010) in a bilingual situation Danish with a fine-grained vowel
system, with the back vowels /u o ɔ ʌ ɒ/, is under influence from Argentina Spanish
with a smaller inventory of back vowels, /u o/.
References:
Montrul, S.A. (2009). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism. Re-examining the age
factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schmid, M. and K.B. Fägersten (2010). Disfluency markers in L1 attrition. Language
Learning. A Journal of Research in Language Studies 60.4, 753-791.
300
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“BACK IN MY DAY, THE KING TAUGHT US ENGLISH”: THE DEVELOPMENT OF
ENGLISH ON THE COCOS (KEELING) ISLANDS
Hannah Joy Black Hedegard
University of Bern
Keywords:
World Englishes, lesser-known varieties of English, sociophonetics, Australian English.
Abstract:
This sociolinguistic study is the first to investigate the development of English on the
Cocos Keeling Islands, and thereby contributes to existing research into lesser-known
varieties of English.
Most research in this area has focused on emerging Englishes that were brought about
through British colonialism, or in more recent studies, American administration.
Furthermore, previously investigated varieties are commonly shaped by a substrate
indigenous language that is often not spoken elsewhere. This is not the case on the
Cocos Keeling Islands, however, where through recent sudden sociopolitical upheavals,
the minimal British-inflected English spoken on the islands has been superseded by
Standard Australian English, and the contact language is not indigenous, but a dialect
developed from the language of the people’s homeland, what is now known as
Malaysia.
The Cocos Keeling Islands are the outermost Australian external territory in the South
Indian Ocean, and have a population of approximately six hundred. One hundred,
mainly White temporary government workers, live on one side of the atoll, whilst 500
‘Cocos Malay’ people live on the other. Brought over from Malaysia in 1826 by an
English merchant as servants, the Cocos Malay developed their own Malay dialect,
and lived in almost complete social isolation until 1984, when they unanimously voted
for integration with Australia. Up to that point, only the children of favoured ‘headsmen’
were personally taught English by the British-English speaking Rajas, descendants of
the founding English merchant. In contrast, integration with Australia has led to an
English-at-all-costs education system and though the Cocos Malay dialect remains the
first language for all islanders, two years of high school education in Perth or
elsewhere in Western Australia (WA) is mandatory. The resulting age-determined line
that separates both proficiency levels and dialects (the limited British-influenced
English of Cocos Malay born pre 1967 vs. the more fluent Australian English of those
born post 1967) is blurred by other social factors on the islands, such as mass
emigration to, and later repatriation from, WA, clashing language ideologies, a genderbased discrepancy in education levels, and type of employment.
In this paper I present cross-generational data collected on the islands that captures
this apex of change. The dataset is constituted of semi-structured 45-minute
sociolinguistic interviews with more than 10% of the total Cocos Malay community on
the island. First, I will provide an overview of salient linguistic features, contrasting
them with standard Australian English and/or British English, and explore the
aforementioned range of sociocultural factors that are influential on this emerging
variety of English. Second, I will present the results and a discussion of small-scale
vowel (diphthong) analysis of the data, illustrating linguistic variation across three
generations and both sexes. Finally, I will reflect on the applicability of Schneider’s
Dynamic Model on this community (Schneider 2007), in light of its unusual colonial
history and ongoing language contact conditions.
References:
Schneider, E. (2007). Postcolonial Englishes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
301
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THE EFFECT OF WORD-FINAL /S/, /R/, AND /Ө/ DELETION ON PRECEDING
VOWELS IN EASTERN ANDALUSIAN SPEAKERS WITH AND WITHOUT SPEECH
DISORDERS
Alfredo Herrero de Haro
Universidad de Wollongong
Keywords:
Eastern Andalusian Spanish, consonant deletion, Phonetics, Spanish Dialectology,
Spanish vowel system.
Abstract:
Syllable-final consonant deletion has been extensively documented in Eastern
Andalusian Spanish (henceforth EAS) by several scholars (e.g. Wulff 1889; Martínez
Melgar 1986, 1994; Ruch and Harrington 2014). However, researchers have focused
on the effects of /-s/ deletion, ignoring other consonants which are also deleted wordfinally (e.g. Gerfen and Hall 2001).
This paper aims to present a more complex reality of EAS consonant deletion. As
posited in Herrero de Haro (2016a, 2016b, in press), EAS vowels have a different
quality word-finally, when they precede deleted /-s/, when they precede deleted /-r/,
and when they precede deleted /-Ө/; the deletion of word-final /s/, /r/, and /Ө/ changes
the quality of a preceding vowel in different degrees.
However, the effect of word-final /s/, /r/, and /Ө/ deletion has not been studied in EAS
speakers with certain speech disorders. The present paper analyses the speech of
EAS speakers affected by different speech disorders (e.g. dyslalia) to analyse whether
these speakers mark consonant deletion and, if so, whether the mechanisms used by
these speakers are similar to those used by EAS speakers not affected by speech
disorders.
This analysis reveals that EAS speakers with certain speech disorders mark /-s/, /-r/,
and /-Ө/ deletion in a similar way to EAS speakers without speech disorders (e.g.
modifying the quality of a preceding vowel). However, the type and intensity of these
modifications vary between both groups of EAS speakers.
These findings are noteworthy as they quantify to which extent a feature of a regional
accent is present in speakers with and without speech disorders.
References:
Gerfen, C. and K. Hall. (2001) [online]. Coda aspiration and incomplete neutralization in
Eastern Andalusian Spanish. Manuscript, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Retrieved from www.unc.edu/~gerfen/papers/GerfenandHall.pdf. on
14/05/14.
Herrero de Haro, A. (2016a). Four mid front vowels in Western Almería: The effect of
/s/, /r/, and /θ/ deletion in Eastern Andalusian Spanish. Zeitschrift für
Romanische Philologie 132 (1), 118-148.
Herrero de Haro, A. (2016b). La apócope de /s/, /r/ y /Ɵ/ en Andalucía oriental y sus
efectos en las vocales precedentes: estudio acústico y perceptivo. Paper
presented at XIX Congreso de la AIH, Münster, 11–16 July 2016.
302
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Herrero de Haro, A. (2017). Four mid back vowels in Eastern Andalusian Spanish:
The effect of /s/, /r/, and /θ/ deletion on preceding /o/ in the town of El Ejido.
Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie.
Martínez Melgar, A. (1986). Estudio experimental sobre un muestreo de vocalismo
andaluz. Estudios de Fonética Experimental 2, 198-248.
Martínez Melgar, A. (1994). El vocalismo del andaluz oriental. Estudios de Fonética
Experimental 6, 11-64.
Ruch, H. and J. Harrington. (2014). Synchronic and diachronic factors in the change
from pre-aspiration to post-aspiration in Andalusian Spanish. Journal of
Phonetics 45, 12-25.
Wulff, F. (1889). Un chapitre de phonétique andalouse, Recueil de mémoires
philologiques présenté à Monsieur Gaston Paris (pp. 211-260). Stockholm:
L'imprimerie centrale.
303
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QUOTATIVES IN SAIPANESE ENGLISH: BE LIKE ON THE MOVE
Dominique Beatrice Hess
University of Bern
Keywords:
Variationist sociolinguistics, quotative, be like, Postcolonial English.
Abstract:
This paper investigates the use of quotatives in the English spoken in Saipan. Several
resources are available for the construction of a dialogue and reporting direct
quotations such as be like, think, say, go and the zero form among others. Earlier
research has focused on quotative resources of L1 varieties and more recently L2
varieties, for example Hong Kong, Jamaica, Philippine or Singapore English, have
been investigated using the ICE corpora. This study adds to the research of quotative
resources in new emerging contact varieties of English. Hence, the global innovative
quotative variant be like is analyzed in the light of its adoption into the local system of
Saipanese English.
Saipan is the largest of 14 islands in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana
Islands, located in the north-western Pacific Ocean. English became a community
language in Saipan when the US began its administration post-WWII. The two
indigenous communities, the Chamorros and Saipan Carolinians, each have their own
language, yet mostly use English as a lingua franca. Consequently, Saipan is shifting
from an English as an L2 to an English as an L1 community.
Variationist methods are used to compare the quotative system of Saipanese English
with what we know about other L1 and L2 varieties. The data consist of a subset of a
corpus collected in 2015: out of 95 conducted sociolinguistic interviews with indigenous
speakers ranging in age from 12-79 years, 32 speakers were analyzed in detail for this
study. According to previous literature on Toronto English (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy,
2007), American English, English English and New Zealand English (Buchstaller and
D’Arcy, 2009), relevant intra-linguistic factors for consideration are the content of the
quote, the grammatical person, mimetic re-enactment as well as tense/temporal
reference. This study, however, focuses on the complex and under-researched social
factors that influence the choice of a quotative. From my Saipan data I investigated not
only the well-known factors of speaker sex and age, but also the mobility histories and
ethnic backgrounds of my speakers.
Results reveal that mobility is one of the key factors influencing the choice of a
quotative: half of all be like tokens were produced by speakers who had spent a
considerable time, five years and above, off-island (six out of the 32 speakers (19%)
fall into this category). The spreading of the quotative be like variant over time,
however, shows a different route for the Chamorros and the Saipan Carolinians. This
result is due to a complex interaction of mobility and ethnicity, and furthermore,
speaker sex in the case of the Saipan Carolinians. This study therefore shows how the
global innovative quotative variant be like is adopted into an emerging contact variety
of English and how different routes are taken to integrate the quotative be like into the
local variety of Saipanese English.
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References:
Buchstaller, I. and A. D’Arcy (2009). Localized globalization: A multi- local, multivariate
investigation of quotative be like. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13, 291–331.
Tagliamonte, S. and A. D’Arcy (2007). Frequency and variation in the community
grammar: Tracking a new change through the generations. Language Variation
and Change 19, 119–217.
305
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CROWD-SOURCING VARIATION IN MINORITY LANGUAGES: ILLUSTRATED WITH
FRISIAN
Nanna Haug Hilton
University of Groningen
Adrian Leemann
University of Cambridge
Charlotte Gooskens
University of Groningen
Keywords:
Smartphone applications, crowd-sourcing, minority language, Frisian.
Abstract:
Sociolinguistics as a discipline has predominantly focused on large language communities
that are monolingual, yet it is generally agreed that theory development depends on
insights from other contexts, including lesser-used varieties in multilingual settings
(Meyerhoff & Nagy 2008). However, the lack of usable recordings of speech data presents
scholars wanting to do variationist sociolinguistic research on such varieties with obvious
challenges. In this paper we present a new methodological tool for crowd-sourcing speech
and perception data in endangered languages, and discuss its benefits and limitations on
the basis of the example of Frisian spoken in the Netherlands.
A number of language documentation efforts using smartphone technology have come on
the market in recent years (e.g. Bird et al. 2014), relying on crowd-sourcing of speech
recordings and users’ ability to translate in writing. At the same time, crowd-sourcing of
data over the internet has become a popular methodology for dialectological and folklinguistic research. Ventures employing dialect quizzes in smartphone applications have
shown how studies of phonetic and phonological variation can benefit from the addition of
crowd-sourced material (Leemann et al. 2016).
The smartphone application ‘Stimmen fan Fryslân’ (Voices of Fryslân), presented here in
its prototype state (full release in 2017), combines the approaches above. It contains a
perceptual dialectology task (here for Frisian and Dutch language areas), and a picturenaming task (usable for any language) that documents phonological and phonetic
variation.
The app asks questions about everyday variant use from which it aggregates a heat map
indicating the localities that best fit a user’s regional variety. Users then assess the validity
of the result and provide metadata (language use patterns, conscious attitudes, age, sex
and educational level). App users are further presented with a series of unambiguous
images that they have to name (items like ‘ear’, ‘eye’, ‘tree’) creating a corpus for
investigating variation in lexical phonology and phonetics.
Our talk concludes with a discussion of the caveats of crowd-sourcing variation in a
threatened language. Previous studies of minority languages indicate that social (stylistic)
variation in speech may be more restricted in such varieties than that which exists in more
widely spoken languages (e.g. Lamb 2008). Moreover, research of minority languages
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require focus on different social variables (from the traditional Labovian variables) that are
less straightforward to sample, such as language use patterns, attitudes, and association
with ethnic identities.
References:
Bird, S., F. Hanke, R. Adams, O. and H. Lee (2014). Aikuma: A mobile app for
collaborative language documentation. Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the
Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages 1-5.
Lamb, W. (2008). Scottish Gaelic speech and writing: Register variation in an endangered
language (Vol. 16). Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.
Leemann, A., M. J., Kolly, R. Britain, D. And E. Glaser (2016) [online]. Crowdsourcing
language change with smartphone applications. PloS one. Available at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0143060
Meyerhoff, M., and N., Nagy (eds.). (2008). Social Lives in Language Sociolinguistics and
multilingual speech communities: Celebrating the work of Gillian Sankoff, vol. 24,
(pp. 70-92). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
307
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PRAGMATIC VARIATION AND MOOD ALTERNATION: FUTURE-FRAMED
ADVERBIALS IN RIOPLATENSE SPANISH
Mark Randall Hoff
The Ohio State University
Keywords:
Pragmatics, mood, epistemicity, Rioplatense Spanish.
Abstract:
The traditional description of Spanish adverbial clauses containing cuando followed by a
verb in the present tense (Pérez Saldanya 1999) is that the indicative mood expresses
habitual meaning (1), while the subjunctive is used for future actions unrealized at speech
time (2).
(1) Cuando llueve [I], se inunda todo. ‘When it rains, everything floods.’
(2) Cuando vengas [S], te lo presto. ‘When you come, I’ll lend it to you.’
Adverbial clauses have been widely assumed to be one of the most stable environments
for maintenance of the subjunctive. However, variationist research on several Spanishspeaking populations (Blas Arroyo & Porcar Miralles 1997, Murillo Medrano 1999, inter
alia) has identified exceptions to this generalization, with the indicative appearing in
prescriptively subjunctive adverbial contexts. Typically, this variation is described as loss
of the subjunctive or a dissolving of mood distinctions. Here, however, I examine mood
alternation in Rioplatense Spanish and show that appearance of the indicative in futureframed adverbial clauses (3) conveys pragmatic meaning not otherwise encoded in
Spanish grammar:
(3) Cuando bajás [I] del bondi, llamame. ‘When you get off the bus, call me.’
The present study pairs qualitative felicity judgments of mood alternation in several futureframed adverbial contexts (cuando, después de que, hasta que, en cuanto, ni bien) with
quantitative data from an online questionnaire completed by native speakers of
Rioplatense Spanish (N=154). Questionnaire participants were presented with 32
contextualized sentences containing future-framed cuando and either an indicative or
subjunctive verb form. Stimuli were controlled for temporal proximity (immediacy),
temporal specificity, degree of certainty, and subject of the subordinate clause.
Participants provided acceptability ratings of stimuli using a 5-point Likert scale.
Mixed-effects linear regression modeling of the questionnaire data was performed in R.
The regression showed that acceptability ratings of the indicative were highest when
contexts are, first and foremost, immediate, and secondarily when the speaker is portrayed
as certain of the action’s realization. The subjunctive on the other hand is preferred in
clauses containing distant and unrestricted future actions, especially when low epistemic
certainty is conveyed. Conditional inference trees are used to further tease apart
interactions between these predictors (Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012). These results
suggest that use of the indicative expresses high epistemic commitment from the speaker
to the realization of the action described in the adverbial clause. However, because the
subjunctive is the “standard" form in the context of future-framed adverbials, tensions exist
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between speakers' desires to communicate varying levels of epistemic commitment on the
one hand and the pressures of prescriptivism on the other, resulting in great speaker-tospeaker variation.
These findings demonstrate an alternate mood distinction at work in Rioplatense- whereas
in Standard Spanish, mood traditionally differentiates between habitual and future actions,
these data show that some speakers of Rioplatense select mood based on epistemicity.
Thus, the present study suggests that the appearance of the indicative in prescriptively
subjunctive contexts may be best explained not as erosion of mood distinctions (cf. SilvaCorvalán 1994, Gallego & Alonso Marks 2015) but rather as the result of pragmatic
principles.
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UNCHAINED: STANCE, STYLE AND THE CHANGING SHORT VOWEL SYSTEM
OF SOUTHERN BRITISH ENGLISH
Sophie Holmes-Elliot
Queen Mary University of London
Erez Levon
University of Southampton Keywords:
Southern British English, short front vowels, chain shift, stance, language change.
Abstract:
This paper presents an analysis of recent developments in the short front vowel system
of Southern British English (SBE). The short front vowels of SBE are participating in a
“drag chain” (Trudgill 2004), i.e., shifting in an anti-clockwise direction initiated by the
backing (and lowering) of TRAP followed by the subsequent lowering of DRESS and
KIT and the potential upward rotation of STRUT (e.g., Wells 1982; Tollfree 1999;
Torgersen & Kerswill 2004). For some, the shift is a canonical example of a changefrom-below, originating in the interior social classes and driven entirely by systeminternal constraints (cf. Labov 1994). Others have argued for the importance of external
factors, particularly as it spreads across the region (Torgersen & Kerswill 2004;
Torgersen et al. 2006). Our analysis indicates that while the original motivation may
indeed have been linguistic, subsequent developments require a social explanation.
Data are drawn from the speech of cast members of two British “engineered reality”
television programmes: Made in Chelsea (MiC) and The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE).
This class-stratified sample – upper middle-class (UMC) Chelsea and working-class
(WC) Essex – is an ideal test site for examining how the vowel systems may pattern
differently across the region. Vowels for analysis were taken from high-definition videos
of the first two seasons of each programme. Formant measurements were
automatically extracted using the FAVE suite (Rosenfelder et al. 2011) with Lobanov
normalisation. We extracted 7,727 vowels tokens (4,650 monophthongs, 3,077
diphthongs) across 30 speakers (balanced across speaker sex and programme).
Results show a very different picture to that of the historical record for these dialects
(e.g. Deterding 1997; Harrington et al. 2000). In particular, extreme crowding of the
lower back space for UMC speakers suggests an overall convergence in this
community as opposed to a systemic re-structuring. This appears to indicate that while
the older changes in these dialects may have shared an original impetus (e.g. lowered
TRAP), the systems have subsequently diverged. Moreover, as the crowding in the
UMC vowel space decreases perceptual distinctiveness, a social, as opposed to
functional, explanation may provide a better account of the data. We investigate this
possibility through an analysis of the DRESS vowel. Linear mixed-model regressions
for F1, F2, and an overall “space value” (F2-F1; Ramsammy & Turton 2012) all agree
that DRESS is significantly backer/lower among the UMC compared to WC speakers,
despite a similar positioning of TRAP across the groups. There exists, moreover, a
significant situational constraint on DRESS realisation in UMC speech, with certain
speech activities eliciting more backed/lowered DRESS values than others, an effect
that is absent in the WC data. Based on these results, we argue that recent
developments in the UMC short front vowel system are not the result of a chain shift.
Instead, we suggest that it is a convergent change (Torgersen et al. 2006) driven
primarily by extra-linguistic factors (Torgersen & Kerswill 2004), notably stance-taking
and language style. More broadly, results highlight the interplay of social and linguistic
forces in the propagation of ongoing change.
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ACQUISITION OF VERNACULAR VARIATION IN A NEW LANGUAGE: A MIXED
METHODS STUDY OF ROMA MIGRANTS IN MANCHESTER
Gerry Howley
University of Sheffield
Keywords:
Second language acquisition, migration, dialect acquisition, language variation,
sociophonetics.
Abstract:
This paper presents the results of a mixed methods study that combines quantitative
analysis of speech data with ethnographic observations to examine the acquisition of
vernacular English dialect variation by adolescent Roma migrants living in Manchester,
England. In the current study, I conducted participant observation over a period of two
years in a Manchester high school. Phonetic data taken from friendship pair recordings
are quantitatively analysed and variation across two vocalic variables (the lettER and
happY lexical sets) is considered in order to see if Roma migrants are acquiring local
patterns of variation. Results indicate that those speakers who are members of more
open friendship networks (that include not only Manchester-born friends, but also other
migrant friends who use English as a lingua franca) are more likely to reproduce
vernacular patterns of variation. Ethnography exposes the unreliability of participants’
self-report data on friendships, and case studies taken from participant observation
provide context to the quantitative results, providing a fine-grained account of migrants'
linguistic variation.
Increasing superdiversity in Europe’s urban centres means that issues of migration and
integration sit at the top of many political agendas. When migrants acquire a dialect in
a new language, this can be seen as a possible indicator of the way in which an
individual is positioning himself or herself within the local culture (Drummond 2013).
While it is now widely recognised that migrants can acquire local, vernacular dialect
features and patterns of variation in a new language, it is still unclear why some
speakers acquire many more local features than others. In addition to more macro
social categories, such as age, social networks have been shown to varying degrees to
impact on dialect acquisition in a new language (Drummond, 2013; Lybeck, 2002;
Schleef et al., 2011). However, this information is limited and the vast majority of
studies that discuss the potential effects of social networks on Second Language
Acquisition (SLA) do not employ ethnographic methodologies that are best suited to the
investigation of those communities and networks.
The findings presented here give weight to the argument that more mixed methods
variationist SLA research is still needed, despite it now being over ten years since
Bayley & Regan (2004) called for such studies. Moreover, as one of the first studies of
Romanian Roma acquisition of English, this work speaks to ongoing discussions about
migration, integration, and social factors impacting upon SLA.
References:
Bayley, R., and V. Regan (2004). Introduction: The acquisition of sociolinguistic
competence. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8 (3), 323-338.
Drummond, R. (2013). The Manchester Polish STRUT: dialect acquisition in a second
language. Journal of English linguistics, 41 (1), 65-93.
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Lybeck, K. (2002). Cultural identification and second language pronunciation of
Americans in Norway. The Modern Language Journal 86 (2), 174- 191.
Schleef, E., M., Meyerhoff and L., Clark (2011). Teenagers’ acquisition of variation: A
comparison of locally-born and migrant teens’ realisation of English (ing) in
Edinburgh and London. English world-wide, 32 (2), 206- 236.
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STYLISTIC ORTHOGRAPHIC VARIATION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF AAVE
IN TWITTER
Christian Ilbury
Queen Mary University of London
Keywords:
Twitter, language variation, social media, AAVE, media language.
Abstract:
Although recent (macro) analyses of language in Twitter have emphasised the potential
of using orthographic variation as a proxy for spoken language data, thereby permitting
large-scale quantitative studies of regional and social variation and thus informing
sociolinguistic and dialectological theory (e.g., Eisenstein, 2015), the extent to which
stylistic variation may influence and impact such approaches remains largely
unexplored. Given that third-wave variationist sociolinguistic analyses of spoken
language have demonstrated that features of particular styles may be utilised to deploy
particular personae and stances (e.g. Kiesling, 2009), the issue of stylistic variation and
the degree to which such instances may impact vast, macrosociological analyses of
language in Twitter remains to be addressed.
In this paper, I argue that that whilst some cases of orthographic variation can be
attributed to actual language use (cf. Eisenstein, 2015), an additional aspect which
such analyses must account for are those instances in which specific linguistic features
and styles are stylistically appropriated by Others to deploy particular stances and
personae. By extracting a sample of 15,803 tweets from 10 British users who identify
as gay, I explore how non-standard spellings accrue social meaning in much the same
way as spoken language features, thus can be deployed by users to exploit the
indexical value of particular linguistic features in certain interactional contexts.
Specifically, I examine the presence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as
manifested in a range of non-standard orthographic, lexical and morphosyntactic
variables (e.g., completive done, r-lessness, substitution of interdental fricatives, etc.).
I argue that such instances can only be interpreted through the lens of stylisation, and
that the use of AAVE contributes to the development of a very specific stance, the
‘sassy queen’, which rests on an underlying appreciation of the ideological associations
of Black women as ‘fierce’ and, ultimately, ‘sassy’. I support such a reading with metacommentaries from other Twitter users and internet memes which reify the ‘sassy
queen’ style as a characterological figure (Agha, 2005).
Based on the findings of this paper, I discuss stylistic variation in Twitter and the extent
to which these patterns of behaviour may influence and impact vast, macro-sociological
and computational approaches to studying language variation and change more
generally. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how best to interpret these patterns
and argue for the value of micro-level analyses in complementing large-scale
quantitative analyses of linguistic variation in Twitter.
References:
Agha, A. (2003). The social life of a cultural value. Language and Communication vol.
23 3/4, 231–73.
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Eisenstein, J. (2015). Systematic patterning in phonologically-motivated orthographic
variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(2), 161-188.
Kiesling, S. F. (2009). Style as stance: Stance as the Explanation for Patterns of
Sociolinguistic Variation. In A. Jaffe (ed.). Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives
(pp. 171-194). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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THE ACOUSTICS AND THE PATTERNED VARIATION OF CESEO IN MÁLAGA
Elena Jaime Jiménez
Ohio State University
Keywords:
Ceceo, seseo, distinción, Andalusian Spanish, change in progress, variation, acoustics.
Abstract:
Andalusian Spanish is characterized by the variable production of the interdental and
the alveolar fricative. A contrast may be maintained or they may be neutralized
resulting in a single interdental or alveolar production. These three scenarios are
ceceo, i.e., the production of orthographic <s> as interdental fricative [θ], e.g., <casa>
[kaθa]; seseo, or the realization of orthographic <c, z> as alveolar fricative [s], e.g.,
<caza> [kasa]; distinction, i.e., the realization of orthographic <s> as alveolar [s] and
orthographic <c, z> as interdental /θ/, e.g., <casa> [kasa] and <caza> [kaθa]. Ceceo,
seseo and distinción occur variably in Málaga, Central Andalusia. Previous studies
seem to indicate that ceceo is leaving the phonological system, since it has been found
to be associated with older male speakers (Villena Ponsoda 2007). The present study
combines a variationist and an acoustic analysis to determine the current status of
ceceo/seseo/distinción in the city of Málaga. More precisely, this paper explores the
status of the phenomena as a change in progress by examining the conserving effects
of priming and frequency through a variationist analysis. These two factors have been
identified as conditioning obsolescing linguistic elements (Schwenter 2015). Previous
acoustic studies have analyzed acoustic cues that differentiate the interdental fricative
from the alveolar fricative (Lasarte Cervantes 2012). The present study goes beyond
that by considering for the first time whether there are differences in production as
manifested in acoustic cues, among interdentals and alveolars that correspond to
different orthographies.
I collected 2748 tokens from the corpus PRESEEA Málaga. For the variationist analysis,
logistic regression was conducted in R to determine the hierarchical impact of linguistic
factors including priming, frequency, stress, word position, syllable count, and social
factors. For the acoustic study, the acoustic measurements of duration and Center of
Gravity were taken, and linear regression was used to determine the effect of place of
articulation, orthography and social factors on Center of Gravity and duration values.
Results show that there is a higher probability of ceceo in unstressed positions and in
words with a high number of syllables, whereas there is a lower probability of ceceo
after a pause. This indicates that ceceo is a type of lenition, given that it is more
common in contexts leading to weakening processes. While there was not an overall
effect of frequency, priming plays a role in determining ceceo, so that a preceding
token with ceceo is probable to lead to a subsequent ceceo production. This suggests
that ceceo is conserved through priming. Regarding the acoustic study, results indicate
that there are two acoustically different interdental fricatives and two acoustically
different alveolar fricatives, depending on their orthography. Alveolar and interdental
realizations of orthographic <c,z> have a higher COG than their alveolar and
interdental counterparts from orthographic <s>.
This study presents evidence from the conserving effect of priming for the status of
ceceo as leaving the system. It also demonstrates that ceseo is far from being
‘confusion’, as has been claimed in the literature, since speakers make clear
distinctions in their production.
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THE ACOUSTICS OF GERMAN FRICATIVES
Stephanie Jannedy
ZAS Berlin
Felicitas Kleber
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Melanie Weirich
Friedrich-Schiller Univ. Jena
Keywords:
Fricative variability, dialectal differences, DCT, spectral moments.
Abstract:
German is one of only three known languages of the world that contrasts the palatal
fricative /ç/ and the postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ in the context of high front vowels (Mielke
2008). In central Germany, /ç/ and /ʃ/ have already merged. In this study, we are
investigating the spectral characteristics of the five contrasting voiceless German
fricatives [f s ʃ ç χ] in four different dialects of German to better understand the
(in)stability of fricative contrasts.
Data was elicited from four speaker groups from Lower Saxony (Northern Germany),
Berlin (North-East Germany), Thuringia (East-Middle Germany) and Bavaria (Southern
Germany). Speakers from these regions differ in their fricatives realization , particularly
in/ç/ - /ʃ/. Northern and Southern German differentiates all five fricatives whereas in the
Thuringian region, /ç/ and /ʃ/ have already merged in spontaneous speech (Herrgen
1986, Hall 2013). In Berlin, these two fricatives are in the process of merging (Jannedy
& Weirich 2014). This ongoing sound change appears to have multiple reasons,
including the spreading of the Middle German dialect into the greater metropolitan
Berlin area and the spread of Hood German, a sociolect spoken by multiethnic and
multilingual communities of larger urban areas (Jannedy & Weirich 2014).
The data collected so far includes real and non-word minimal pairs differing in the five
fricatives in identical or similar segmental contexts. Acoustic analyses of the five
fricatives include the four spectral moments (COG, SD, skewness, kurtosis: Forrest et
al. 1988) and Discrete Cosine Transformations (DCTs: Harrington 2010). We are also
investigating durational and formant transition differences between the fricatives and
dialects. Given that the DCTs are more successful in differentiating the fricatives, we
are basing our analyses mostly on these coefficients. The figure below shows first
results for 3 female speakers each for the Thuringian and Northern German dialect for
the five fricatives embedded in the non-word /ɪ_FRIC_a/. It is apparent that /ç/ is in the
middle of the fricative cloud. The palatal fricative reveals least acoustic differences to
all other fricatives and therefore are prone to destabilization.
Our focus lies especially on the realization of the /ç/-/ʃ/, including interacting factors
such as word frequency and speaker age. In addition, we are analyzing the influence of
the (ongoing) merger on the German fricative system in terms of the dispersion of the
fricatives in the acoustic space.
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References:
Forrest, K., G. Weismer, P. Milenkovic and R. N. Dougall (1988). Statistical analysis of
word-initial voiceless obstruents: Preliminary data. Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America 841, 115-123.
Hall, T. A. (2013). Alveolopalatalization in Central German as markedness reduction.
Transactions of the Philological Society (pp. 143-166). Doi: 10.1111/1467968X.12002.
Harrington, J. (2010). Phonetic analysis of speech corpora (pp. 1-424). Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Herrgen, J. (1986). Koronalisierung und Hyperkorrektion. Das palatale Allophon des
/CH/-Phonems und seine Variation im Westmitteldeutschen (pp. 1-278).
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
Jannedy, S. and M. Weirich (2014). Perceptual divergence in an urban setting:
category instability of the palatal fricative. Journal of Laboratory Phonology
5(1):91-122.
Mielke, J. (2008). The emergence of distinctive features. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
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SEX EFFECTS IN THE VARIATION AND CHANGE OF THE HIGH BACK VOWEL
Sandra Jansen
University of Brighton
Keywords:
GOOSE-fronting, sex effects, peripheral varieties.
Abstract:
The fronting of the high back vowel (/uw/ or GOOSE, cf. Wells 1982) is probably the
most investigated vowel change in varieties of English. Studies have been conducted
in North America (e.g. Labov et al. 2006; Hall-Lew 2009; Hinrichs et al. 2013), South
Africa (e.g. Mesthrie 2010) and New Zealand (e.g. Maclagan et al. 2009). So far the
studies which have been carried out on this feature show a strong consistency in the
structural constraints: words with a preceding palatal /j/ consistently have higher F2
values than words with preceding anterior coronals, and following /l/ has repeatedly
been found to block fronting. However, at least in the UK, studies on GOOSE are mainly
restricted to urban areas.
The data for this talk/poster stems from 18 sociolinguistic interviews conducted in
Maryport, a peripheral town in Cumbria in the far north-west of England. The interviews
were transcribed in ELAN, the transcriptions were then subjected to forced alignment
of segments in Praat using a modified BEEP dictionary for British English (FAVEalign,
Rosenfelder et al. 2011). FAVEextract (Rosenfelder et al. 2011) was then used to
extract all vowel tokens in the interview and sentence list.
The overall data show that we do not observe a change towards fronting across
apparent time in this community. Little variation in the use of F2 exists between the age
groups and no clear trend in one direction is evident. However, a strong sex effect
exists with women producing fronter GOOSE vowels than men across apparent time.
While a fronting process is not under way, changes in the F1 value are observable.
Male and female speakers are diverging in the choice of linguistic form, i.e. an
interaction between age and sex exists (p=0.0024). Across apparent time the F1
values for women decrease, which means that the vowel is raised while the F1 values
increase for male speakers, i.e. they produce the GOOSE vowel continuously lower in
the vowel space. The divergence between male and female speakers might have to do
with the traditional gender roles still found in the community in combination with
retaining local values.
The data presented in this talk/poster challenge the views on high back vowel fronting
from studies in more urban places in the UK and other English varieties. The strong
structural constraints found in other studies are not attested and most importantly, a
change towards fronting of this vowel is not observable (yet).
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VARIATION AND CHANGE IN AN L2: THE CASE OF LOSS OF RHOTICITY
Sandra Jansen
University of Brighton
Keywords:
Panel study, dialect acquisition, variation in an L2 dialect.
Abstract:
In recent years, the field of quantitative sociolinguistics has developed a heightened
interest in life span changes (e.g. Sankoff & Blondeau 2007, Van Hofwegen & Wolfram
2010, Buchstaller 2015). At the same time second dialect acquisition has been under
investigation (e.g. Chambers 1992, Tagliamonte & Molfenter 2007, Nycz 2015).
However, panel studies of second dialect acquisition in an L2 are still very rare.
The subject of this study is a native German speaker who started learning English at
school at the age of eleven with RP as target accent. The person then spent a year in
Colorado at the age of 17, studied English in Germany and moved to England at the
age of 32. The data stem from sociolinguistic interviews conducted by the German
speaker in the north-west of England between 2007 and 2014.
Using a language variation and change approach, the talk focuses on the loss of
rhoticity and its trajectory. Rhoticity has frequently been examined in L1 varieties of
English, e.g. increase of postvocalic /r/ in New England (Nagy and Irwin 2010) and
New York (Becker 2009) and loss of rhoticity in southwest England (Piercy 2007). The
linguistic constraints in both directions of this change seem to be very similar and
Piercy (2012: 85) remarks that “linguistic factors, which may apply across all varieties
of English could have universal effects in the use of /r/.”
Initial results suggest that the linguistic constraints which most strongly favour /r/-loss
in southwest England are also driving this intraspeaker change. The use of panel data
provides the opportunity to investigate the longitudinal development of this change and
test the universality claim in an L2 dialect acquisition situation.
References:
Buchstaller, I. (2015). Exploring linguistic malleability across the life-span: Age-specific
patterns in quotative use. Language in Society 44/4, 457-496.
Chambers, J. K. (1992). Dialect acquisition. Language 68, 673-705.
Nagy, N. and P. Irwin (2010). Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s nea(r) and fa(r). Language
Variation and Change 22/2, 241-78.
Nycz, J. (2015). Second dialect acquisition: A sociophonetic perspective. Language
and Linguistics Compass 9, 469-482.
Piercy, C. (2007). A quantitative analysis of rhoticity in Dorset: evidence from four
locations of an urban to rural hierarchy of change. CamLing 2007, 199-206.
Piercy, C. (2012). A Transatlantic Cross-Dialectal Comparison of Non-Prevocalic /r/.
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18/2, Article 10.
Sankoff, G. and H. Blondeau (2007). Language change across the lifespan. /r/ in
Montreal French. Language 83/3, 560-88.
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Tagliamonte, S. A. and S. Molfenter (2007). How'd you get that accent? Acquiring a
second dialect of the same language. Language in Society 36/5, 649-675.
Van Hofwegen, J. and W. Wolfram (2010). Coming of age in African American English:
A longitudinal study. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14, 427-455.
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AUDIENCE EFFECTS ON THE PHONETIC REALISATION OF UPTALK RISES
Anna Jespersen
Aarhus University
Keywords:
Uptalk, intonation, speech style, audience design, Australian English.
Abstract:
One of the primary functions of intonation is to convey pragmatic and social meaning.
While the meaning of different contours has been a focal point for intonational
research, specific, localised meanings as they occur in spontaneous conversation have
been subject to far less work. Several studies have investigated connections between
the frequency of use of declarative rises and text types (e.g. Horvath 1985; Britain
1992; Levon et al. 2014; Fletcher et al. 2002; Ritchart & Arvaniti 2014). However, fewer
studies have looked at the effects of changing speech styles on the frequency of use
and phonetic form of high rises. Lowry (2002) and Ulbrich (2008) found that Belfast
English speakers tended to use more falling contours in careful speech than in
spontaneous speech, thus showing sensitivity to the norms of British prestige variants.
In a qualitative study, Podesva (2011) found systematic variation both in the frequency
of different contour types and in their phonetic realization as homosexual American
English speakers negotiated gender roles.
This paper investigates another aspect of style-shifting, namely the influence of
audience effects on uptalk rises. Specifically, it examines the f0 characteristics of
uptalk rises as speakers interact with different interlocutors. The data consist of semispontaneous conversational speech recorded from online radio programmes.
Recordings were made of 22 Australian English speakers from Sydney, Australia (8f,
14m), of which 11 speakers are Aboriginal, and 11 non-Aboriginal. Sound files were
labelled according to the ToBI guidelines for Australian English (Fletcher & Harrington
2001), and 752 uptalk rises were extracted for analysis. F0 measurements were taken
at the low elbow and peak of each rise to analyse the height of the rises. In order to
operationalise audience effects for quantitative analysis, the data was labelled using
the Discourse Context Analysis framework (Gregersen et al. 2009; cf. Nance 2013)
which aims to conceptualise variation along a range of stylistic levels in real-time data.
The results provide evidence that audience effects can influence not only the frequency
of use of uptalk rises, but also their phonetic characteristics. The study found an effect
of interlocutor type on the size of f0 excursions, which was significant across four of the
five rise types investigated. In contexts where speakers addressed one or more
interlocutors they had never met before, rises had smaller f0 excursions than in other
speaking contexts. Contexts in which speakers addressed a radio audience with no
interlocutors present resulted in rise with larger f0 excursions, while rises were still
higher during conversations with one or more previously known interlocutors. These
trends were stable across genders and ethnic groups, and may reflect changes in cooperative dynamics across different communicative settings. The results of the study
highlight the influence of speech style on the phonetic form of high rising terminals, and
the specific contribution of changes in the speaker's audience. In addition, it is
demonstrated that both the height of the uptalk peaks and the overall size of the rises
can co-vary with sociophonetic parameters.
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THE USE OF LOCAL VARIETIES OF A MINORITY LANGUAGE ON SOCIAL
MEDIA: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY
Lysbeth Jongbloed-Faber
Fryske Akademy
Maastricht University
Leonie Cornips
Meertens Institute
Maastricht University
Edwin Klinkenberg
Fryske Akademy
Hans Van de Velde
Fryske Akademy
Keywords:
Local language varieties, minority languages, social media.
Abstract:
Social media have become increasingly important in our daily-life communication and
connect people, regardless of place and time. On the Internet, the distinction between
public and private domains has become obscure. Local issues can draw,
(un)intentionally, national or global attention (Tagg, 2015, p. 195), and the context
collapse (Marwick & boyd, 2011), the gathering of a diverse group of contacts who
would never meet simultaneously in real-life, can considerably complicate language
choice. As a result, on the Internet a majority language is often preferred over a
minority language or local variety, as communicating in the latter would usually exclude
part of the audience (Androutsopoulos, 2014).
Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands. Frisian is recognised as the second
official language in the Fryslân province. Spoken Frisian is characterized by rich
variation and linguists distinguish three main dialect varieties. Frisian varieties are
predominantly used in informal situations and on the countryside, while Dutch is mostly
used in formal situations and in the cities. Although there is an official (written) standard
for Frisian, this standard is not frequently used (nor widely known among Frisian
speakers). However, the growing popularity of social media has ignited an increasing
use of local language varieties in writing, and the question is to what extent Frisian and
its dialects benefit from this trend.
Since 2013, the use of Frisian on social media has been studied. As the use of social
media is very volatile, longitudinal studies are needed to observe both the actual
situation and developments in time. The research consists of both quantitative and
qualitative research methods, such as questionnaires among teenagers and adults,
focus group discussions and the analysis of actual language use. In 2013, teenagers
were still intensively using Facebook and Twitter. Although already at that time,
WhatsApp was the most popular social medium, and used by 95% of the participants,
communicating on Facebook and Twitter was for most of them still a daily habit.
However, during recent years, the older generations have ‘taken over’ these media,
and currently, for young people, besides WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram have
become the most popular social media. The question is how local language varieties
are used on these more intimate and image-focused social media.
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This presentation will show how the evolvement in the use of social media has affected
the use of the minority language and its dialects by Frisian teenagers. The evidence
will be supported by both quantitative, self-reported use in questionnaires from
2013/2014 (n=2,267) and 2017 (to be collected), and qualitative data, analysing
language use on the diverse social media platforms.
References:
Androutsopoulos, J. (2014). Languaging when contexts collapse: Audience design in
social networking. Discourse, Context and Media 4-5, 62-73.
Marwick. A. and D. Boyd (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users,
context collapse and the imagined audience. New Media and Society 13 (1),
114-133.
Tagg, C. (2015). Exploring Digital Communication: Language in action. Abingdon:
Routledge.
323
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HOW TO MEASURE FOREIGN-ACCENTEDNESS AND INTELLIGIBILTY IN AN
OBJECTIVE WAY
Mª Ángeles Jurado-Bravo
Gitte Kristiansen
University Complutense of Madrid
Keywords:
Dialectometry, English as a Lingua Franca, foreign accent, intelligibility.
Abstract:
The study of dialectometry has generally been focused on the study of distances
among dialects of the same language (Heeringa, 2004; Wieling, 2012) or related
languages (Beijering et al., 2008; Gooskens et al., 2008; Heeringa et al., 2006).
However, this type of methodology is scarcely used in the study of foreign-accented
speech (Wieling et al., n.d.), a field which tends to adopt more subjective perspectives
(Derwing & Munro, 1997).
The aim of this talk is to present ASPA Tools (Accented Speech Phonetic Alignment
Tools), a web application which measures phonetic distances between foreignaccented speech and a standard pronunciation. Unlike similar instruments (e.g.
VisualDialectoMetry, RUG/L04, Gabmap and DiaTech, all briefly described in Wieling &
Nerbonne, 2015) which focus on dialect geography, ASPA Tools is especially designed
to objectively measure the level of accentedness and intelligibility of non-native English
speech in relation to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).
The analysis combines Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) and a variation of the
Levenshtein Distance (LD) to analyse the pronunciation of a group of speakers and
compare it to a given standard (in this case, ELF). Furthermore, it objectively measures
(as opposed to subjective judgments of prototypicality) the prototypical pronunciation of
the group, which allows the researcher to analyse the most salient deviations of the
group's pronunciation from the standard.
ASPA Tools works with IPA symbols, which makes it easier for the researcher to work
with an international phonetic notation. Moreover, its user-friendly interface and the
presentation of the results in tabular form makes the analysis of the data much faster
and easier.
We will describe the instrument in detail and show examples of how the tool can be
used to investigate foreign-accented speech from an ELF approach.
References:
Beijering, K., C. Gooskens and W. Heeringa (2008). Predicting intelligibility and
perceived linguistic distances by means of the Levenshtein algorithm.
Linguistics in the Netherlands 15, 13–24.
Derwing, T. M. and M. J. Munro (1997). Accent, intelligibility, and comprehensibility:
Evidence from four L1s. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 19(1), 1–16.
Gooskens, C., W. Heeringa and K. Beijering (2008). Phonetic and Lexical Predictors of
Intelligibility. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 2(1–2),
63–81. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1753854809000317
324
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Heeringa, W. (2004). Measuring dialect pronunciation differences using levenshtein
distance.
Retrieved
from
http://www.let.rug.nl/~heeringa/dialectology/thesis/thesis.pdf
Heeringa, W., P. Kleiweg, C. Gooskens and J. Nerbonne (2006). Evaluation of string
distance algorithms for dialectology. Linguistic Distances.
Wieling, M. B. (2012). A quantitative approach to social and geographical dialect
variation.
University
Library
Groningen
[Host].
Retrieved
from
http://goo.gl/M8uUOy
Wieling, M. B., J. Bloem, K. Mignella, M. Timmermeister and J. Nerbonne (n.d.).
Automatically measuring the strength of foreign accents in English. Retrieved
from http://urd.let.rug.nl/nerbonne/papers/WielingEtAl-Accents-Validating-2013final1.pdf
Wieling, M. B. and J. Nerbonne (2015). Advances in dialectometry. Annu. Rev.
Linguist. 1(1), 243–264.
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SCOUSE NURSE AND NORTHERN HAPPY: VOWEL CHANGE IN LIVERPOOL
ENGLISH
Marten Juskan
University of Freiburg
Keywords:
Scouse, vowel change, salience, identity.
Abstract:
While many varieties in Britain are reported to be levelling (Kerswill 2003), there is
evidence that at least with respect to some variables this is not true for Scouse, the
variety of English spoken in the city of Liverpool (Watson 2007).
This paper investigates change in the NURSE and happY vowels in Liverpool English
across 3 generations of speakers and discusses if and how the results might be
connected to questions of salience, local identity, and Liverpool's changing fortunes in
the 20th and the 21st century. Based on a sample of 20 sociolinguistic interviews, this
study finds that younger speakers use more local variants of the NURSE-SQUARE
merger, a highly salient variable (Honeybone and Watson 2013, Watson and Clark
2013) that is part of the stereotype of Liverpool English. Realisations of less salient
happY, on the other hand, become laxer, which is a change away from the (tense)
traditional local norm, and towards the majority of the other varieties spoken in
Northern England (Trudgill 1999).
While style shifting patterns and explicit comments suggest that the salience of the
NURSE-SQUARE merger is declining, this in itself does not seem to be a satisfying
explanation for what is happening. However, changes in production can be linked up
with qualitative data from the interviews, which indicate that younger Liverpudlians not
only readily express pride in their city and its accent, but that they also feel a strong
connection to the north of England more generally. I interpret phonetic change in the
two vowels under scrutiny as being governed by a combination of salience and
questions of identity: younger speakers use Scouse variants of the socially salient
NURSE vowel to express their 'primary' identity as Liverpudlians, and laxer realisations
of less-salient happY to also associate themselves with other towns and cities in the
north – a strategy which allows them to simultaneously express both their local, and
their regional identity linguistically.
Furthermore, recent (small, but noticeable) improvements both in Liverpool's
economic situation and its internal and external image are identified as likely factors
behind the covert prestige that seems to be attached to Scouse NURSE realisations
despite the fact that Liverpool English is still one of the most stigmatised varieties
of the UK (Montgomery 2007).
References:
Honeybone, P. and K.Watson (2013) Salience and the sociolinguistics of Scouse
spelling: Exploring the phonology of the contemporary humorous localised
dialect literature of Liverpool. English World-Wide 34 (3), 305-340.
Kerswill, P. (2003). Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English. In D.
Britain and J. Cheshire (eds.). Social Dialectology (pp. 43-223). Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Montgomery, C. (2007) Northern English Dialects: A Perceptual Approach. PhD
dissertation: University of Sheffield.
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Trudgill, P. (1999) The Dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell.
Watson, K. (2007) Is Scouse getting Scouser? Phonological change in contemporary
Liverpool English. In: A. Grant and C. Grey (eds.). The Mersey Sound:
Liverpool’s Language, People and Places. (pp. 215–241). Liverpool: Open
House Press.
Watson, K. and L. Clark (2013) How salient is the NURSE~SQUARE merger? English
Language and Linguistics 17, 297-323.
327
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VOWEL HARMONY PATTERNS IN GREEK DIALECTAL CHILD SPEECH
Ioanna Kappa
Marina Tzakosta
University of Crete
Keywords:
Dialectal child spech, vowel harmony patterns, non-harmony dialect.
Abstract:
In this study we test the claim that Vowel Harmony (VH) is universally motivated in
child speech, facilitating the phonological development in non-harmony languages (see
Cohen 2012). We draw on a corpus of Greek L1 naturalistic developmental
(longitudinal) data from 4 children raised in the dialectal environment of Crete and
exposed in a dialect with a non productive harmony grammar. The data demonstrate
that VH appears systematically during certain developmental stages of acquisition.
Stress seems to be the major cue for VH at the early stage (1a,b), namely faithfulness
to the vocalic featural composition of a prosodically and perceptually prominent position
(i.e. stressed syllable, cf. Smith 2002). In the next developmental stage directionality,
i.e. right edge prominence, determines the VH pattern (2) regardless of the sonority of
the trigger or the target vowel. [Vowel hierarchy for the Cretan dialect: a>o>u>i,e (cf.
Kappa, to appear)]. In later acquisitional stages, sonority factors determine the shape
of the emergent VH patterns and VH may be triggered by an unstressed, more
sonorous vowel located at the word-initial syllable, resulting in non-iterative progressive
assimilation (3a, 3b). In all data the domain of VH is the phonological word (ω).
Target
Child’s output
Gloss
Child: Age
1a) [marίna]ω
[minίna]ω
‘Marina, proper name’
Ch-1: 1;08-1;10
1b) [pirúni]ω
[pulúni]ω
‘fork-NEUT.NOM.SG.’
Ch-2: 1;06-2;01,24
2) [átaxt-iINFL]ω
[átiti]ω
‘naughty- FEM.NOM.SG’
Ch-1: 1;10-2;01
3a) [alif-íINF]ω
2;6
[alafí ]ω
‘cream-FEM.NOM.SG.’
Ch-1: 2;02-
3b) [trapézi]ω
2:03,19
[tapázi]ω
‘table-NEUT.NOM.SG.’
Ch-3:
Our data support the claim that VH is universal in nature. VH facilitates phonological
acquisition and may affect the order of vowel acquisition. VH emerges in the speech of
children who acquire complex linguistic systems, in which phonology and morphology
both affect the shape of the emergent forms. VH is phonologically conditioned in Greek
dialectal child speech being determined by prosodic and positional prominence effects,
i.e. stress, directionality and sonority, govern the VH patterns. These effects are
depicted in distinct developmental paths adopted by different children or one and the
same child. Finally, inter-language VH patterns are governed by phonological
properties of the target language while intra-language VH patterns are determined by
developmental paths followed by the learners.
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References:
Cohen, E-G. (2012). Vowel harmony and universality in Hebrew acquisition. Brill’s
Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics (BAAL) 4, 7-29.
Kappa, I. (to appear). Instances of Vowel Assimilation in the Cretan Dialect.
Proceedings of ISTAL 21. Thessaloniki: Department of English Studies, AUTH.
Smith, J. (2002). Phonological augmentation in prominent positions. PhD, University
of Massachusetts: Amherst.
329
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THE GERMAN /A̠͡ɪ/ – ONE (?) PHONEME FROM A VARIATIONIST LINGUIST’S
POINT OF VIEW
Roland Kehrein
Philipps University of Marburg
Keywords:
Morphosyntactic variation, German dialects, vernacular universals.
Abstract:
The Standard German (SG) diphthong phoneme /a̠͡ɪ/ in words like Eis ‘ice’, Wein
‘wine’, Kleider ‘clothes’, or Seife ‘soap’ can be traced back historically to two distinct
phonemes occurring in complementary lexical distribution. These are Middle High
German (MHG) î in the case of Eis and Wein and MHG ei in the case of Kleider and
Seife (or West Germanic ī and ai). While in Standard German the two historical
phonemes merged into the diphthong /a̠͡ɪ/ the aforementioned phonological
distinction is maintained in all German dialects even to this day. This has been
empirically proven by analyses of the data collected in our project regionalsprache.de
(abbrev.: REDE), funded by the Academy of Science and Literature from 2008 to 2026.
For this project speakers from 150 locations have been recorded in five standardized
communicative situations, each requiring a specific style in order to meet the
communicative demands. The speakers represent three generations: the oldest
generation might be considered NORMs (in Trudgill’s sense), the second, a middle
generation, is made up of 45 to 55-year-old speakers and, finally, the youngest
generation consists of speakers about 20 years of age.
In the investigation presented here I focused on the middle generation and their
individual linguistic competencies. These were surveyed by translation tasks in which
the speakers were asked to render 40 sentences presented in SG into the deepest
local dialect known by the speaker (investigation of individual dialect competence) as
well as translate the same 40 sentences from the local dialect back into their best SG.
Additionally, informants were recorded reading aloud the text “The North Wind and the
Sun” (investigation of the individual competence of SG).
For the analyses all instances of MHG î and ei produced by 20 speakers from 10
different locations in Germany were demarcated using PRAAT (cf. Boersma &
Weenink 2016). Altogether nearly 600 sounds have been transcribed phonetically to
date. Additionally, formant values were measured allowing for the display of the single
variants as five-point-graphs in formant charts.
The presentation aims to answer some basic research questions:
– How many and which types of variants for MHG î and ei can be observed in the
speakers’ individual best dialect?
– How many and which types of variants for MHG î and ei can be observed in the
speakers’ individual best SG? Are these variants equal to the SG /a̠͡ɪ/ phoneme or
do they differ?
– In which respect do the speakers’ best SG variants differ from the respective
speakers’ best dialect variants on the one hand and from SG /a̠͡ɪ/ on the other?
Which language dynamic processes can be inferred from these relationships?
330
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References:
Boersma, P. and D. Weenink (2016) [Computer program]. Praat: doing phonetics by
computer. Version 6.0.21. Available at: http://www.praat.org/. Retrieved 25
September 2016.
331
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HOW DO LAY LINGUISTS PERCEIVE THE GERMAN-AUSTRIAN BORDER?
Andrea Kleene
Institut für Deutsche Sprache
Keywords:
Border, Bavarian language area, folk linguistics.
Abstract:
Research findings have attested that political borders, drawn through homogenous
linguistic landscapes, often initiate a diverging trend. The political border between
Germany and the Netherlands, for instance, became a language border as well due to
the fact that both states have now a separate standard language (cf. Smits 2011).
Equally, for the border between France (Alsace) and Germany, language variation can
be verified by several studies (cf. Auer et al. 2015: 345; Klausmann 1990: 210) and the
former German-German-border still seems to be a border in the minds of many
Germans (cf. Harnisch 2015, among others).
My talk will focus on the situation at the German-Austrian border. According to
Scheuringer (1990, among others) a diverging trend can also be seen along this
border. Bülow/Schifferer/Dicklberger (2016), however, show that the consolidation of
Europe has impacted the language dynamics in the German-Austrian border region in
that increasing language contact can be observed.
I will consider how lay linguists evaluate the language on both sides of the political
border: Do they perceive the national border between Germany and Austria as a
language border? Which linguistic differences are being noticed? Are there any
connections between Germans and Austrians living on either side of the border? These
and other questions will be answered using in-depth interviews, conducted with people
from Passau (Germany) and Schärding (Austria).
This data is complemented by the results of an online-questionnaire as well as a
listener judgement test. Both were conducted in the entire Bavarian language area.
My research suggests that political borders seem to bias our language attitudes more
than our language use.
References:
Auer, P. et al. (2015). Auswirkungen der Staatsgrenze auf die Sprachsituation im
Oberrheingebiet (Frontière linguistique au Rhin Supérieur,FLARS). In R.
Kehrein, A. Lameli and S. Rabanus (eds.). Regionale Variation des Deutschen
Projekte und Perspektiven (pp. 323-348). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Bülow, L., Schifferer, J. and Dicklberger, A. (2016). Varietätenkontakt statt
Grenzvarietäten. Zur Entwicklung der sprachlichen Situation im deutschösterreichischen Grenzgebiet am Beispiel von Neuhaus am Inn (D) und
Schärding (Ö). In J. Kusová, L. Vodrážková and M. Malechová (eds.). Deutsch
ohne Grenzen 397-420.
Harnisch, R. (2015). Untersuchungen zur Sprachsituation im thüringisch-bayerischen
Grenzgebiet (SPRiG). Neue Dialektgrenzen an der ehemaligen deutschdeutschen Grenze nach vier Jahrzehnten politischer Spaltung? In R. Kehrein,
A. Lameli and S. Rabanus (eds.). Regionale Variation des Deutschen Projekte
und Perspektiven (pp. 219–240). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
332
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Klausmann, H. (1990). Staatsgrenze als Sprachgrenze? Zur Entstehung einer neuen
Wort- und Sprachgebrauchsgrenze am Oberrhein. In L. Kremer and H.
Niebaum
(eds.).
Grenzdialekte.
Studien
zur
Entwicklung
kontinentalwestgermanischer Dialektkontinua. Germanistische Linguistik 101–
103, 193–215. Hildesheim: Olms.
Scheuringer, H. (1990). Sprachentwicklung in Bayern und Österreich: Eine Analyse
des Substandardverhaltens der Städte Braunau am Inn (Österreich) und
Simbach am Inn (Bayern) und ihres Umlandes. Hamburg: Buske.
Smits, T. (2011). Strukturwandel in Grenzdialekten. Die Konsolidierung der
niederländisch-deutschen Staatsgrenze als Dialektgrenze. Stuttgart: Steiner
(Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. Beihefte. 146).
333
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THE “POSITIVE” EFFECT OF “NEGATIVE” QUESTIONS
Edwin Klinkenberg
Fryske Akademy
Nika Stefan
Fryske Akademy
University of Amsterdam
Arjen Versloot
University of Amsterdam
Keywords:
Minority language, language variation, sociolinguistic methods.
Abstract:
Numerous studies in social sciences have shown that positively and negatively worded
questions are not complementary and lead to different results. Probably the best known
example of such a discrepancy between positively and negatively formulated questions
comes from Rugg’s (1941) opinion poll on ‘speeches against democracy’, which
revealed a 21% difference in judgments levels. A similar discrepancy has been found in
other domains (Schuman & Presser, 1981, Holleman, 1999). Therefore, questionnaire
design is crucial for the quality and validity of a scientific project. This also concerns
(socio)linguistic research on minority languages, where topics such as language purity
and interferences from another (dominant) language are quite sensible. The question
asymmetry has recently been tested on a grammaticality judgement in the West
Frisian-speaking community, giving remarkable results. In our talk, we will argue that
the discrepancy between positive and negative questions can actually be a benefit,
instead of detriment, by providing a lot of information about the functioning of a minority
language within its speaking community.
(West) Frisian is a Germanic language spoken in Fryslân - a bilingual province in The
Netherlands. Frisian has a rich dialect variation and is known to be influenced by Dutch
(the national language) in the form of numerous interferences (De Haan, 1997).
Speakers of Frisian are often more proficient in Dutch and have a limited knowledge of
the Frisian standard (Breuker, 1993). The actual linguistic situation in Fryslân was
surveyed with an extensive questionnaire. Besides answering numerous questions
about their personal language use, the respondents were asked to judge the
correctness of different linguistic variants in Frisian (originally Frisian ones or Dutch
interferences) by indicating which of the given variants are right or not right/wrong,
depending on the question type.
The research outcomes confirm the previous findings that positively and negatively
worded questions are not complementary. Moreover, the results show that combining
both types of questions within the same study can shed more light on general language
knowledge, preference and acceptance. While a positive question reveals the most
common and/or preferred linguistic variant(s), the negative one provides information
about the general acquaintance with other variants ant their acceptance within the
speech community.
References:
Breuker, P. (1993). Noarmaspekten fan it hjoeddeiske Frysk [Norm aspects of the
present-day Frisian]. PhD dissertation. University of Groningen.
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Haan, G. J. (1997). Contact-induced changes in modern West Frisian. In G. J. de Haan
and O. Vries (eds.). Dedicated to Bo Sjölin (= Us Wurk 46), 61-89.
Holleman, B. C. (1999). Wording effects in survey research: Using meta-analysis to
explain the forbid/allow asymmetry. Journal of quantitative linguistics 6, 29-40.
Rugg, D. (1941). Experiments in wording questions. Public opinion quarterly 5, 91-92.
Schuman, H., S. Presser (1981). Questions and answers in attitude surveys:
Experiments on question form, wording and context. London: Academic Press.
335
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EVOLUTION OF THE STATUS OF A MINORITY LANGUAGE AND IT’S THE
EFFECT ON DIALECT AREAS IN FRISIAN (1965 TO 2015)
Edwin Leon Klinkenberg
Nika Stefan
The Fryske Akademy
Keywords:
Minority language, dialect variation, longitudinal research, language attitude, language
behavior.
Abstract:
Frisian is a regional minority language that is spoken in the bilingual province of
Fryslân in the north of the Netherlands. Although a standard for Frisian exist, it applies
mainly to written Frisian. Spoken Frisian comprises of three main dialects that are
spoken in different areas in Fryslân. Klaaifrysk (Clay Frisian) refers to the soil
component that is predominantly found in the north of the province. Wâldfrysk (Wood
Frisian) refers to the woodlands in the east. Finally, Súdwesthoeksk (South-Western) is
predominantly spoken in the south-western area of Fryslân. Over the last 5 decades
the (social)economic situation in Fryslân as well as the status of Frisian has changed.
The question now arises whether the dialects were affected to the same extend.
Although Frisian was spoken by a majority of the inhabitants in the 1950’s as a first
language, it was mainly spoken in rural areas and informal domains. From the 1950’s
onward Frisian was increasingly recognized in areas like primary education (1955),
public administration (1995) and in the Court of Justice (1956). In 2014 Frisian was
officially recognized as the second official language in the Netherlands.
From the 1960’s several generations of Frisians grew up in a bilingual Dutch/Frisian
society in which the status of Frisian gradually increased. This process was monitored
in four large-scale language surveys that were conducted between 1960 and 2015
(Pietersen, 1969; Gorter et al., 1984; Gorter and Jonkman, 1995). In these surveys,
information was gathered on several sociological and sociolinguistic aspects of
everyday use of Frisian, language attitude, language transfer and language proficiency.
The evolution of these aspects over the research period will be presented with respect
to the three dialect areas. Special attention will be given to the influence of the distance
to the central (economic) areas of the Netherlands. Through the increased mobility and
infrastructure from the 1960’s onward the south-western part of Fryslân has become
more accessible for (Dutch-speaking) non-Frisians wanting to live in the countryside
and commute to the central part of the Netherlands. For the eastern and especially the
northern part of Fryslân this is far less the case. The increased contact and exposure to
Dutch will affect the sociological and linguistic aspects like language attitude, language
transfer, language behavior and language proficiency.
References:
Gorter, D., G. H. Jelsma, P. H. van der Plank and K. de Vos (1984). Taal yn Fryslân:
Undersyk nei taalgedrach en taalhâlding yn Fryslân [Language in Fryslân:
Research into language behaviour and language attitude in Fryslân]. Ljouwert
and Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy.
Gorter, D. and R. J. Jonkman (1995). Taal yn Fryslân op ’e nij besjoen [Language in
Fryslân revisited]. Ljouwert and Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy.
Pietersen, L. (1969). De Friezen en hun taal: Een onderzoek naar de lees- en
spreekgewoonten in Fryslân en naar de houding ten aanzien van het Fries [The
Frisians and their language: A research into the reading and speaking habits in
Fryslân and into the attitude with respect to Frisian]. Drachten: Laverman.
336
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F*CKING VOWELS
Remco Knooihuizen
Jadzia Seeberger
Hedwig Sekeres
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Keywords:
Loan words, swearing, attitude, fuck.
Abstract:
The English swear word fuck has been borrowed into many other languages, its
frequency there perhaps helped by the fact that non-native swear words typically have
a lower taboo value than native swears (Harris et al. 2003). However, the original
vowel /ʌ/ (STRUT) is uncommon cross-linguistically so the loan requires adaptation
into the receiving language (Van Coetsem 1988).
The English STRUT vowel in borrowings into Dutch may be produced as /ɔ/ or /œ/ (as
in the loan cover, e.g. Smakman & de France 2014); for fuck in particular, adaptation to
/ɑ/ or adoption of the original /ʌ/ are also possible. Informal observation suggests
different pronunciations of fuck (so different adaptation strategies) are linked to both
social types and stances (cf. also Babel 2016), but also that different forms of the word
fuck may be pronounced differently by the same speaker. In this paper, we present
evidence of sociolinguistic constraints on variation in adaptation strategies for the word
fuck in Dutch.
Our evidence is based on data elicited from several hundred speakers in the North of
the Netherlands. Participants were asked to read out several sentences with swear
words; the vowel in each swear word was asterisked out (f*ck) so as not to prime vowel
production. They were then asked to rate the severity of the swear word; the actual
purpose of the research was not disclosed to participants until afterwards.
Preliminary analysis of the first batch of data suggests that a number of social factors
are relevant for the choice of adaptation strategy:
• age: younger speakers use more /ɑ/ than older speakers;
• attitude to swearing: speakers with a negative attitude to swearing use more /œ/
than speakers who use swear words more regularly;
• word form: different forms of the word (fuck, what the fuck, fucking, fucked up, and
the verb fucken) show different patterns of adaptation, with significant intra-speaker
variation.
We attempt to explain some of the variation with reference to stance, by means of an
analysis of non-elicited occurrences of fuck (etc.) in students’ self-recordings of Dutchlanguage conversations.
References:
Babel, A. M. (2016). Affective motivations for borrowing: Performing local identity
through loan phonology. Language and Communication 49, 70–83.
van Coetsem, F. (1988). Loan phonology and the two transfer types in language
contact. Dordrecht: Foris.
Harris, C., A. Ayçiçeğ and J. Berko Gleason (2003). Taboo words and reprimands elicit
greater autonomic reactivity in a first language than in a second language.
Applied Psycholinguistics 24 (4), 561–579.
337
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Smakman, D. and de France, T. (2014). The acoustics of English vowels in the speech
of Dutch learners before and after pronunciation training. In J. Caspers, Y.
Chen, W. Heeren, J. Pacilly, N. O. Schiller and E. van Zanten (eds.). Above and
beyond the segments: Experimental linguistics and phonetics (pp. 288–301).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 338
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SOCIAL, REGIONAL, AND INTER-INDIVIDUAL VARIATION IN GERMAN
ADJECTIVE GRADATION: EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ON PERCEPTION AND
PRODUCTION OF COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES
Katharina Korecky-Kröll
University of Vienna
Keywords:
Adjective gradation, German, social variation, regional variation, inter-individual
variation.
Abstract:
German adjective gradation is an interesting phenomenon because of high variation
and competition between forms (e.g. Nowak 2016): Nearly all comparatives and
superlatives are formed synthetically from their positive forms via suffixation. Some
also undergo a stem vowel change (umlaut), either obligatorily or optionally (e.g.
comparative schmaler/schmäler ‘more narrow’), but more frequently in southern than in
northern regions of the German-speaking area (Nübling 2006). Due to its location in the
very south, Austria may be considered a particularly interesting testing ground for this
phenomenon.
Comparatives may also undergo deletion of the e schwa (e.g. edel – edler ‘classier’),
and superlatives may show an e epenthesis (e.g. am schlausten/schlauesten
‘cleverest’). However, in contrast to the umlaut, the e epenthesis is not salient and most
speakers are not aware of the corresponding regularities or the existence of competing
forms, but just prefer one form over the other.
Due to high variation, but also to low frequencies of comparatives and especially
superlatives in everyday speech (Zeldes 2011), this system is not only difficult for
learners, but even young adult native speakers with equally high levels of education
may show considerable inter-individual variation in processing such forms.
The major aim of this talk is to investigate social, regional, and inter-individual variation
in native speakers of German spoken in Austria and to tease apart the different factors.
To investigate social variation (cf. Street & Dąbrowska 2014), we invited 120 university
students and 90 young adults with educational levels below high-school diploma (all
aged 18-35, native speakers of German and living in Vienna) to participate in an online
grammaticality judgment experiment. In this experiment, participants were asked to
judge, as quickly as possible, written comparatives and superlatives as correct or
incorrect by pressing two different keys.
Results show significant effects of educational background throughout all categories:
Not only three times as many trials of participants with lower levels of education had to
be excluded due to very long latencies of over 5 seconds, but university students also
showed significantly higher accuracy rates and shorter latencies than their lower
educated peers.
As to regional variation, the above results will be compared to first results of another
comparative and superlative production test conducted in rural regions of Austria with
adult speakers of different ages and social backgrounds, most of them speaking local
dialects.
Finally, all subgroups with sufficient numbers of participants will be investigated
separately to examine inter-individual variation.
339
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References:
Nowak, J. (2016). Klar und klärer: umlaut comparison as a doubtful case in
contemporary German. Paper presented at the 46th Poznań Linguistic Meeting,
September 2016.
Nübling, D. (2006). Historische Sprachwissenschaft des Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr.
Street, J. and E. Dąbrowska (2014). Lexically specific knowledge and individual
differences in adult native speakers’ processing of the English passive. Applied
Psycholinguistics 35, 97-118.
Zeldes, A. (2011). On the productivity and variability of the slots in German
comparative correlative constructions. In M. Konopka, J. Kubzak, C. Mair, F.
Štícha and U. H. Waßner (eds.). Grammatik und Korpora 2009 (pp. 429-449).
Tübingen: Narr.
340
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WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO FORM A VARIETY? SOCIOLECTALITY VS
IDIOLECTALITY IN NORTH AMERICAN DANISH
Karoline Kühl
Jan Heegård Petersen
University of Copenhagen
Keywords:
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H[WHQWWKHLUGLVWULEXWLRQLVFRUUHODWHGDFURVVVSHDNHUVLQZKLFKFDVHZHPD\VSHDNRI
DQLQFLSLHQWQHZEXWQRZORVWYDULHW\RI'DQLVK3UHOLPLQDU\DQDO\VHVLQGLFDWHWKDWWKH
'DQLVK LPPLJUDQWV DQG WKHLU GHVFHQGDQWV VHOHFW YDULDQWV RI WKH YDULDEOHV LQ D QRQ
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References:
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12,
453-476.
Guy, G. (2013). The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle
multiple sociolinguistic variables? Journal of Pragmatics 52, 63-71.
Hinskens, F. and G. Guy (2016). Linguistic coherence: Systems, repertoires and
speech communities. Lingua 172-173, 1-9.
341
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PRESCRIPTIVISM IN PRESENT-DAY POLAND. THE NORMATIVE ATTITUDES OF
THE SPEAKERS OF POLISH
Krystyna Kułak
Adam Mickiewicz University
Keywords:
Prescriptivism, standard language, Polish, speakers' attitudes.
Abstract:
The glaring gap between linguists' and laypeople's opinions concerning language
norms is a phenomenon which is not absent from the sociolinguistic reality of Polish
(Markowski 2005). Like many European languages, Polish is officially governed by a
regulatory body, The Polish Language Council (Rada Języka Polskiego) and
semiofficially by popular experts on language correctness. It also has to be noted that
the long tradition of including evaluative opinions on language change in scholarly
books written by Polish linguists clearly has had an influence on the overall approach to
language correctness not only among individuals with no educational background in
linguistics, but also teachers and intellectuals of different kind. "Proper" Polish is often
considered an indicator of intelligence, high social class and personal good manners,
which leads to frequent stigmatization of individuals found guilty of violating the norm,
even in the absence of any systematic explanation why certain forms are "wrong" while
others are "right". The ideology of "proper" Polish is connected with the widespread
fear of the language becoming "contaminated" and "spoiled" and the discussion on
how to protect it, such views being infused with ideological and political motivations. In
this paper the present-day attitudes of the native users of Polish toward language norm
and correctness are explored by the means of a modified replication of a public opinion
pool conducted in 2005 reported by The Polish Language Council. The participants,
representing different social and educational background, were asked to express their
opinions on the condition of today's Polish and the structure of language norms. Their
concerns are illustrated with examples of inquiries published on-line by the most
popular language advice specialists. The author's aim is to present the most recent
attitudes toward Polish language norm and to discuss their sociopolitical and scholarly
grounds and implications.
References:
Armstrong, N. and I. Mackenzie (2015). On prescriptivism and ideology.
Representaciones. Revista de Estudios sobre Representación en Arte, Ciencia
y Filosofía 11, 2. 26-57.
Cegieła, A. (1996). Norma wzocowa i norma użytkowa komunikacji we współczesnej
polszczyźnie. In J. Miodek (ed.). O zagrożeniach i bogactwie polszczyzny (pp.
25-34). Wrocław: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Polonistyki Wrocławskiej.
Kochański, W., B. Klebanowska and A. Markowski (1989). O dobrej i złej polszczyźnie.
Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna.
Lubaś, W. (1996). Polszczyzna wobec najnowszych przemian społecznych. In J.
Miodek (ed.). Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Polonistyki Wrocławskiej (pp. 153-162).
Markowski, A. (2005). Językoznawstwo normatywne dziś i jutro: zadania, szanse,
zagrożenia. Postscriptum 2-1(48-49), 126-139.
342
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Markowski, A. (2006). Kultura języka polskiego. Teoria. Zagadnienia leksykalne.
Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
Straaijer, R. (2016). Attitudes to prescriptivism: an introduction. Journal of Multilingual
and Multicultural Development 37, 3. 233-242.
343
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THE INFLUENCE OF THE AMERICANIZED EDUCATION SYSTEM ON THE GUAM
DIALECT OF ENGLISH
Eva Anina Kuske
University of Bern
Keywords:
Guam Dialect of English, varieties of English, sociolinguistics, dialectology.
Abstract:
In my paper, I discuss how socio-historic developments in the education system are
mirrored in the diachronic development of the Guam Dialect of English (GDE). The
island located in the Northern Pacific Ocean has had a diverse colonial past, with each
colonial ruler (Spain, the United States and briefly Japan) enforcing their national
language on the inhabitants, especially in the school system. As a result of more than
100 years of (almost) continuous American rule, the indigenous people have
undergone a shift from speaking Chamorro (their indigenous language) as a first
language to an almost monolingual generation of English speakers in the time period of
only a few generations. Kehoe (1974) pins the change in the inhabitants’ first language
down to the post World War Two generation that decided to raise its children in
English. Simoy (2012) specifically identifies the Naval Education System under
Governor Maxwell as being greatly responsible for the change to English as the main
language in the school system. This led to English becoming a first language in a
majority of homes on Guam.
Although the changes in language policies in the educational sector and the push for
English as an official language have been well documented, no research describes the
influence of these changes on the Guam Dialect of English. The policy changes are
mirrored in the inhabitants’ dialect as the older generations speak English as a second
language and the younger generations have moved towards a monolingual language
culture that reflects the heavy American influence on the island. Using an apparent
time model, I will show which linguistic features in the vowel system are only existent in
the older generations of Chamorros, which features newly emerged under the
American influence and which features have persisted in all generations throughout the
political and educational changes. The dataset includes recordings of 45 minute long
sociolinguistic interviews with four representative speakers of the Guam Dialect of
English: Two young speakers showing vowel plots that are similar to those of General
American English speakers, and two older speakers that still show a heavy influence of
the substrate language in their vowel system. The differences between older and
younger speakers illustrate in what ways the English on Guam has shifted since the
changes in the education system.
References:
Kehoe, M. (1975). Language and Politics in Guam and Micronesia. Paper presented at
the IESOL Conference. Los Angeles, California.
Simoy, C. (2012). American Education for the Chamorros: Reconciling Benevolence
and Military and Civilian Educational Objectives in the U.S. Administration of
Guam in the Early Twentieth Century. Unpublished thesis. Faculty of the
Department of History of Vanderbilt University.
344
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HERITAGE SPEAKERS AND LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY: PHONOLOGICAL
REMARKS ON SARDINIAN
Rosangela Lai
University of Florence
Keywords:
Heritage speakers, Sardinian, phonology, dialectology.
Abstract:
In spite of enjoying official recognition (Law 482/1999), Sardinian is classified as
endangered by UNESCO (Moseley 2007). As a result of poor parental transmission
(Rindler-Schjerve 1998, 2000), the relative standing of Sardinian and Italian has long
been unbalanced in favor of the latter. Nowadays, most young people are heritage
speakers of Sardinian: they acquire Sardinian via parental transmission only
incompletely, and do not achieve language proficiency in childhood due to low
exposure (Cf. Montrul 2008).
The purpose of this work is to analyze the phonology of these heritage speakers.
Heritage speakers are described as having good phonological competence (Montrul
2010). However, the few studies in the literature suggest that even in this area the
acquisition is incomplete (Montrul 2010). As we will see, Sardinian heritage speakers
show some non-native phonological features.
We will especially focus on the obstruent system of heritage speakers and their lexical
knowledge. Sardinian displays lexical stratification with separate treatments of native
vocabulary and foreign vocabulary (Cf. Ito & Mester 1999): the same type of segment
undergoes different phonological rules according to the lexical stratum to which it
belongs. This peculiar situation can be readily observed in voiced obstruents. In native
vocabulary, voiced obstruents are affected by external sandhi lenition, while foreign
vocabulary (e.g., Italian loanwords) is unaffected. As can be seen in Table (1), native
vocabulary displays lenition of voiced obstruents in intervocalic contests, which in these
cases manifests itself as deletion. By contrast, in foreign vocabulary, lenition does not
apply (Cf. Wagner 1941).
(1) Lexical strata: the case of voiced obstruents
a. a. Native vocabulary
b. b. Foreign vocabulary
word-initial position
biʤi'nau ‘neighborhood’
but'tɛɣa ‘shop’ (from It. bottega)
intervocalic position
su Øiʤi'nau ‘the neighborhood’
sa but'tɛɣa ‘the shop’
The phonology of heritage speakers shows a degree of simplification: the distinction
between native vocabulary and loans is progressively being lost. Native vocabulary is
increasingly treated according to the phonological system of foreign loans, i.e., in
native words like (1a), the obstruent does not delete (i.e., su biʤi'nau instead of su
Øiʤi'nau). The absence of an alternation of the kind shown in (1a) follows from the use
of an Italian-like phonological system.
Our study is evidence that the commonplace assumption of the native-like nature of the
phonology of heritage speakers might in fact be overly optimistic.
References:
Ito, J. and A. Mester (1999). The Structure of the Phonological Lexicon. In T. Natsuko
(ed.). The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (pp. 62-100). Oxford: Blackwell.
345
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Montrul, S. (2008). Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age
Factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Montrul, S. (2010) Current Issues in Heritage Language Acquisition: Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press 30, 3–23.
Moseley, C. (2007). Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages. London and
New York: Routledge.
Rindler Schjerve, R. (1998). Code switching as an indicator for language shift ?
Evidence from Sardinian-Italian bilingualism. In R. Jacobson (ed.). Code
switching Worldwide (pp. 221-247). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Wagner, M. L. (1984 [1941]). Fonetica storica del Sardo [Historische Lautlehre des
Sardischen] Cagliari: G. Trois.
346
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STYLIZATION OF LOCAL DIALECT AMONG CONTEMPORARY RURAL YOUTH
Anne Larsen
University of Copenhagen
Keywords:
Stylization practices, dialect, rurality, youth.
Abstract:
In the project Dialect in the periphery we examine the current status and usage of
dialects in three Danish dialect areas with a focus on adolescents’ social and linguistic
everyday practices.
This paper focuses on data from the small island in the Baltic Sea called Bornholm. As
part of a team of researchers I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork among a group
of adolescents from 8th to 9th grade. The project data are audio and video recordings of
interactions including interviews, group conversations and self-recordings conducted
by the participants themselves. Furthermore, we have collected data from the
participants’ profiles on Facebook and Instagram. In addition, we have carried out
interviews and audio recordings of some of the adolescents’ parents and grandparents.
Our quantitative analysis of group recordings and interviews shows that the
standardization process on Bornholm is especially advanced in the young generation,
and that the change from dialect to standard has happened quite abruptly from one
generation to the next. The parents and grandparents use lexical, grammatical,
phonetical and prosodic dialect features whereas the adolescents do not use any of
these features in unmarked speech. Even the local prosodic features as the
Bornholmian intonation pattern which is considered to be the most persistent dialect
feature (Grønnum 2005: 340; Kristiansen et al. 2013) is absent among the
adolescents, and even locally oriented boys who could be expected to use the most
local dialect features (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003) speak standard Danish.
However, our ethnographic informed qualitative study suggests that dialect features
are still used among the adolescents. In the audio recordings conducted by the
adolescents during school and leisure time activities it appears that the adolescents
use a variety of dialect features but that these features primarily occur in interactions
among the adolescents in stylization practices (Rampton 2009:149).
In this presentation I aim to show how the adolescents across gender, place orientation
and class affiliation use dialect features in their everyday interaction with their peers.
Their stylizations indicate that the Bornholmian dialect indexes masculinity, toughness,
incorrectness and negative school orientation. Furthermore the study shows that the
local dialect among various groups of the adolescents has social value as an in-group
register used to accentuate friendship relations and maintain local ties.
References:
Eckert, P. and S. McConnell-Ginet (2003). Language and Gender. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Grønnum, N. (2005). Fonetik and Fonologi. København: Akademisk Forlag.
347
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Kristiansen, T., N. Pharao and M. Maegaard (2013). Controlled manipulation of
intonational difference: An experimental study of intonation patterns as the
basis for language-ideological constructs of geographical provenance and
linguistic standardness in young Danes. In T. Kristiansen and S. Grondelaers
(eds.). Language (De)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: Experimental
Studies (pp. 355–374). Oslo: Novus.
Rampton, B. (2009). Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and
stylization. Language in Society 38, 149–176.
348
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ON THE VARIATION BETWEEN IF AND WHETHER IN BRITISH ENGLISH
Cristina Lastres-López
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Keywords:
If, whether, conjunction, complementiser, subordinate interrogative.
Abstract:
This paper explores the syntactic variation between the conjunctions if and whether in
closed subordinate interrogatives, as illustrated in (1) and (2) below.
(1) I don't know if they are any good though <ICE-GB:S1B-005 #173:1:A>
(2) I don’t know whether he was giving it or taking it <ICE-GB:S1A-005 #253>
While the use of whether is restricted to subordinate interrogatives, if also occurs in
conditional clauses. However, taking aside conditionals, both conjunctions display a
similar grammatical behaviour in instances such as the ones presented above. In such
contexts, if and whether are usually defined as grammatically interchangeable
complementizers (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002: 973), although there are slight semantic
and stylistic differences between the use of these two conjunctions (Eckardt, 2007:
462). Previous research indicates that it cannot be demonstrated that if and whether
occur in free distribution (Gawlik, 2013: 131), thus it seems that there are certain
factors that trigger the use of one complementizer over the other. This presentation will
explore and try to determine which are the factors that influence the choice of
conjunction in closed subordinate interrogatives. The distribution of both
complementizers is examined by means of a corpus-based analysis, scrutinising data
extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB)
(Nelson, Wallis, & Aarts, 2002). The data were extracted automatically using the
International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Programme (ICECUP) and the Fuzzy
Tree Fragment tool, which allows to construct and retrieve specific grammatical
structures directly; the results were then manually analysed in a database according to
a number of variables. Preliminary results reveal that, in addition to the preference of
certain verbs for one complementizer over the other, much of the variation may be
related to sociolinguistic factors.
References:
Eckardt, R. (2007). The syntax and pragmatics of embedded yes/no questions. In K.
Schwabe and S. Winkler (eds.). On Information Structure, Meaning and Form.
Generalizations across languages (pp. 447-466). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gawlik, O. (2013). On 'if' and 'whether' complement clauses of 'see','wonder', and
'know' in contemporary spoken academic American English: A corpus-based
study. Respectus Philologicus 24(29), 131-141.
Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, G., S. Wallis and B. Aarts (2002). Exploring Natural Language: The British
Component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
349
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LANGUAGE VARIATION AND THE LOCAL SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS OF THE
POTTERIES
Hannah Mary Leach
University of Sheffield
Keywords:
Sociophonetics, stoke-on-trent, social class, dialect.
Abstract:
This paper investigates how speakers use language variation to model the social
relationships and hierarchies particular to their local, industrial community. Much
previous research has focused on mining and steel industries (Llamas, 2000; Dyer,
2001; Burland, 2016; Devlin, 2016) but my data examines language variation in The
Potteries, the dominant pottery industry centred around Stoke-on-Trent, in the northwest Midlands of the UK. Using oral history data, I demonstrate how two variables, one
with a recognisable and broad indexical relationship to social class (H-dropping; see
Wells, (1982)) and one with local recognition and significance (the horsES vowel; see
Leach (2012)), are used in this industrial community.
My analysis will focus on a subset of an oral history archive comprising 27 speakers
who worked in “the world’s leading centre of pottery manufacture” (Imrie, 1991, p.436).
My speakers are aged between 58 and 91 and were recorded in the early 2000s. Using
27 hours of interview data alongside historical documentation of the pottery industry
(Mervyn, 1961; Sekers, 1981; Baker, 1991; Edensor, 2000), I examine how social and
structural hierarchies within the pottery industry correlate with language variation in this
unique location. More specifically, I focus upon specific ‘skilled’ (designer, fireman,
freehand paintress) and ‘unskilled’ (glazer, placer, caster) roles, and the disparities
between male and female workers.
The distribution of H-dropping reflects its recognition as a locus of social class variation
across the UK. Most speakers in the dataset do not articulate initial /h/, aside from
those in jobs held in high esteem (management), those which are outward-facing
(administrators), or those who worked away from the majority of workers on the factory
floor (designers). This pattern may reflect the well-established indexical link
(Silverstein, 2003; Johnstone, 2010) between H-retention and higher social standing
(Wells, 1982, p.253) although, in the Potteries, the distribution of H-dropping seems to
more specifically distinguish specific industrial roles that are non-manual (and
conducted away from the factory floor environment), and more manual occupations.
In contrast, the variation between standard [ɪ] and local [i:] in the horsES vowel, which is
restricted to the city itself and parts of the nearby region, shows little significant
correlation with social categories such as gender, geographical origin, or industrial role.
The patterns of this variable suggest that it may be indexically linked to The Potteries
itself. This is demonstrated through case studies of individual speakers who use tenser
and laxer realisations of the horsES vowel depending on their topic of conversation
(work-related or non-work-related), and their stance towards the industry and their time
spent working in it.
By focusing on this particular location and two distinctive variables, my research
demonstrates the importance of place to the study of language variation. More
specifically, it also shows how the type of linguistic variable studied may affect our
understanding of the social meanings of linguistic variation.
350
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References:
Baker, D. (1991). Potworks: the industrial architechture of the Staffordshire Potteries.
London: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.
Burland, K. (2016). Where the Black Country meets ‘Black Barnsley’: dialect variation
and identity in an ex-mining community of Barnsley. In E. Moore and C.
Montgomery (eds.). A sense of place: studies in language and region.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Devlin, T. (2016). Vowel shift in East Durham coal mining vocabulary. Northern
Englishes Workshop 7. University of Edinburgh.
Dyer, J. (2001). Changing dialects and identites in a Scottish-English community. U.
Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 7.3, 43-57.
Edensor, T. (2000). Reclaiming Stoke-on-Trent: Leisure, Space and Identity in the
Potteries. Staffordshire: Staffordshire University Press.
Imrie, R. (1991). Industrial change and local economic fragmentation: the case of
Stoke-on-Trent. Geoforum 22(4), 433-453.
Johnstone, B. (2010). Indexing the local. In N. Coupland (ed.). The Handbook of
Language and Globalization. London: Blackwell.
Leach, H. (2012). The witch[i:z] watch [ɪt] - variable tense unstressed vowels in Stokeon-Trent. MA. University of York.
Leigh, F. (2011). North Staffs Dialect: Ow Ter Toke Raight (5th ed). Staffordshire:
Staffs Publishing.
Llamas, C. (2000). Middlesbrough English: Convergent and divergent trends in a ‘part
of Britain with no identity’. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics
8, 123–48.
Mervyn, J. (1961). Potbank: a social enquiry into Life in the Potteries. Life in Britain.
London: Secker & Warburg.
Montgomery, C. (2003). Variety of English used in the North Staffordshire Potteries.
BA. University of Sheffield.
Sekers, D. (1981). The Potteries. Buckinghamshire: Shire Publishing.
Silverstein, M. (2003.) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.
Language and Communication 23, 193–229.
Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English 1: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
351
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TRACKING CHANGE IN SOCIAL MEANING: THE INDEXICALITY OF [é:] IN RURAL
AND URBAN SWEDEN
Therese Leinonen
Jenny Nilsson
Lena Wenner
Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden
Keywords:
Language change, indexicality, social meaning, sociophonetics.
Abstract:
In this study, we focus on [i:] (a variant of the phoneme /i:/, see e.g. Björsten &
Engstrand 1999) which has different connotations in different parts of Sweden in order
to highlight and problematize processes behind changes in social meaning for a
linguistic form. The variant in question is found in some areas in Sweden, and its social
meaning seems to be changing in different ways in different locations. Here, we
investigate the feature in two rural areas (South Bohuslän and South Hälsingland),
where it has been part of the traditional dialect system indexing place, and in one urban
area (Sweden’s second largest city Gothenburg), where it at least in the mid-20th
century marked social class and gender.
In order to investigate the variant’s separate social meanings and how this has
changed over time we have approached the phenomenon from three angles in the
three investigated areas. First, we have investigated the use of the variant in data from
the mid-20th century compared to the use in data recorded today. Second, we have
made interviews with informants about their more or less conscious attitudes towards
the variant. In this part of the investigation, we have used discourse analysis to
establish how informants in the separate locations position themselves and others in
relation to the linguistic variant. Finally, we have conducted an IAT experiment
(Greenwald et al. 1998; Campbell-Kibler 2012) in order to test to what extent [i:] is
associated with urbanity/rurality at the three investigation sites.
Our results indicate that the correlation between linguistic form and social meaning
is changing in (at least) two ways. In the rural areas investigated, the use of [i:]
has been de-localized: from simply indexing place and traditional dialect, it seems to
have become linked to urbanity rather than to locality and tradition (compare Agha
2003). In urban Gothenburg, [i:] has gone from marking young educated female to
becoming more and more enregistered as a part of the Gothenburg dialect (for a
similar case, see Johnstone on Pittsburghese, i.e. Johnstone, Andrus & Danielson
2006; Johnstone 2009, 2013). By approaching the phenomenon with different
methods, we are also able to discuss the relationship between conscious and
unconscious attitudes on the one hand, and use of linguistic form on the other.
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CONTACT AND EXPOSURE TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN KIRIBATI ACROSS
TIME
Toblas Leonhardt
University of Bern
Keywords:
Post-colonial Englishes, contact, exposure, VOT, Kiribati.
Abstract:
Kiribati consists of 33 islands scattered across Micronesia, in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean. Its contact history with people from Western cultures only begins in the 18th
century and was not intense then or since. Politically, Kiribati fell under British
administration in 1892 and became independent in 1979, but this period too was
marked by a peculiar absence of its ruler. Today, Kiribati is one of the least visited
countries of the world (United Nations World Tourism Organization, 2015) and less
than 1 % of its roughly 100’000 inhabitants are of foreign origin (2010 Census). As a
consequence of British colonial rule, however, English is an official language and has
prominence in administrative, educational, and also other domains.
In this paper, I aim to discuss the complexity of Kiribati’s contact history, and attempt to
explain how it has shaped Kiribati’s current linguistic reality. Therefore, I firstly provide
a brief general description of Kiribati English features in order to show that,
unsurprisingly with its historical background, substrate language effects are suggested
in many cases; and secondly, I investigate in more detail how exposure to the English
language as a factor influences linguistic behaviour. Interestingly, while some linguistic
variables, in particular the voice onset time (VOT) of alveolar plosives /t, d/, exhibit
gradual changes over different age groups in the direction of the target language, there
is no such gradual change in exposure level over time.
In Kiribati, exposure to the English language is indeed a very complex factor that is
linked to place of upbringing, schooling, occupation, mobility, and more. Thus, it cannot
be equated with a speaker’s proficiency level. Owing to an unusual contact history, it is
hardly possible to make generalisations about exposure levels across certain periods.
It would be erroneous, for example, to assume that younger speakers would be more
exposed to English than older speakers had been some decades ago, because of
globalisation, or vice versa, that older speakers were more exposed than young,
because they were schooled during the British administration. My data (1-hour long
sociolinguistic interviews with 33 I-Kiribati informants who differ across many social
factors, including age, education, occupation, mobility, etc.) confirm that there is no
substantial correlation between exposure level and age; on the contrary, by comparing
same-aged people, young or old, it becomes apparent how very dissimilar their
backgrounds with the English language are.
In short, neither Kiribati’s contact history nor the statistical analyses of my data suggest
that exposure levels gradually increased over time. Exposure can thus not be
accounted for the gradual changes in linguistic behaviour. It is more likely that this
pattern emerges as a result of increased outward orientation.
References:
Kiribati National Statistics Office, Secretariat of the Pacific Community Statistics for
Development Programme (2012). Kiribati 2010 Census, vol 2: Analytical Report.
Noumea: Secretariat of the Pacific Community.
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United Nations World Tourism Organization (2015) [online]. UNWTO tourism highlights,
2015
edition.
Available
at:
http://www.eunwto.org/doi/book/10.18111/9789284416899.
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SAME DIFFERENCE:
THE PHONETIC SHAPE OF HIGH RISING TERMINALS IN LONDON
Erez Levon
Queen Mary University of London
Keywords:
HRT, London English, intonation in discourse, acoustic analysis, social/pragmatic
meaning.
Abstract:
It is uncontroversial that intonational variation carries meaning. Whether
conceptualised as derived from language-specific conventions (e.g., Pierrehumbert and
Hirschberg 1990) or from more universal, biologically-based “codes” (e.g., Ohala 1983,
1994), research has established that differences in intonational tune serve to encode a
variety of distinct referential meanings, speaker attitudes and emotions. A clear
illustration of this can be found in the different tune shapes that have been identified for
utterance-final rising pitch contours on declarative statements (i.e., so-called High
Rising Terminals, or HRT). Scholars in a number of locations, including Australia
(Flecther & Harrington 2001; Fletcher et al. 2002), New Zealand (e.g., Warren 2005,
2016; Warren & Daly 2005), and the US (e.g., Barry 2008; Ritchart & Arvaniti 2014;
Armstrong et al. 2016), have found that differences in the social and/or pragmatic
distributions of the contour correlate with differences in its phonetic or phonological
shape.
In this paper, I examine whether the same pattern holds for HRT in London. The
examination is motivated by my own prior research (Author 2016), which has
demonstrated that there are significant differences in the extent to which different social
groups in London make use of HRT, and, for the who are regular users, the meanings
that the contour is used to convey. Data are drawn from 16 small-group interviews with
42 white, middle-class speakers of London English (28 women, 14 men) aged 18-25.
From this corpus, 719 HRT contours (from a total 7,351 declarative IPs, or 9.8%) were
auditorily identified and extracted. Analyses of the phonetic shape of the extracted
contours focus on three properties that have been identified as relevant in previous
research:
1) rise excursion, or the total span of pitch movement from the nuclear pitch
accent to the end of the IP;
2) rise dynamism, or the slope of pitch change during the final rise; and
3) rise alignment, or the point at which the upward movement of the rise begins in
the final pitch phrase.
Mixed-model regression analyses are built in R to examine each of these properties
and the extent to which they vary across the social and functional categories shown in
my previous work to constrain the relative frequency of HRT in London.
Results indicate that despite significant differences in rates of use across categories,
the phonetic shape of the contour does not vary in relation to either social or
functional/pragmatic factors. This is surprising since it contradicts much previous
research on the feature (though cf. Tyler 2015; Arvaniti & Atkins 2016). Moreover, the
lack of phonetic differentiation is also not predicted by standard theories of intonation in
discourse (e.g., Pierrehumbert 1980; Ladd 2008). In the talk, I discuss the potential
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ramifications of this finding for our understandings of prosodic variation and the
meanings of intonation more generally.
356
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A VARIATIONIST LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE EMERGING
ENGLISH IN KOSRAE, MICRONESIA
Sara Lynch
University of Bern
Keywords:
Englishes, sociolinguistics, phonology.
Abstract:
This study introduces the breadth of linguistic characteristics of the previously
unresearched variety of English emerging on Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia
(FSM). English is spoken as the inter-island lingua franca throughout Micronesia and
has been the official language of FSM since gaining its independence in 1986, whilst
still retaining close diplomatic and economic ties with the US. I present here an analysis based on a corpus of 96 Kosraean English speakers,
compiled during a three month fieldwork trip to the island in the North-Western Pacific.
The 45 minute, sociolinguistically sensitive recordings are drawn from a corpus of old
and young, with varying levels of education, occupations, and off-island experiences.
The conversations were transcribed and focus variables were analysed using the R
statistical programme. In the first part of the paper I offer an overview of salient and representational features
of spontaneous spoken Kosraean English and suggest how this analysis fits in with the
framework of other varieties of English worldwide. For the latter part of the paper, I outline the factors which appear to influence the
production of [h] insertion and /h/ deletion, prominent features of KosE. The first
variable, the realisation of /h/ (as in 1) is often subject to deletion in both L1 and L2
varieties of English. 1. Male, 31: yeah I build their house their local huts and they pay me /h/ deletion is a salient feature of Kosraean English, and according to my statistical
analysis is constrained primarily by social factors. Women consistently employ /h/
deletion more than men. Age appears a strong influencing factor also, with older
generations proving much more likely to delete /h/. The motivations affecting these
results range from off-island experiences and also attitudes towards English, to the
United States and to island traditions. The second feature under scrutiny is the variable epenthesis of [h] to provide a
consonantal onset to vowel-initial syllables. 2. Male, 31: that guy is really hold now This practice is also found beyond Kosraean English. Previous studies find hepenthesis arising in L1 varieties including Newfoundland (Clark, 2010) and Tristan de
Cunha English (Schreier, 2003). [h] insertion is found to have intralinguistic features as
the main determining factors, with both lexicality and following environment
constraining its use (see figure 2.). In this paper I provide a concise sociolinguistic description of the variety. I address the
current linguistic state of English on Kosrae and investigate the intralinguistic and
extralinguistic factors motivating the patterns of these specific variables. 357
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References:
Clarke, S. (2010). Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Schreier, D. and K. Lavarello-Schreier (2003). Tristan da Cunha: History People
Language. London: Battlebridge.
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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PLACE: DIALECT AND STANDARDIZATION ACROSS
THREE GENERATIONS IN THREE DANISH DIALECT AREAS
Marie Maegaard
Malene Monka
University of Copenhagen
Keywords:
Dialect, sociolinguistics, standardization, linguistic change, place.
Abstract:
The project Dialect in the Periphery examines dialect use and processes of
standardization in three geographically peripheral locations in Denmark: Northern
Jutland, Southern Jutland, and the island of Bornholm. Processes of linguistic
standardization in the traditional dialect areas of Denmark has been described in
numerous publications through the last decades (e.g. Coupland & Kristiansen 2011;
Maegaard et al. 2013, Pedersen 2003), and most often focus has been on the rapid
change from the use of local dialect features to the use of standard features spreading
from Copenhagen.
In our study we examine three different dialect areas and follow the use of local dialect
across three generations. Our results show that while standardization is taking (and
has taken) place in all three areas, it happens in very different ways and at different
paces. Based on quantitative analyses of the language use of 20 speakers from each
location, representing families of three generations, we will show how standardization
has taken place. The overall results show that while the standardization process in
Northern Jutland seems to have happened quite dramatically several generations ago,
in Southern Jutland the young speakers still use quite a high degree of local dialect
features, and on the island of Bornholm we see the standardization process happening
very drastically from one generation to the next.
In our talk we will present these quantitative results, and we will include analyses of
other project data (ethnography, interviews, interaction data, and social media data) in
our interpretation of them. We will argue that the different patterns are best explained
by looking into differences in local place-making processes; i.e. how anonymous space
is turned into someone’s place (Auer 2013). This means giving attention to a number of
factors that may influence language use, linguistic ideologies, and norms, e.g.
geographical, historical, cultural, political, socio-economic, and attitudinal factors
(Britain 2002; Johnstone 2004). Qualitative analyses point to differences in placemaking processes and in the role ascribed to the local dialect in these processes in the
three locations.
References:
Auer, P. (2013) [online]. The Geography of Language: Steps toward a New Approach.
FRAGL 16. Available at: https://portal.uni-freiburg.de/sdd/fragl/ 2013.16.
Britain, D. (2002). Space and Spatial Diffusion. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N.
Schilling-Estes (eds.). The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp.
603-637). Maiden: Blackwell.
Coupland, N. and Kristiansen, T. (2011). SLICE: Critical perspectives on language
(de)standardization. In T. Kristiansen and N. Coupland (eds.) Standard
Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe (pp. 11-35). Oslo:
Novus Press.
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Johnstone, B. (2004). Place, Globalization, and Linguistic Variation. In C. Fought (ed.).
Sociolinguistic Variation - Critical Reflections (pp.65-83). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Maegaard, M., T. J Jensen, T. Kristiansen and J. N Jørgensen (2013). Diffusion of
Language Change: Accommodation to a Moving Target. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 17, 3-36.
Pedersen, I. L. (2003). Traditional dialects of Danish and the de-dialectalization 19002000. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 159, 9-28.
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GENDER ASSIGNMENT IN REFERENCE TO FEMALE PERSONS IN
LUXEMBOURGISH BY NATIVE PORTUGUESE SPEAKERS
Sara Martin
University of Luxembourg
Keywords:
Luxembourgish, native Portuguese speakers, gender assignment, neuter, pragmatic
distance.
Abstract:
Due to migration, Luxembourg has a large Portuguese speaking community. In fact,
according to a recent study, 15,7% of the population consider Portuguese as their main
language (Fehlen/Heinz 2016: 33); many of them acquire Luxembourgish as their L2 or
L3. The Luxembourgish language is per se particularly interesting because the
standardization processes are still ongoing, which leads to great variation. As a result
of a large community of non-native Luxembourgish speakers (including native
Portuguese speakers), variation increases even more.1
This paper focuses on the analysis of gender assignment in reference to female
persons in Luxembourgish by native Portuguese speakers. The study of the use of
pronouns (such as personal and possessive pronouns) is especially interesting
because in the 3rd person singular, Luxembourgish has different pronouns: hien/en
(m.), si/se (f.) and hatt/et (n.). For referring to female persons, there are two
possibilities: either the feminine or the neuter pronoun is used - the choice depending
on pragmatic factors, such as age, respect, social hierarchy, etc. Until now, not much
research has been done on this specific topic (exceptions are e.g. Döhmer 2016 and
Nübling 2015). In general, the aspect of pragmatic distance is decisive in the choice of
gender assignment. In cases of higher pragmatic distance, the feminine pronouns si/se
are used instead of the neuter pronouns hatt/et. In many cases, the pattern of gender
assignment is rather stable but there is still variation depending on the type of the
name (e.g. first name, first name + surname, title (+surname)). Female first names are
generally neuter, titles (such as Mamm 'mother') are feminine. Between those two
categories, there are different types of names, which can either take the feminine or
neuter pronoun (e.g. Schwëster 'sister').
These use patterns are difficult to learn for native Portuguese speakers, because on
one hand there is variation in the gender assignment depending on pragmatic factors
and different types of names and on the other hand the Portuguese language only
distinguishes between feminine and masculine gender and has no comparable neuter
forms to refer to female persons. The paper therefore investigates the differences in
the use pattern of feminine and neuter pronouns in reference to female persons in
Luxembourgish by native Portuguese speakers and native Luxembourgish speakers.
The study combines the analysis of quantitative (written) data (i.e. questionnaire) as
well as qualitative (spoken) data (e.g. picture and video description, interview). Results
from both parts of the study will be presented and discussed.
References:
Döhmer, C. (2016). Formenbestand und strukturelle Asymmetrien
Personalpronomen im Luxemburgischen. In ZDL, Beihefte, pp. 13-38.
der
1
Only 55,8% of the population in Luxembourg consider Luxembourgish as their main language
(Fehlen/Heinz 2016: 33).
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Fehlen, F. and Heinz, A. (2016). Die Luxemburger Mehrsprachigkeit. Ergebnisse einer
Volkszählung. Bielefeld: transcript.
Nübling, D. (2015). Between feminine and neuter, between semantic and pragmatic
gender assignment: Hybrid names in German dialects and in Luxembourgish. In
J. Fleischer et al. (eds). In Agreement from a Diachronic Perspective (pp. 235265). Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
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ON THE SPREAD OF URBAN VERNACULARS THROUGH MEDIA: EVIDENCE
FROM A TWITTER CORPUS
Stefania Marzo
Tom Ruette
Freek Van De Velde
Eline Zenner
University of Leuven
Keywords:
Geolocation, quantitative variationist methods, variation and style, media,
twitter.
Abstract:
Over the past twenty years contemporary urban vernaculars (CUVs) have been
identified across a wide range of European contexts and generally in urban areas with
a large immigrant population. In all these contexts, CUVs are spreading among local
youngsters and are stylized in youngsters’ interactions. As the linguistic behaviour of
youngsters using CUV features is too heterogeneous and variable to support a single
variety, sociolinguists generally agree that CUVs do not represent distinct varieties but
rather fluid styles. However, recent studies have also shown that it is possible to
identity a more or less coherent linguistic system that forms part of the speakers’
linguistic resources (Hinskens/Guy 2016; Wiese/Rehbein 2016).
Despite a number of studies on these linguistic aspects of CUVs (Quist/Svendsen
2008; Van Meel et al. 2013), too little is known about the way features spread among
the broader community, for example through mass media. A question we need to deal
with in order to further our understanding of the coherence and uniformity of CUVs is:
which CUV features spread in the broader community and do they spread with the
same stylistic/discursive loading?
In this paper, we tackle this question by focusing on the spread of a Flemish urban
vernacular (Citétaal). As Citétaal has known a growing popularity in Flemish media (in
two Flemish fiction series), a few popular (lexical, morhological and phonological)
features are now spreading in social media texts (in particular on Twitter) of speakers
who are not the prototypical users of Citétaal.
By analyzing a self-collected corpus of geo-located tweets, we will first offer a birdseye view on the spread of these features, by analyzing their use before and
immediately after the release of two popular fiction series. Based on the most
widespread features (e.g. the palatalisation of [s + Consontant] and the use of the word
vies (‘ugly’) as an intensive marker), we will perform a more fine-grained corpus
analysis and scrutinize how with which stylistic purposes these features are spreading.
A quantitative analysis of the distribution of the variants across speakers (relying on
regression modeling) is complemented by an in-depth qualitative discursive analysis
(focusing on the stylistic loading of the feature). This allows us to integrate in situ
patterns of intra-speaker variation with aggregative patterns of inter-speaker variation.
We show that a few typical features of Citétaal are spreading in Flanders after the
recent Flemish fiction series, but that their use does not remain exclusively linked to
these series. Further, it is shown that the features are used with different stylistic
purposes depending on the locality of the speakers. These findings will be discussed
against the background of recent insights into the coherence and uniformity of
contemporary urban vernaculars.
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References:
Hinskens and Guy (eds.). (2016). Coherence, covariation and bricolage: Various
approaches to the systematicity of language variation. Lingua 172-173.
Quist and Svendsen (eds.) (2008). Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. New Linguistic
Practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Van Meel, L., F. Hinskens and R. van Hout (2016). Co-variation and varieties in
modern Dutch ethnolects. Lingua 172–173, 72–86.
Wiese and Rehbein (2016). Coherence in new urban dialects. A case study. Lingua
172-173, 45-61.
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ANALYSING THE DIAPHASIC DIMENSION OF DIALECT USE IN ITALY FROM THE
PERSPECTIVE OF LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY
Sara Matrisciano
Heidelberg University
Keywords:
Variationist sociolinguistics, diaphasia, dialects, language ideology, Italy.
Abstract:
Within research on linguistic variation, the analysis of diachronic, diatopic, diastratic
and diaphasic variations is essential. In Italy, the diatopic dimension has always played
an important role in the analysis of linguistic variation and change, especially with
regard to the interaction of the dialects (independent language systems that developed
directly from Latin) and the standard language.
It is indisputable that in Italy, there is an ongoing process of language shift towards
Italian. Nevertheless, in some Italian regions, the dialects remain particularly vivid.
Indeed, more than fifty years after Gerhard Rohlfs famously described Italy as the
European country with the highest number of dialects, linguists working on Italy are still
confronted with the huge linguistic variety in the Peninsula. The survival of many
dialects has led to situations of bilingualism with and without diglossia, in which codeswitching/code-mixing between Italian and dialect have become frequent in verbal
interaction – not only in informal conversation (Berruto 1997; Sobrero 1997).
Nowadays, it is widely acknowledged that dialect use (or the use of dialectal features)
can fulfil various communicative functions (e.g. expressive, emphatic, ludic functions),
which are part of the diaphasic dimension. The diaphasic dimension, however, often
appears as a category which includes everything that does not fit into the other
dimensions of variation. Dialect use in Italy goes far beyond traditional diaphasic
categories, such as the distinction between formal and informal settings, and the
reasons for dialect use can differ from region to region and city to city (Berruto 2006).
This multi-faceted sociolinguistic situation demonstrates the need for scholars to
rethink the diatopic variation as part of the diaphasic dimension and to develop more
sophisticated classification models within the diaphasic dimension.
In my presentation, I will provide examples of diaphasically motivated dialect use
gathered from an ongoing qualitative case study in Naples, which cannot be
adequately described through macro categories – formal vs. informal – but need to be
analysed through a microanalytic lens, paying particular attention to the sociocultural
context and underlying language ideologies. In Naples, dialect use is ideologically
linked to power, as it functions as a protective technique in everyday interaction. The
analysis of such a language ideology allows one to define more closely the dynamics
within the diaphasic dimension and to contour diaphasic subcategories. The
identification and examination of these subcategories – especially with regard to
settings where dialect is used deliberately, even strategically – contribute to a deeper
understanding of the social structures, social practices, and power relations within
specific speech communities, providing insights into their linguistic choices and
practices (Cavanaugh 2013) and, with that, contribute to the specification of diaphasic
variations.
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References:
Berruto, G. (2006). A mo’ di introduzione. In A. Sobrero (ed.). Lingua e dialetto
nell’Italia del Duemila 5-13.
Berruto, G. (1997). Code switching and code-mixing. In M. Maiden (ed.). The dialects
of Italy 394-400.
Cavanaugh, J. (2013). Language ideologies and language attitudes. In P. Auer.
Language Variation–European Perspectives IV, 45-56.
Sobrero, A. (1997). Italianization of the dialects. In M. Maiden (ed.). The dialects of
Italy, 412-418.
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OLLEI I’M PICKY CHERRANG WITH A GIRL I LIKE CHERRANG: NATIVISATION
OF A NEWLY EMERGING POSTCOLONIAL ENGLISH VARIETY
Kazuko Matsumoto
University of Tokyo
Keywords:
Discourse-pragmatic variation, address term, grammaticalisation, discourse marker,
postcolonial.
Abstract:
This paper reports variationist research on the adoption and adaptation of indigenous
Palauan discourse-pragmatic features in a newly emerging postcolonial English variety
in the Pacific. The use of the Palauan address terms ollei, charrach and cherrang has
been expanded in Palauan English, so for example, Palauan’s male-exclusive term
ollei (Josephs 1990) is used by females in Palauan English. The original function of
ollei as an address term has also been expanded to serve some of the functions that
you know (e.g., appealing for understanding: Müller 2005) and dude (exclamation,
mitigation, agreement, discourse structure: Kiesling 2004) are acknowledged as
serving in other varieties of English.
The data consist of over 85,000 words by 20 teenagers, which is part of a “new” larger
corpus of Palauan English containing recording of different generations collected
between 2010 and 2015. Spontaneous conversation among same-sex close friends
are qualitatively and quantitatively analysed to examine both the distributions and
functions of ollei together with those of you know and dude.
Our real-time analysis of these address terms on the basis of an “older” corpus of
Palauan English conversations collected in 2000 and a “newer” one collected between
2010 and 2015 indicates linguistic change in progress. We can draw this conclusion
from only rare occurrences of these Palauan address terms in our older corpus as
opposed to their very frequent use among predominantly teenagers in our newer
corpus. This suggests that they are likely to have been only slowly entering the variety
in the late 1990s, but have been spreading rapidly by 2010, mostly among teenagers.
Our statistical analyses of these address terms used by teenagers in our new corpus
according to gender and education indicate that they are strongly sociolinguistically
stratified by education and gender. Particularly boys who are publicly, rather than
privately educated, and who have not travelled extensively outside of Palau appear to
be leaders of this linguistic change. A closer analysis of functional distributions,
however, suggest that young girls also use ollei to other girls only when ollei serves
functions other than its original function as an address term. Girls seem to be
conservatively following the traditional rule of how to use ollei in Palauan (i.e., the
male-exclusive term used by males to address males; Josephs 1990), not using ollei
when it serves as the original function as an address term, but only when ollei serves
the expanded functions, do girls also use it.
The actuation of the adoption of these indigenous address terms in Palauan English is
discussed in terms of (a) contextual factors (the continued lack of face-to-face
American English input to everyday life in Palau) and (b) change in speakers’
perceptions towards English spoken in Palau (from L2 for adults to their own distinct
variety of English, “Palish”, for youngsters). This paper argues that this is potential
evidence of the nativisation of Palauan English, while emphasising the need for a
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further, more specific account for the linguistic diffusion of these grammaticalised
discourse markers.
References:
Josephs, L. S. (1990). New Palauan-English Dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Kiesling, S. F. (2004). Dude. American Speech 79(3), 281-305.
Müller, S. (2005). Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schneider, E. (2007). Postcolonial Englishes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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LANGUAGE CONTACT PHENOMENA IN SOUTH TYROLEAN HIGH SCHOOL
GRADUATES:
THE USAGE OF REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS
Mara Maya Victoria Leonardi
Alexander Glück
Free University of Bozen
Keywords:
Language variation, orality/literacy, internal/external multilingualism.
Abstract:
The province of South Tyrol in northern Italy constitutes a linguistic area in which
most inhabitants are characterized by internal and external multilingualism.
Internal multilingualism refers to the co-existence of local varieties of German, namely
Bavarian dialects, and the regional variety of Standard German. External
multilingualism, on the other hand, refers to the presence of both German and Italian.
In our presentation, we shall present preliminary results obtained from the ongoing
project “KOMMA – Sprachkompetenzen von Maturantinnen und Maturanten”.
The project investigates cohesion phenomena in written as well as spoken
discourses of South Tyrolean high school graduates and the possible influence
of their contact language(s). The written data includes 430 school texts produced
within the school context. The spoken data comprises 254 elicited interviews as
well as focus group discussions. All subjects speak a German variety as (one of) their
first language(s), and attend a high school in which German is the only language of
tuition (except in foreign language classes). However, they have also learned Italian
from their first primary school year at the latest.
We aim to describe characteristics in these graduates’ usage of reflexive
pronouns, which have thus far only been mentioned sporadically and
unsystematically in the literature. Furthermore, we will also try to explain the
extent to which these characteristics can be ascribed to subjects’ first language,
namely a Bavarian dialect, or to Italian, their contact language.
References:
Egger, K. (1979). Morphologische und syntaktische Interferenzen an der
deutschitalienischen Sprachgrenze in Südtirol. In P. S. Ureland (ed.). Standardsprache
und Dialekte in mehrsprachigen Gebieten Europas (pp. 55-104). Tübingen:
Niemeyer.
Eichinger, L. (2002). South Tyrol: German and Italian in a Changing World. Journal of
Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23, 137-149.
Gast, V. and F. Haas (2008). On reciprocal and reflexive uses of anaphors in German
and other European languages. In E. König and V. Gast (eds.). Reciprocals and
Reflexives: Cross-linguistic and Theoretical Explorations (pp. 307-346). Berlin
and New York: de Gruyter.
Gast, V. and D. Hole (2003). On Paradigmatic (In)Coherence in Romance and
Germanic Reflexives. In L. Gunkel, G. Müller and G. Zifonun (eds.). Arbeiten
zur Reflexivierung (pp. 75-89). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
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Riedmann, G. (1979). Bemerkungen zur deutschen Gegenwartssprache in Südtirol. In
P. S. Ureland (ed.). Standardsprache und Dialekte in mehrsprachigen Gebieten
Europas (pp. 149-181). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Riehl, C. M. (2008). German-Romance language contact and language conflict in Italy,
France and Belgium. In J. Warren and H. Benbow (eds.). Multilingual Europe:
Reflections on Language and Identity (pp. 129-148). Cambridge: Cambridge
Scholar Press.
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COLONIALISM, CAPITALISM AND CONSONANTS: THE EMERGENCE OF
NAURUAN ENGLISH
Laura Mettler
University of Bern
Keywords:
Postcolonial English, language variation and change, language attitudes, variationist
sociolinguistics.
Abstract:
Nauru is a tiny island republic in the western Pacific Ocean located just 60 km south of
the equator. It belongs to the region of Micronesia and its nearest neighbour is Banaba
(Ocean Island) in the Republic of Kiribati, 330 km to the east. Nauru is bordered to the
south-west by the Solomon Islands and to the north and north-west by the Marshall
Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.
Nauru has a complex colonial past and experienced a variety of different colonial
rulers: Germany, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan are all implicated.
First contacts with the English language took place in the 19th century: Traders,
whalers, beachcombers and runaway convicts called sporadically on Nauru, and
towards the end of the century the first missionaries arrived. What undoubtedly
changed the fate of this small nation, however, was the discovery of phosphate in
1900. Vast deposits of this highly valuable mineral put Nauru much in demand, and this
has powerfully shaped its social, economic, political and especially also linguistic
development ever since. High numbers of mining workers were imported from China
and Nauru’s neighbouring islands, while the colonisers were in charge of
administration, business, politics and profits. In 1968 Nauru finally gained
independence as well as control over the phosphate and its assets.
Due to the diverse language groups present on Nauru, English has since initial
colonisation served as the main lingua franca (except for the short Japanese
occupation) and continues to be the main language of education, administration,
business, politics and intercultural communication. To date there exists but one paper
on Pidgin English in Nauru, however. In 2015, I collected informal recordings of 39
participants, resulting in approximately 34 h of recorded Nauruan English, with the aim
of addressing this research gap. Nauru is especially interesting because few
communities where English emerged under Australian rather than British or American
colonial rule have been studied so far.
This presentation has the following aims: Firstly, to set the emergence of English in
Nauru into the context of the country’s complex colonial past. Nauru’s colonial rulers
have exercised control in different ways, with different degrees of settler migration,
different local policies, and with the mining worker communities Nauru experienced a
wide range of different linguistic influences over the course of the 19th and 20th
centuries. Secondly, language attitudes towards both English and Nauruan are
presented. The results stem from analyses based on a questionnaire study as well as
recordings of semi-structured interviews with Nauruans. Thirdly, a brief portrait of the
main linguistic characteristics of this emerging variety introduces its phonological,
morphosyntactic, and lexical features. Finally, in a quantitative analysis, I specifically
focus on intersonorant /t/ since this variable allows us to demonstrate intra- as well as
extra-linguistic factors shaping this variety. The aim is, therefore, to give a holistic
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sociohistorical, political, attitudinal as well as linguistic account of the process by which
a new English emerges in a (post-) colonial environment.
References:
Gardner, R. C. (2001). Integrative motivation and second language acquisition. In
Dörney, Z. and Schmidt, R. (eds.). Motivation and second language acquisition
(pp 1-20). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Horvath, B. M. (2008). Australian English: Phonology. In K. Burridge and B. Kortmann
(eds.). Varieties of English: The Pacific and Australasia (pp 89-110) Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
International Court of Justice (April 1990), Certain Phosphate Lands in Nauru (Nauru v
Australia), Memorial of the Republic of Nauru, Volume 1, http://www.icjcij.org/docket/files/80/6655.pdf; 14 February 2016.
Kayser, A. (1993). Nauru Grammar. Canberra: Australian National University Printing
Service.
Kortmann, B. and Szmrecsanyi, B. (2004). Global synopsis: Morphological and
syntactic variation in English. In B. Kortmann, E. W. Schneider, K. Burridge, R.
Mesthrie and C. Upton (eds.). A Handbook of Varieties of English Volume 2:
Morphology and syntax (pp 1143-1202). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mesthrie, R. and Bhatt, R. (2008). World Englishes: The study of new linguistic
varieties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nathan, G. S. (1973). Nauruan in the Austronesian language family. Oceanic
Linguistics, 7: 1-2, 479-502.
Nauru Bureau of Statistics (2011). Republic of Nauru national report on population and
housing: Census 2011. Nauru.
Schneider, E. W. (2008). Global synopsis: phonetic and phonological variation in
English world-wide. In E. W. Schneider et al. (eds.). A Handbook of Varieties of
English (1111-1137). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Siegel, J. (1990). Pidgin English in Nauru. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 5:
2, 157-186.
Tollfree, L. (2001). Variation and change in Australian consonants: Reduction of /t/.
In D. Blair and P. Collins (eds.). English in Australia. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 45-68.
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THE NON-AGREEMENT USE OF THE SPANISH DATIVE CLITIC “LE”
INSTEAD OF “LESS” IN MÁLAGA
Álvaro Molina García
University of Málaga
Keywords:
Indirect object, non-agreement, objective conjugation, gramaticalization, le and les.
Abstract:
The goals of the research were the following two: to determine what are the linguistic
factors which favor the non-agreement use of the Spanish dative clitic le with a plural
indirect object (IO) and to know the social distribution in Málaga with the sociolinguistic
variables “age”, “gender” and “educational level”.
Two concepts are explained:
a) First, prototypes theory (Huerta 2005). The lack of agreement is produced because
of the degradation of their prototypic properties of the IO; in other words, the more the
IO moves away from prototypic categories, the more cases of disagreement are
recorded.
b) Secondly, the posibility of the existence of an objective conjugation in Spanish,
(Llorente y Mondéjar 1974). The fact that the unstressed pronoun is undergoing a
process of gramaticalization favors the disagreement.
The data which have been analyzed have been obtained from the Corpus El español
hablado en Málaga, that is composed by 72 semi-structured oral interviews of low,
medium and high educational and age level men and women, with a four informants
per box distribution. From this Corpus, I developed a coding scheme with the variables
which were significant in previous studies. Then, I codified all the unstressed pronouns
in an Excel sheet. Finally, these data were analyzed statistically using SPSS. I am
currently executing a multiple regression analysis with GoldVarb to put forward a model
which explains the most number of cases.
The SPSS analysis showed that the most significant linguistic factor was the
duplication. A higher percentage of disagreement is appreciated when there is
duplication (52,6% with duplication, versus 28,5% without it). In the same variable, a
recoding was accomplished to check out if a type of duplication was stronger than
another. It was noted that the real favoring context is the cataphoric duplication (74,2%
of disagreement with cataphoric duplication, versus 19,6% with the anaphoric one).
These data coincide with the previous studies percentages.
The other significant linguistic factors which favor the employment of “le” by “les” are:
1: If the IO is expanded by a relative clause or a genitive. 2: If the IO is not government
by the verb. 3: If the IO is a receiver. 4: If the gender of the referent is female. 5. If the
IO is inanimante . 6: If the verb is impersonal.
The social distribution is the following: the phenomenon is more common in men than
women (42% versus 31,6%), in low educational level informants (50% in low studies
versus 40,9% and 32,6% in media and high studies, respectively), and in people of the
second generation (43,3% versus 37,8% in the first and 32,6 in the third).
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References:
Huerta Flores, N. (2005). Gramaticalización y concordancia objetiva en el español.
Despronominalización del clítico dativo plural. Verba. Anuario Galego de
Filoloxia 32, 165-190.
Llorente, A. and J. Mondéjar (1974). La conjugación objetiva en español. Revista
española de lingüística 4: 1, 1-60.
Soto, G., S. Sadowsky and R. Martínez (2014). El le invariable en el español escrito de
Chile. Literatura y lingüística 29, 214-225.
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“I DON’T TALK PROPER NO MORE”: BEYOND THE SOCIAL STIGMA OF
MORPHOSYNTACTIC VARIATION
Emma Moore
University of Sheffield
Keywords:
Morphosyntax, social meaning, ethnography, style, adolescents.
Abstract:
The study of morphosyntactic variation has lagged behind the study of phonological
variation in sociolinguistics, despite early claims that “[t]he extension of probabilistic
considerations from phonology to syntax is not a conceptually difficult jump” (Sankoff
1973:58). Nonetheless, there are documented challenges to the study of
morphosyntactic variation – most notably the increased difficulty in circumscribing a
linguistic variable when dealing with levels of the grammar above phonology
(Tagliamonte 2012:206–207). Added to this, Eckert and Labov (under review) have
noted that “… in general, syntactic variables do not show the same socially meaningful
variation as phonological variables.”
To address this claim, this paper will re-examine a well-studied morphosyntactic
feature, negative concord. The social correlates of this variable are well-established
(see, for example, Labov 1972b; Cheshire 1982; Smith 2001) yet, despite being
“arguably the most common stigmatized variable in the English language” (Eckert
2000:216), its social meanings have been less well interrogated. My analysis will use
data collected during a high school ethnography of 39 adolescent girls in a north-west
British town (comprising approximately 50 hours of recordings, a 262,000-word corpus,
and 196,400 words of fieldwork notes). Using this data, I will demonstrate how the
social meanings of negative concord may reflect its social correlates, given the
“sociohistorical continuities in referential practices” (Agha 2003:247) that variables
carry with them. However, by focusing on the styles and stances associated with this
feature in a particular and specific set of interactional moments, I will also show that the
social and linguistic contexts in which the form occurs strongly determine its precise
social meanings.
I will argue that, when evaluating social meaning, it does not make sense to think about
morphosyntactic variables as distinct from the phonological variants with which they cooccur, and vice versa. That is to say, understanding whether or not syntactic variables
are socially meaningful requires that we view them as part of complex linguistic styles,
not as isolated linguistic variables. In this way, my work will add to recent studies of
social meaning which have shifted emphasis “from a substitution class approach to
variation (where variants compete to fill a linguistic ‘slot’) to a stylistic approach (where
the manner and nature of a feature’s occurrence may be just as important as its
relative frequency)” (Moore 2012:71). More generally, this paper will also argue that
variationists need to pay more attention to components of the grammar above the level
of phonology if we are to provide a complete theory of the social meaning of linguistic
variation.
References:
Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23(3–4).
231–273.
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Cheshire, J. (1982). Variation in an English Dialect: A Sociolinguistic Study.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of
Identity at Belten High. Oxford: Blackwells.
Eckert, P. and W. Labov. The intersection of social meaning and linguistic structure.
Journal article.
Labov, W. (1972). Negative Attraction and Negative Concord in English Grammar.
Language 48(4), 773–818.
Moore, E. (2012). The social life of style. Language and Literature 21(1), 66–83.
Sankoff, G. (1973). Above and beyond phonology in variable rules. In C. J. Bailey and
R. Shuy (eds.). New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English (pp. 42–62).
Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.
Smith, J. (2001). Negative concord in the Old and New World: Evidence from Scotland.
Language Variation and Change 13(2), 109–134.
Tagliamonte, S. (2012). Variationist Sociolinguistics:
Interpretation. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
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Change,
Observation,
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TUT-TUT: A SOCIOPHONETIC STUDY OF THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF CLICKS
IN THREE VARIETIES OF SCOTTISH ENGLISH
Julia Moreno
Jane Stuart-Smith
University of Glasgow
Keywords:
Phonetic variation, clicks, talk-in-interaction, regional and social accent variation,
Scottish English.
Abstract:
Clicks are typologically rare sounds which function as phonemes in some African
languages (Ladefoged/Maddieson, 1996). Clicks have also been observed as a
paralinguistic feature of English (e.g. Gimson, 1970; Ladefoged, 1982). Clicks seem to
play different roles, e.g. to display disapproval (Ladefoged/Johnson, 2001) and
sympathy (eg Ogden, 2016):
01 L they don’t seem interested
02 they don’t call
03 R mhm
04 L you know, they seem like
05 he’s just a nuisance
06 R CLICK is this your weird uncle
Recent studies of American and British English (e.g. Wright 2011) show that clicks are
also important in the regulation of turn-taking, e.g. indexing a new sequence of speech:
yes uhm and I think perhaps uh he took it to heart (.) .hhh (0.2) uhm (0.5) CLICK right
Little is known about the regional and social distribution of clicks in English. Clicks have
been noted as characteristic of female speakers (Gold et al 2013 from a small sample),
but may relate as much to interaction as to speaker identity (Ogden 2013).
This study focuses on the distribution and function of clicks across three regional
varieties of Scottish vernacular English. A sociophonetic approach was used to
investigate the form and functions of clicks as they occurred in the spontaneous
conversations of nine middle-aged working-class women (approx. 6 hours), from three
sociolinguistic corpora: Glasgow (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2003); Buckie (NE Scotland, e.g.
Smith 2000); and Lerwick (Shetland, e.g. Smith 2012). All clicks were classified
phonetically by place of articulation, by accompanying phonetic materia (e.g.
creakiness, nasality, etc.), and position in turn. After Ogden (2016), clicks were also
coded according to interactional function: (1) regulation of turn-taking (e.g. indexing a
new sequence, word search, etc); (2) display of affect (e.g. sympathy, disapproval,
etc.).
Overall 451 clicks were observed, across all places of articulation, with dental clicks as
most common. Most clicks were not creaky, were non-nasal, showed high amplitude,
did not occur alongside an inbreath, and were followed by a falling intonation contour.
Small differences according to region were found, with more clicks produced by
speakers from Shetland (44.1%), than Buckie (30.6%), and Glasgow (25.3%). Most
features of clicks patterned similarly across regions, though again, Shetland speakers
produced more palato-alveolar clicks and slightly more high-amplitude clicks. Contrary
to previous reports, our speakers used clicks more to manage their talk, than display
affect. The most common turn-regulation functions of clicks were indexing a new
sequence of talk (33%) and searching for a word (28%). Clicks were also found used to
display (dis)approval, (dis)agreement, sympathy, and sadness. Interestingly, click use
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clearly varied by individual speaker, even when accounting for interactional function (cf.
Ogden 2016).
These results suggest that clicks form an important element of the social-linguistic
interactional system of Scottish English speakers. They are highly systematic, perform
a wide range of actions in conversation, and show both regional and individual
differences. The implications of our findings for sociolinguistic theory will be discussed,
together with the next steps for a substantial, socially-stratified study of clicking in
English.
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MOBILITY, SOCIAL PRACTICES AND REGIONAL DIALECT AMONG DANISH
YOUTH
Kristine Køhler Mortensen
Pia Quist
Camilla Boesen Madsen
University of Copenhagen
Keywords:
Regional dialect, standardization, youth, mobility.
Abstract:
One of the key questions in debates on linguistic standardization in Denmark is
whether linguistic variants spread from the national center of Copenhagen (Coupland &
Kristiansen 2011) or rather from multiple regional centers throughout the country
(Kerswill 2003, Ejskjær 1964). In this paper, we wish to contribute to this debate while
nuancing the perspectives on social meaning linked to regional dialect and mobility.
Based on an elaborate 10-months ethnographic study of youth and their families in the
Hirtshals area of Northern Jutland, we investigate how regional dialect of Northern
Jutland works as the largely unmarked norm among 15-16 year-olds. Whereas the
local dialect, ‘Vendelbomål’, is entirely depleted among these teenagers, regional
linguistic resources are deployed every day. In this local context too elaborate usage of
standard Danish is frowned upon by the youth and pointed out as uncool attempts to
sound ‘elite’.
We discuss whether this apparent strong status of regional dialect among teenagers
may be connected to the demographic history of the region, in particular mobility
patterns connected to the largest, and financially dominant, regional city of Aalborg.
Recent qualitative studies point to an interesting static level of variation throughout the
past hundred years in Aalborg (Pedersen forthc.). As a possible explanation for this
linguistic situation, Pedersen points to the demographic past of the city in which the
main social and linguistic influences have derived from destinations of geographical
proximity allowing for a developmental process of regionally bound variation less
influenced by the capital city of Copenhagen.
Moreover, the paper addresses preliminary findings of complex patterns in the
distribution of regional features across the social ecology of the youth. Although all
participants of this study speak regional dialect to some extent, ethnographic
observation revealed specific cliques to perform a higher level of regional variation than
others. In contrast to other studies of youth and dialect (Schøning & Pedersen 2007,
Monka 2013) the speakers with a high level of regional dialect in Hirtshals are not
characterized by immobility and local orientation. Instead, speakers who use a high
degree of regional dialect show a variety of mobility patterns and social practices that
are linked to both coolness and active lifestyle as well as local, regional, and
international orientation. We conclude by reflecting upon which new questions these
nuanced uses of regional dialect in Hirtshals may pose in the debate on dialect
levelling and standardization processes.
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GRAMMAR SEQUENCING IN TEACHING SPANISH AS SECOND LANGUAGE
Alejandro Muñoz-Garcés
Yun Sil Jeon
Coastal Carolina University
Keywords:
Computational linguistics, corpus analysis, gramatical sequence, teaching Spanish as
second language.
Abstract:
This collaborative research between Università di Firenza and Coastal Carolina
University started with the purpose of finding an automatized way of extracting more
simple constructions to more complex ones using several Spanish oral speech
corpora.
For this research we utilized various oral speech corpora in Spanish: C-Or-Dial
(Didactic Oral Corpus Annotated Linguistically, 120,000 transcribed and tagged words),
C-ORAL-ROM (tagged and lined up) and the Spanish Minicorpus (30,000 tagged and
lined up words and with articulation of information marks). Our initial work wanted to
find a way to automatically extract the simplest utterances from the corpus and
continue with progressively more complex utterance extractions. The following step in
the investigation consists in analyzing these lists with different types of utterances,
using some morphological and syntactic analyzers offered online, such as GRAMPAL
and FREELING, among others, to decide which one is best for our analysis. The same
process of extracting tonal units and analyzing them will be done in C-ORAL-ROM
corpus and also with the Spanish Minicorpus. At last, through these findings we are
going to propose a better sequenced text to a teacher of Spanish as second language,
because we will find which grammatical structure is used in oral Spanish, and in which
order, how, and when these structures are utilized. It will be big step towards a better
understanding of the teaching of grammar, because the proposed grammar sequence
will be based on the frequency of these structures found in native speaker utterances.
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SYBIES, TATTIES AND KILTIES: PROBLEMS CONCERNING THE FORM AND
DEVELOPMENT OF DIMINUTIVES IN SCOTS AND SCOTTISH STANDARD
ENGLISH
Alan Murray
University of Leeds
Keywords:
Scots, Scottish Standard English, diminutives.
Abstract:
Dialects of Scots (Sc) are well known for their many diminutive forms, expressed either
through adjectives (e.g. wee, peerie) or suffixes (e.g. -ie/-y, -ock, -ikie). The ending -ie/y occurs as a diminutive in most English varieties (especially in personal names), but
its use in both Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE) is much more frequent, with
the suffix occurring in a high number of lexicalized items (e.g. lintie “linnet”, lassie
“girl”), as well as continuing to be productive in spontaneous speech. Recent
scholarship has pointed to many such forms as overt Scotticisms in both everyday
speech and literary output, e.g. tattie “potato” and sybie “salad onion” (e.g. Dossena
1998, Dossena 2012).
This paper investigates the form and development of words with the suffix -ie in Scots.
In many cases, e.g. wifie (woman) or cattie (cat), the diminutive implies smallness,
endearment or familiarity. However, this does not apply to all cases. Thus kiltie does
not mean “*small kilt”, but “a man wearing a kilt”. Similarly, the suffix in scaffie
“dustman” (< scavenger) or parkie “park-keeper” seems simply to denote agency. In
other cases the occurrence of an -ie ending can be explained through phonological
changes. Thus French ciboule (scallion, salad onion, spring onion) was originally
borrowed into Scots as syboe (with vocalization of final /l/), but is now universally
pronounced as sybie. This seems to be an example of words borrowed relatively late
which retained an original -o in Standard English but became -ae/-ie in Scots, as in the
case of Eng. potato > older Sc. pitawtie “potato” with the modern reduced form tattie.
Other examples include Sc. tomatie (tomato), stuckae (stucco), tabbacae (tobacco). It
is likely that this development was influenced by a wider change in the early modern
period; here an unstressed vowel in final position was realized in Southern English
spelling variously as <-o(w)> or <-er> (e.g. fellow, feller), but as <-ie> or <-ae> in most
dialects of Scots (e.g. tattie, fellae, windae). A similar change can be observed in the
cases of placenames whose modern popular pronunciation diverges from the official
spelling, which may be based on older variants or an Anglified spelling, e.g. Kelso
(Roxburghshire), but Scots Kelsae; Yarrow (Selkirkshire) but Scots Yarrae; Chatto
(Berwickshire) but Scots Chattae; Portobello (Midlothian), but Scots Portaebellae. We
can conclude that many of the words in Scots and SSE containing the -ie/-ae suffix did
not originate as diminutives, but are the result of the Scots realisation of unstressed
endings whose quality corresponds to that of the diminutive.
References:
Dossena, M. (1998). Diminutives in Scottish Standard English: A Case for Comparative
Linguistics. Scottish Language 17: 22-39.
Dossena, M. (2012). Vocative and diminutive forms in Robert Louis Stevenson’s fiction:
A corpus-based study. International Journal of English Studies 12: 1-17.
Jamieson, J. (1808). Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. Edinburgh.
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REGIONAL VARIATION AND ENREGISTERMENT IN THE GERMAN STATE OF
BAVARIA
Konstantin Niehaus
University of Innsbruck
Keywords:
Language and identity, enregisterment, language accommodation, language contact,
German language.
Abstract:
The concept of enregisterment has been applied to English quite extensively (cf.
Johnstone 2006, Beal 2009). Enregisterment means “processes through which a
linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognised
register” (Agha 2003: 231), reflecting certain cultural values. Research on
enregisterment in English focused on speakers’ perceptions of specific variants as
‘typical’ for their region (like ‘Pittsburghese’, ‘Geordie’ and ‘Sheffieldish’) – which is
communicated through media and merchandise and ultimately reveals the regions’
identities. For German, Auer (2013) modified the approach for national standard
German varieties but there has not been any investigation into regional varieties of
German so far.
In my talk, I will analyse enregisterment and enregistered variants in Upper German
regions, i.e. the Bavarian regions of Bavarian-Suebia, Franconia and Old Bavaria.
What we can assume from the actual language usage is that speakers in Old Bavaria
may draw considerably on the dialect continuum of Bavarian-Austrian in order to
construct their ‘Bavarian’ identity (divergence as well as convergence towards Austria,
cf. Bülow et al. 2015). Speakers from culturally less influential areas however might not
enregister (many) variants as their own, e.g. the speakers of Suebian-Alemannic in
Bavarian-Suebia, who ‘bavarise’ their regional speech with Bavarian variants (cf. Möller
2003: 279; König & Renn 2007: 78).
I will present a new two-folded study on the case: on the one hand, field work, using an
identity questionnaire (cf. Llamas 2007) and incorporating factors of age, sex and
mobility of the participants; on the other hand, an examination of (mass-)medial
representations (such as dialectal comic books, souvenirs and online videos) of the
regional speeches in Bavarian-Suebia, Franconia and Old Bavaria. I will use (mostly
lexical) examples to illustrate the benefits of this approach in dialectological and
sociolinguistic research.
References:
Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23
(3/4), 231‒273.
Auer, P. (2013). Enregistering pluricentric German. In A.S. da Silva (ed.).
Pluricentricity. Language Variation and Sociocognitive Dimensions (pp. 19‒48).
Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Beal, J. C. (2009). Enregisterment, Commodification and Historical Context: Geordie
versus Sheffieldish. American Speech 84 (2), 138‒156.
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Bülow, L., J. Schifferer and A. Dicklberger. (2015). Varietätenkontakt statt
Grenzvarietäten. Zur Entwicklung der sprachlichen Situation im deutschösterreichischen Grenzgebiet am Beispiel von Neuhaus am Inn (D) und
Schärding (Ö). In J. Kusová, L. Vodrážková and M. Malechová (eds.). Deutsch
ohne Grenzen (pp. 399‒422). Brno: Tribun EU.
Johnstone, B., J. Andrews and A. E. Danielson (2006). Mobility, Indexicality and the
Enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. In W. König and M. Renn (eds.). Journal of
English Linguistics (34) (pp. 77‒04). Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag.
Llamas, C. (2007). A place between places: Language and identities in a border town.
Language in Society, 36 (4), 579‒604.
Möller, R. (2003). Zur diatopischen Gliederung des alltagssprachlichen Wortgebrauchs.
Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 03/2003, 257‒297.
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WORD-FINAL /T/ AND "TOUGH" OR KNOWLEDGEABLE PERSONAL IN SPORT
CLUB INTERACTIONS
Fergus O’Dwyer
University of Münster
Keywords:
Discourse analysis, Dublin and Irish English, sociophonetics, stancetaking.
Abstract:
This paper examines interaction among male members of a sports club
in Dublin, focusing on sociopragmatic functions of /t/ variants. Realizations of
word-final /t/ in Dublin include a slit /t/, which features hearable frication, a glottal
fricative [h], and a realization ranging between a glottalized [?t], glottal stop
[?], and something close to deletion. While complete deletion is rare, glottal
variants have been related to the "rough" city centre region. A pattern found in
this data is that glottals seem to index "tough" and aggressive personae, which
is often found in dressing room talk: discourse about games, which is
inherently aggressive and combative. While slit /t/ is linked to rural varieties of
Irish English, little has been done in terms of sociopragmatics of the feature. I argue
that speakers in this context use a slit /t/ in word final tokens to imply relative
epistemic status. These realizations are common in what I call information talk: talk
where speakers are giving information about how the club works, and how the
speakers are involved in these practices. The data suggests that the slit /t/ is in
particularly salient in information talk when speakers
are
speaking
from
a
position
of
knowledge
or
authority.
Auditory analysis is supplemented by visual analysis of the spectograms, and
acoustic analysis, to create clear coding distinctions between the variants.
An ethnographic approach identified the salient attributes of the social space in
this context, and outlined how individuals make use of language and other
social practices to negotiate their alignment
to
interactional
identities.
Statistical analysis examined the correlation between variation in the consonant
and three types of predictors (linguistic, social attributes, and interactional
variables), and highlights the patterns and trends of variation that deserve
more attention and interpretations: stancetaking in this case. Detailed,
qualitative analysis develops my interpretations of the discourse functions
that seem to cluster around occurrences of the two variants. Discourse
analysis characterizes the interactions where /t/ tokens are found as
epistemic-based (i.e. interviewees displaying knowledge or asserting expertise to
the interviewer), or related to tough personae. This yields suggestions and
inferences regarding how speakers have tried to achieve certain purposes in a
speech extract, and specifically how they position themselves and others. The
result of these steps is to highlight the stance commonalities of discourse
functions of the variants in question.
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After outlining this analysis, I will conclude how social meanings and interactional
identities are indexed in salient sociophonetic variants. In this case, the use of certain
variants are better understood by relating them to discourse about the
practices which speakers value, participate in and identify with.
References:
Kallen, Jeffrey L. 2013. Irish English Volume 2: The Republic of Ireland. Berlin: De
Gruyter Mouton.
Lonergan, John. 2014. “An Acoustic and Perceptual Study of Dublin English Phonology.”
Unpublished PhD Thesis. University College Dublin.
385
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LANGUAGE USE, STYLE AND AUTHENTICITY IN SWEDISH-LANGUAGE PUNK
ROCK AND HIP HOP
Jenny Öqvist
Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden
Keywords:
Sociolinguistics of popular song, Authenticity, Swedish-language popular music.
Abstract:
In the 1950s and 1960s, Swedish rock artists performed almost exclusively in English.
In 1969, the album considered to be the first Swedish-language rock album (Pugh
Rogefeldt's Ja dä ä dä, (‘Yes it is’)) was released and from then onwards, singing in
Swedish became an increasingly viable option. We can thus look back on almost fifty
years of recorded Swedish-language pop and rock music, but we still know very little
about the varieties of Swedish that have been used.
In this study, the language use in Swedish-language pop, rock, and hip hop is
investigated, with focus on non-standard features. My main interest is regional variation,
but other aspects, e.g. multilingualism and slang, are also considered. Phonetic, lexical
and syntactic features are included in the analysis.
In a previous study, the use of the Stockholm dialect in different genres of popular
music recorded 1969–2009 was analysed (Öqvist 2009, 2010). Dialect features were
found to be almost absent in mainstream pop, while they were quite common in punk
rock, and very frequent in hip hop. The use of regional language features was
interpreted as part of the artists' claims of authenticity (cf. also Beal 2009). The idea of
authenticity is present in most genres of popular music, but different understandings of
authenticity seem to apply to different genres and styles (Fornäs 1995). Authenticity
within hip hop is often connected to "localness" (cf. Brunstad 2006, Alim et al. 2009),
and this arguably holds true for (Swedish) punk rock as well, albeit to a lesser degree.
In the present study, artists from a variety of regions of Sweden are included, in order to
explore to what extent different regional varieties are used as linguistic resources in
Swedish-language pop, rock, and hip hop. In the presentation, I discuss how the
linguistic choices and language use can be understood in connection to i) the
artists' (national and) regional origins, ii) music genre and style iii) authenticity, and iv)
time period.
References:
Alim, H. Samy et al. (2009). Global linguistic flows: hip hop cultures, youth identities,
and the politics of language. New York: Routledge.
Beal, J. C. (2009). You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham. Dialect and
identity in UK ‘Indie’ Music. Journal of English Linguistics 37.
Brunstad, E. (2006). Globalisering og språgleg mangfald. I Sandøy, Helge & Tenfjord,
Kerstin, Den nye norsken? Nokre peilepunkt under globaliseringa. Oslo: Novus.
Fornäs, J. (1995). Listen to your voice! Authenticity and reflexivity in karaoke, rock, rap
and techno music. In W., Straw et al. (ed.) Popular music: Style and identity.
Montreal: Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions.
386
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Öqvist, J. (2009). Capital Style: The Stockholm dialect in Swedish popular music.
Paper presented at ICLaVE 5, Copenhagen June 2009.
Öqvist, J. (2010). Står där och väntar på tricken. Stockholmska i svensk populärmusik.
In C. Falk, et. al. (ed.) Svenskans beskrivning 30. Stockholm: Institutionen för
nordiska språk, Stockholms universitet.
387
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CARIBBEAN COLOMBIAN SPANISH IN NEW YORK CITY: A SUBJECT PRONOUN
EXPRESSION ANALYSIS
Rafael Orozco
Louisiana State University
Keywords:
Spanish, subject pronoun expression, New York City, sociolinguistics, language variation.
Abstract:
This paper explores subject personal pronoun expression (SPE) among Colombian
speakers of Caribbean Spanish in New York City. We test eight linguistic and seven social
predictors using 3,006 tokens from conversations with twenty socially stratified
consultants. Predictors explored include tense, mood and aspect (TMA), verb type,
grammatical person and number of the subject, lexical frequency, age, gender, and
exposure to NYC life. Results reveal an overall pronominal rate of 43%, which is
significantly higher than that found in a baseline population in Colombia (Carvalho et al.
2015; Lastra & Martín Butragueño 2015; Otheguy & Zentella 2012). The conditioning
model found reveals person/number of the subject as the strongest predictor. The findings
for TMA uncover a significant difference between clauses in the simple present in NYC
and Colombia, apparently influenced by the emigrants’ new sociolinguistic surroundings.
Moreover, our Iexical frequency analysis exploring the verb as a random effects predictor
provides more definite answers regarding how verbs condition SPE than the syntactically
and semantically-guided approaches that have been used for four decades (cf. Bentivoglio
1980). We learn that pensar ‘think’ and creer ‘believe’ are the main promoters of overt
subjects among cognitive verbs while salir ‘leave’ is the main promoter of null subjects
among motion verbs. At the same time, we find that different verbs within a single
semantically-based category have different effects. For instance, decir ‘say, tell’ favors
overt subjects whereas hablar ‘speak’ promotes null subjects among speech verbs. The
effects of social constraints reveal significant pronominal rate increases across the board
with regard to speaker’s gender and age. Moreover, they also reveal a significantly higher
overall pronominal rate among newcomers to NYC as compared to monolingual baseline
speakers in Colombia.
In general, our findings validate those of Erker & Guy 2012; Posio 2011, 2015; Travis
2005, 2007; among others, by demonstrating that verb class, or for that matter
classifications based on syntactic or semantic criteria, do not constitute the most accurate
way to explore the effects of the verb on SPE. That is, by grouping verbs according to
semantic criteria, we disregard important conditioning tendencies. Therefore, we could
increase our understanding of the effects of the verb on SPE by means of a multipronged
approach that incorporates lexical frequency, among other criteria. Furthermore, the
significantly higher pronominal rate among newcomers has methodological implications by
strongly suggesting that their speech does not provide a completely reliable measure of
pronominal rates, and perhaps the effects of internal predictors, in their home speech
communities.
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References:
Bentivoglio, Paola. (1980). Why canto and not yo canto? The problem of first person
subject pronoun in spoken Venezuelan Spanish. Los Angeles, CA: Master’s
Thesis, University of California Los Angeles.
Carvalho, Ana M., Rafael Orozco, & Naomi Lapidus Shin. (2015). Introduction. In Ana
Maria Carvalho, Rafael Orozco & Naomi Lapidus Shin (eds.), Subject Pronoun
Expression in Spanish: A cross-dialectal perspective (pp. xiii-xxvi). Washington DC:
Georgetown.
Erker, Daniel & Gregory R. Guy. (2012). The role of lexical frequency in syntactic
variability: Variable subject personal pronoun expression in Spanish. Language
88(3), 526–557.
Lastra, Yolanda & Pedro Martín Butragueño. (2015). Subject Pronoun Expression in Oral
Mexican Spanish. In Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco & Naomi Lapidus Shin
(eds.), Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A cross-dialectal perspective.
(pp. 41-59). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Otheguy, Ricardo & Ana Celia Zentella. (2012). Spanish in New York: Language contact,
dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Posio, Pekka. (2011). Spanish subject pronoun usage and verb semantics revisited: First
and second person singular subject pronouns and focusing of attention in spoken
Peninsular Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 43(3), 777-798.
Posio, Pekka. (2015). Subject Pronoun Usage in Formulaic Sequences: Evidence from
Peninsular Spanish. In Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco y Naomi Lapidus Shin
(eds.), Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A cross-dialectal perspective. (pp.
61-80). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Travis, Catherine E. (2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian
Spanish. In Randall Gess & Edward J. Rubin (eds.), Theoretical and experimental
approaches to Romance linguistics: Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic
Symposium on Romance Languages, 2004. (pp. 329–349). Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Travis, Catherine E. (2007). Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in
narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19(1), 101-135
389
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DISTRIBUTION OF ARTICULATION RATE ACROSS ENGLAND – FINDINGS
BASED ON 150 SPEAKERS
Lucy Anne Parkinson
Adrian Leemann
University of Cambridge
Keywords:
Articulation rate, English, crowdsourcing, forensic phonetics.
Abstract:
We all know people who talk fast and others who speak (almost dreadfully) slow.
Studies have demonstrated speech rate differences between languages as well as
between speakers and varieties of the same language: Robb et al. (2004) found that
NZ English speakers articulate faster than American English speakers while Jacewicz
et al. (2009) reports that Northern Americans articulate significantly faster than
Southerners. Until today, no large-scale work has examined the spread of articulation
rate within England. We used data from the English Dialects App (EDA) Corpus
(Leemann et al. 2016) to investigate articulation rates of read speech from across
England.
EDA allows users to record themselves reading passages from ‘The Boy who cried
Wolf’ (Deterding 2006). More than 2800 speakers from the UK have provided speech
recordings, of which we worked with a subset of 150 speakers: white males, 21–30
years old who have completed Higher Education; this helps to accounts for effects of
age, gender and reading proficiency. We examined sentences 1, 2 and 5 of the ‘Wolf’
passage, forced aligning the files with WebMAUS (Kisler et al. 2012), and manually
checking pause boundaries. Articulation rate was calculated as the number of syllables
per second excluding pauses. We spatially plotted the articulation rates using Carto
(2016).
Results revealed a largely random spatial distribution of articulation rate; see Figure 1.
The darker the red, the higher the articulation rate. It appears that within localities there
is as much variation as between them. It is possible that this variation is due to the
small sample size of speakers: most places have only one speaker each; therefore it is
unknown whether the same pattern exists in the wider population. Currently, we are
examining two larger regions - Greater London and Yorkshire, with around 130
speakers each - which will allow us to look at intra-locality variation; results of this will
be shown in the presentation.
The results of the current study are highly pertinent for speaker identification:
articulation rate represents one of many parameters practitioners can use in speaker
comparison to provide evidence for or against speaker identity (cf. Jessen 2008).
Population statistics for English have been lacking until today but these findings
present a first attempt to alleviate this situation: we found a mean articulation rate of
5.20syll/sec (SD=0.618) for the 150 speakers; see Figure 2. Putting these findings in a
broader linguistic context, the English speakers articulate 0.2 syllables fewer per
second than the 100 German speakers presented in Jessen (2007).
References:
Carto. (2016). www.carto.com; Deterding, D. (2006). The North Wind versus a Wolf.
JIPA, 36(02).
Jacewicz, E. et al. Articulation rate across dialect, age, and gender. LVC 21(2).
390
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Jessen, M. (2007). Forensic reference data on articulation rate in German. Science &
Justice, 47(2).
Kisler, T. et al. 2012. Signal processing via web services. Proc. of Dig. Hum. 2012;
Leemann, A. et al. 2016. English Dialects; Robb, M. et al. 2004. Speaking rates
of American and New Zealand varieties of English. Clinical Linguistics &
Phonetics 18(1).
Figure 1: Geographical distribution of articulation rate based on sentence 5 (‘This gave the boy so much
pleasure that a few days later he tried exactly the same trick again, and once more he was successful’)
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Figure 2: Histogram of speaker articulation rates by frequency
392
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GEOGRAPHIC VARIATION AS A WINDOW ON PROBABILISTIC INDIVIDUAL
GRAMMARS
Dirk Pijpops
Freek Van de Velde
University of Leuven
Keywords:
Dutch, partitive genitive, probabilistic grammar, exemplar-based.
Abstract:
Present-day Dutch has a vestigial partitive genitive morpheme. Adjectives take the
genitive -s morpheme when they are used as a dependent of a quantifier (Haeseryn et
al. 1997: 863; Broekhuis 2013: 420-426). This is illustrated in (1). The construction
comes in two variants: either with an overt -s suffix, or without the suffix.
(1)
iets
bijzonder(-s)
something
special-GEN
‘something special’
While the two variants do not show any observable semantic differerence, Pijpops &
Van de Velde (2014) applied mixed-model logistic regression and found that the
expression of the -s is probabilistically determined by a number of factors. While
overall, the [+s] variant is more frequent, the [-s] variant is also fairly common, and is
more likely to occur (i) in informal registers, (ii) in low-frequency phrases, and (iii) in the
south of the language area (Belgium). There also is a strong main effect for the [-s]
variant for adjectives that occurred in superficially similar non-partitive constructions.
This is illustrated in (2) and (3): though similar in surface form, the contexts makes
clear that (2) is not a partitive construction. The absence of the -s morpheme then spills
over to genuine partitives like (3) (see Pijpops & Van de Velde, forthc. for extensive
explanation on what they call ‘constructional contamination’).
(2)
iets
verkeerd
geïnterpreteerd
[something]NP [[wrongly]AdvP interpreted]
(3)
iets
verkeerd
gegeten
eaten
[something
wrong]NP
This suggests that, in line with exemplar-based theories of language, prior use of
constructions leaves a (context-rich) trail in the mind of the language users.
In this talk, we want to see whether the same effect also occurs with regard to
the regional variable. Can the regional provenance of the lexemes inserted in a
construction exert an influence on the morphological realisation of the target
construction, even if the construction is used by language users with a different
regiolectal background? In our study southern speakers have a stronger tendency to
drop the genitive -s, but less so when they are using ‘northern’ lexemes, and vice
versa. This effect holds even if the regional provenance of the lexemes is subtle, and
unlikely to be a shibboleth of a regionally recognisable type of speech. Furthermore, we
see that while the analogical pull of lexemes with a regional profile is felt everywhere in
the language area, the effect is more blurry in cities near the border of the two regions
and more clear in the core areas. This finding shows that not only the language-internal
context of prior instances is stored in memory, but the ‘language-external’, lectal
context as well.
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References:
Broekhuis, H. (2013). Syntax of Dutch: Adjectives and adjective phrases. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Haeseryn, W. et al. (1997). Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst. Groningen: Nijhoff.
Pijpops, D. and F. Van de Velde (forthcoming, 2016). Constructional contamination:
How does it work and how do we measure it?’. Folia Linguistica 50.
Pijpops D. and F. Van de Velde (2014). A multivariate analysis of the partitive genitive
in Dutch. Bringing quantitative data into a theoretical discussion. Corpus
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (ahead of print).
2 394
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FULL MERGER IN PROGRESS: EVIDENCE FROM DUTCH LABIODENTAL
FRICATIVES
Anne-France Pinget
Utrecht University
Keywords:
Merger, tonogenesis, sound change, fricatives, devoicing.
Abstract:
Previous studies have established that Dutch initial fricatives are involved in a sound
change in progress (e.g., Kissine et al., 2003; Pinget, 2015). It has been shown that
voiced initial labiodental fricatives /v/ are devoicing, slowly merging with their voiceless
counterparts /f/, since they are produced with less voicing and longer durations. The
devoicing is spreading across regions and age groups.
A tentative conclusion based on these studies is that the change is resulting in a full
merger. This conclusion can however only be confirmed if there are no other cues –
besides voicing and duration – used to maintain the phonological contrast.
In other languages like Afrikaans where initial stops are merging, it has been shown
that the phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants is still
maintained by an F0 difference at the onset of the following vowel (Coetzee et al.,
2014). F0 at vowel onset typically starts lower after voiced than after voiceless
consonants (e.g., Hombert et al., 1979). The process in which this difference gets
phonologized is called tonogenesis.
This paper investigates whether the same kind of incipient tonogenesis is observable in
Dutch fricatives. The maintenance of the F0 difference in the following vowel would
provide evidence for incipient tonogenesis in Dutch, whereas its disappearance would
indicate that initial labiodental fricatives develop as a full merger.
Five regions within the Dutch speaking area were chosen to represent the different
stages of sound change, ranging from West-Flanders (with incipient devoicing) to
Groningen (merger). Twenty speakers (10 males and 10 females) were recorded in
each region, reading words beginning with /f/ and /v/ in carrier sentences. Following
segmentation, voicing was measured as the proportion of the fricatives produced as
voiced, and F0 was extracted at 11 equidistant time points over the vowels.
Results show clear differences in F0 at the vowel onset after labiodental fricatives. This
F0 effect shows regional differences that correspond to the regional differences in
fricative devoicing: the F0 effect is still strong in regions like West-Flanders, FlemishBrabant and Limburg where fricative devoicing is weak. In the regions with strong
fricative devoicing (like South-Holland and Groningen), both voiced and voiceless
fricatives show high F0 at onset and falling F0 contours. The sound change seems
thus to trigger a reduction of the vowel F0 cue, but not (yet) its full disappearance. We
argue that these results are in line with the full merger hypothesis.
References:
Coetzee, A. W., P. S. Beddor and D. P. Wissing (2014). Emergent tonogenesis in
Afrikaans. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 135(4), 2421-2422.
Hombert, J., J. Ohala and W. Ewan (1979). Phonetic explanations for the development
of tones. Language 55(1), 37-58.
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Kissine, M., H. Van de Velde and R. van Hout (2003). The Devoicing of Fricatives in
Standard Dutch. In P. Fikkert and L. Cornips (eds.). Linguistics in the
Netherlands. (pp. 93-104). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pinget, A. C. H. (2015). The actuation of sound change. PhD dissertation. Utrecht
University. LOT: 399.
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VARIATION OF “TO MENSTRUATE” IN A SPANISH ONLINE FORUM FOR
WOMEN
Andrea Pizarro Pedraza
Université catholique de Louvain
Dirk De Hertog
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Keywords: linguistic taboo, cognitive sociolinguistics, CMC, written vernaculars,
menstruación
Abstract:
Not all linguistic taboos are equally taboo. When Allan & Burridge (1991: 52-53) carried
out their experiment to measure the revoltingness rating of different taboos,
“menstruation” was rated by their male informants at the maximum level, just as “vomit
and shit”. Indeed, within feminine sexuality menstruation appears to be especially
stigmatized. Our corpus studies (Pizarro Pedraza 2013) showed that sexual
physiological phenomena tended to be expressed indirectly more frequently than body
parts, and that the tendency was especially outspoken for menstruation. However, the
data showed sociolinguistic variation: the result was actually true for men, rather than
for women. As part of their own sexuality, women generally express the concept
through direct variants.
In this cognitive sociolinguistic study we would like to explore how women refer to the
concept TO MENSTRUATE, by focusing on the variation within the construction
Pronoun + verb + la menstruación/la regla/el period (ex. me vino la regla ‘I had my
period’) in a corpus of forum comments from the website enfemenino.com. The verbs
that can happen in the second slot bajar, venir, llegar… construe the event from
different perspectives (as happening from within or without the woman’s body).
Moreover, we know that there is stylistic variation in the nominal variants present in the
last slot: regla being the most informal and menstruación the most formal.
Based on the assumption that the different facets of online contexts are related to a
variety of social interactions (Herring 2007) and written vernaculars, we focus
specifically on those from the sexual health section of the website. The corpus is
composed of more than 13000 threads where women discuss personal problems,
either to ask for or to give advice. In that sense, the corpus is a good example of the
intermingling for the private and public spheres in computer-mediated communication
(CMC) (Androutsopoulos 2011) in a context that allows for anonymity but also in-group
solidarity.
We use part-of-speech tags as approximations to constructions to automatically extract
the linguistic expressions with the structure Pronoun + verb + la menstruación/la
regla/el periodo. We will first measure the distribution of the different verbs with each
nominal variant in order to determine possible combinatorial preferences. Then, we will
measure the impact of conceptual and sociolinguistic variables (embodied perspective,
type of speech act, degree of formality, etc.) on the preference for different
constructions.
References:
Allan, K. and K. Burridge (1991). Euphemism and Dysphemism. Language Used as
Shield and Weapon. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
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Androutsopoulos, J. (2011). Language change and digital media: A review of
conceptions and evidence. Standard languages and language standards in a
changing Europe. K. Tore and N. Coupland. Oslo, Novus: 145-161.
Herring, S. C. (2007). "A Faceted Classification Scheme for Computer-Mediated
Discourse." Language@Internet 4.
Pizarro Pedraza, A. (2013). Tabú y eufemismo en la ciudad de Madrid. Estudio
sociolingüístico-cognitivo de los conceptos sexuales. PhD, Univ. Complutense.
398
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A MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH TO THE USE OF COLLOQUIAL BELGIAN
DUTCH ON FLEMISH TELEVISION: FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE GRADUAL
ACCEPTATION OF NON-STANDARD DUTCH
Lynn Prieels
Gert De Sutter
Ghent University
Keywords:
Audiovisual translation, subtitling, language variation, Belgian Dutch, norm-adherence.
Abstract:
The present study investigates the vitality of colloquial Belgian Dutch by investigating to
what extent it is used in written subtitles by the (self-declared) norm-setting public
broadcaster VRT within the Flemish area of the Dutch language community. Next to
the official standard language (General Belgian Dutch), various non-standard,
colloquial varieties (e.g. colloquial Belgian Dutch, regiolect, dialect) are widely used in
Flanders, both in informal and formal situations. Previous research has demonstrated
that several of these varieties frequently occur in spoken language on Flemish
television (e.g. Van Hoof, 2013). In this context, it is particularly interesting to
investigate to what extent this colloquial Belgian Dutch variety penetrates in intralingual
subtitles. If this would occur in a significant number of cases, this shift from an
exclusively spoken variety to a written medium would be indicative for the further
spreading and acceptation of non-standard Dutch in Flanders.
In a first step, we examine (i) to what extent Flemish subtitlers prefer non-accepted
Belgian Dutch variants rather than General Standard Dutch variants, (ii) whether they
more often use non-standard lexemes than non-standard grammatical items, and (iii)
which contextual parameters (program genre and source language) affect the
subtitlers’ linguistic choices. To achieve this goal, we gathered sets with lexical and
grammatical norm-related linguistic variants and extracted them from the SoNaRcorpus (Schuurman et al. 2010). Using profile-based correspondence analysis
(Plevoets 2015), we measured linguistic distances between the parameters and their
interactions and visualized them in a three-dimensional plot. The results reveal that
certain television genres (e.g. fiction and comedy) encourage the use of colloquial
Belgian Dutch in the subtitles. In addition, it was shown that the intralingual subtitles of
Flemish speakers contain more non-general Belgian Dutch than the interlingual
subtitles of English speakers and the intralingual subtitles of Netherlandic Dutch
speakers. A plausible explanation for these results is that subtitlers (consciously or
unconsciously) transfer the non-standard, colloquial Belgian Dutch variants in the
original footage directly to the subtitles.
In a next step, we compare the original speech in the television program to the
corresponding subtitles to examine to what extent the original footage influences the
subtitlers’ linguistic choices. To find out whether subtitlers just transfer spoken Belgian
Dutch colloquialisms to the subtitles or whether they even add colloquialisms to the
subtitles (thereby enforcing the Belgian atmosphere), we analyzed the language use in
the original speech and the corresponding subtitles of twenty fiction programs. The
results reveal that colloquial Belgian Dutch does not merely occur in spoken registers,
but that it is also a vital alternative for Standard Dutch in written language.
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References:
Plevoets, K. (2015). Corregp: Functions and Methods for Correspondence Regression.
Ghent University
Schuurman, I., V. Hoste and P. Monachesi (2010). Interacting Semantic Layers of
Annotation in SoNaR, a Reference Corpus of Contemporary Written Dutch. In
LREC.
Van Hoof, S. (2013). Feiten en fictie. Taalvariatie in Vlaamse televisiereeksen vroeger
en nu. Nederlandse Taalkunde 18(1), 35-64.
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ARE UNACCUSATIVES A HOMOGENEOUS CLASS? PATTERNS OF SUBJECT
POSITION IN SPANISH UNACCUSATIVES ARE MOTIVATED BY FUNCTION AND
WEIGHT FACTORS
Manuel Pulido-Azpiroz
Penn State University
Keywords:
Subject position, unaccusatives, weight factors, Spanish.
Abstract:
Despite the widespread influence of the Unaccusativity Hypothesis (Perlmutter, 1978),
more recent studies on Romance languages have cast doubt on the homogeneity of
unaccusatives as a class (e.g., Aranovich, 2003). In Spanish, an SVO language,
unaccusative verbs have been argued to show a strong tendency to have postverbal
subjects (e.g. Mendikoetxea, 1999).
Hypothesis: This study argues that previous classifications by lexical verb item (type)
fail to capture the heterogeneity of usage patterns in unaccusatives. For example,
motion verbs can be divided according to a deictic function (Talmy, 2000) as a) ‘come’
verbs (i.e., “motion-toward-the-center”, that is, the speaker/interlocutor), which do not
often require target specification through an adverbial; and b) ‘go’ verbs expressing
“motion-from-the-center,” which are expected to be complemented. The presence of
adverbials within a clause may affect the position of the subject due to weight factors
(Silva-Corvalán 1982). Because adverbials that specify path in go verbs may be
expected to be focalized (i.e., postverbal) it is predicted that go verbs will favor
preverbal subjects despite their classification as unaccusatives.
Method: 1143 affirmative declarative sentences containing intransitive verbs with 3rd
person subjects were extracted from two corpora of Peninsular Spanish (CORLEC,
Marcos-Marín, 1992; PRESEEA-Madrid, Cestero et al., 2012). Tokens were coded for
(a) Verb type; (b) Presence and position of an adverbial; and (c) Referential Distance
(Givón, 1983) up to 12 clauses.
Results and Conclusion: The presence of adverbials is high in copulas (83%, N=126)
and go verbs (61%, N=89) but is disfavored in non-deictic unaccusatives (37%, N=147)
and come verbs (34%, N=116). As predicted, verb types with low rates of postverbal
adverbials favor VS, whereas go verbs and predicative copulas favor SV. Importantly,
even when no adverbial is present in the clause, go verbs still favor VS to a
significantly lesser extent (54%) than do the other unaccusatives (67%-91%),
suggesting entrenchment of usage patterns. The results question the view of
unaccusativity as a coherent category.
References:
Aranovich, R. (2003). The semantics of auxiliary selection in Old Spanish. Studies in
Language 27, 1-37.
Cestero, A. M., I. Molina and F. Paredes (2012). La lengua hablada en Madrid. Corpus
PRESEEA-MADRID (distrito de Salamanca). Alcalá de Henares: Universidad
de Alcalá.
Marcos Marín, F. (dir.) (1992). COREC: Corpus de Referencia de la Lengua Española
Contemporánea: Corpus Oral Peninsular.
401
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Mendikoetxea, A. (1999). Construcciones inacusativas y pasivas. In I. Bosque and V.
Demonte (eds.). Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española, vol II, (pp.
1575-1629). Madrid: Espasa.
Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. In
Jaeger, J. et al. (eds.). Proceedings of the 4th annual meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society (pp. 157-189). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Silva-Corvalán, C. (1982). Subject Expression and Placement in Mexican-American
Spanish. In J. Amastae and L. Elías-Olivares (eds.). Spanish in the United
States. Sociolinguistics Aspects (pp.93-120). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Talmy, L. (2000). Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Toward a Cognitive
Semantics, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
402
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PRACTICES OF POWER AND THE POWER OF PRACTICE. ANALYZING VISUAL
MULTILINGUALISM AND SOCIETAL DYNAMICS WITH THE CITIZEN SCIENCE APP
“LINGSCAPE”
Christoph Purschke
University of Luxembourg
Keywords:
Citizen science, linguistic landscape, multilingualism, discourses of power, digital
humanities.
Abstract:
In this paper I will introduce a crowdsourcing approach to research on linguistic
landscapes using the mobile app “Lingscape” (cf. Purschke in print). I will discuss the
methodological background of this citizen science project and its implications for the
analysis of cultural practice in general and linguistic landscapes in particular. I will then
present evidence from two case studies in Luxembourg and Vienna.
Multilingual communities like Vienna and Luxembourg are laboratories for the analysis of
cultural complexity. In both cases we find a historically diverse population, a large amount
of socioeconomic (trans-border) migration and societal challenges regarding the
organization of social participation in multilingual practices. Thus, they can serve as
primary examples for the ways in which contact between different cultures and languages
shapes social practice. This is especially true when it comes to the negotiation of power in
a given community. One visible indicator of such power-related discourses are multilingual
lettering practices in public space. Both top-down (official signposts, street signs, etc.) and
bottom-up (advertisement, business signs, graffiti, etc.) signs and lettering directly reflect
cultural complexity by dint of the copresence and semiotic structuring of different
languages in public lettering thus forming the so-called “linguistic landscape” of a
community (cf. Landry & Bourhis 1997: 25).
The analysis of visible multilingualism is a vital subbrach of Sociolinguistics (cf. Shohamy
& Gorter 2009). Still data collection and analysis is somehow arduous due to the density
and diversity of lettering in public space. Therefore, Lingscape makes use of smartphone
technology and a crowdsourcing approach to linguistic landscapes research. This free
research and teaching tool for Android and iOS enables users to upload photos of public
signs to an interactive map. Such an approach to collecting citizens’ perceptions of public
space of course bears a certain risk regarding data quantity and quality. But at the same
time it directly engages citizens with scientists in a joint research process.
The initial studies conducted with Lingscape in Vienna and Luxembourg clearly
demonstrate the potential of this citizen science approach. But, much more importantly,
the studies highlight different individual and societal strategies of negotiating power via
public lettering practices. It can be shown that individual perspectivations of public lettering
build upon different perceptions of symbolic purposes and practical frames of action.
Moreover, the studies reveal characteristic patterns of practice on the local, regional, and
national level that directly reflect different ways in which communities negotiate
sovereignty of interpretation over public space and social participation.
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References:
Landry, R. and R. Y. Bourhis (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An
empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16, 23–49.
Purschke, C. (in print). Surveying the linguistic landscape of a multilingual country by
smartphone. Introducing Lingscape in Luxembourg. Linguistik Online.
Shohamy, E. and D. Gorter (eds.) (2009). Linguistic landscape: expanding the scenery.
London and New York: Routledge.
404
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DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP ON HOLIDAY: AUXILIARY ALTERNATION IN SPOKEN
MONTRÉAL FRENCH (1971-2016)
Béatrice Rea
University of Oxford
Keywords:
Sociolinguistic variation, trend study, auxiliary alternation, Montréal French.
Abstract:
My paper investigates the auxiliary alternation in spoken Montréal French between avoir
“have” and être “be” with the twenty or so verbs prescriptively requiring the latter (tomber
“to fall”, partir “to leave”, rester “to stay”, etc.):
(1) J’ai tombé (AVOIR) vs Je suis tombé (ÊTRE)
I fell/have fallen
Interestingly, this levelling phenomenon has been documented in virtually all the Frenchspeaking communities of North America (Ontario, Canadian Maritime Provinces, New
England, Louisiana) and in some varieties of popular European French in Lorraine,
Picardy, Gascony, and Wallonia (Ledgeway 2012).
After analysing the Sankoff-Cedergren Montréal Corpus (1971), Ledgeway (in press,
section 3.2.2.4) observed that linguistic structure had little to do with the variation, and
Sankoff &Thibault (1977: 107) concluded that greater exposure to the standard would slow
down avoir-extension. With a pilot study (2013) and a trend study (2016), I attempt to
determine whether their prediction came true. I will also explore such variation within
pronominal constructions because they have not been studied by Sankoff and Thibault:
(2) Je m’ai fait mal (AVOIR) vs Je me suis fait mal (ÊTRE)
I (have) hurt myself
In 2013, I recorded 12 native speakers of Montréal French (and recorded an additional 36
in spring 2016) and transcribed the compound tense tokens of the verbs that had shown
alternation in Sankoff & Thibault (1977, 1980), as well as those of the pronominal verbs
that arbitrarily surfaced during the sociolinguistic interviews.
A comparison of my preliminary results (2013) with those of Sankoff & Thibault (1977,
1980) reveals that the auxiliary alternation observed in intransitive verbs has overall
significantly decreased in Montréal French. Être-retention correlates with a younger age,
the completion of higher educational degrees, upper socioeconomic classes, greater
insertion in the linguistic market, and English bilingualism: thus substantiating the
conclusions drawn by Sankoff & Thibault. My data also show that avoir-generalisation in
the compound tenses of pronominal verbs is highly socially marked. The decline of avoirextension in Montréal French appears to illustrate a realignment with Standard French.
References:
Ledgeway, A. (2012). From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and Change.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
405
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Ledgeway, A. (2015). From Latin to Romance Syntax: The Great Leap. In P. Crisma and
G. Longobardi (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Diachronic and Historical
Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sankoff, G. and P. Thibault. (1977). L’alternance entre les auxiliaires avoir et être en
français parlé à Montréal. Langue française 34: 81–108.
Sankoff, G. and Thibault, P. (1980). The alternation between the auxiliaries avoir and être
in Montréal French. In G. Sankoff (ed.). The Social Life of Language (pp. 311–
345). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
406
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DIALECT CONVERGENCE IN WESTERN ANDALUCÍA: THE DEMERGER OF CECEO
Brendan Regan
University of Texas
Keywords:
Demerger/merger, dialect convergence, ceceo, sociophonetics, Andalusian Spanish.
Abstract:
Throughout Europe, large-scale societal changes have led to the loss of traditional
dialectal features through convergence towards regional or national standards (Auer &
Hinskens 1996). In Andalucía, one such case is the demerger of ceceo to the national
standard distinción as shown in Málaga (Ávila 1994; Villena 1996, 2001, 2008; Villena &
Requena 1996; Lasarte 2010) and Granada (Salvador 1980; Moya & García-Wiedemann
1995; Melguizo 2007). Such studies have led Hernández & Villena (2009), among others,
to propose Eastern convergence and Western divergence. However, most research has
focused on urban Eastern Andalucía, leaving Western (and rural) Andalucía understudied.
Based on 80 sociolinguistic interviews (40 male, 40 female; ages 18-80), the current
endeavor analyzes the coronal fricative variation in the city of Huelva and the nearby rural
town of Lepe. The aim of the study was three-fold: (i) to demonstrate that ceceo is
demerging to distinción in Western Andalucía; (ii) to compare the findings of a rural
community to those of urban communities in order to counteract the urban turn of
variationist studies (Britain 2012); and, (iii) to employ a large-scale sociophonetic approach
to examine gradient sound change. The current analysis comes from a four-part
sociolinguistic interview averaging 60 minutes: (i) semi-directed conversation; (ii)
paragraph reading; (iii) word lists; and (iv) demographic and attitudinal questions. Only
syllable initial orthographic <s> and <z,ci,ce> were analyzed as syllable final is
aspirated/deleted. The tokens were measured acoustically using Praat (Boersma &
Weenink 2016) for spectral peak frequency (Hz), the first four spectral moments, and
normalized amplitude (dB). The data were analyzed using a linear mixed effects
regression model (R Development Core Team 2010) with both linguistic (orthography,
style, preceding/following segment, syllabic stress, functionality) and extra-linguistic factors
(gender, age, education, occupation, years lived away) as fixed factors and with speaker
as a random factor.
Analyses indicate that significant predictors of demerged realizations are gender, age,
years lived away, education, orthography, and style based on the measures of center of
gravity, variance, and amplitude. The demerged speakers appear to be youth, those with
university studies, those with years lived away, and females. The implications of this study
are (i) that Huleva and Lepe, similarly to Eastern Andalucía, are also experiencing the
demerging of the dialectal feature of ceceo to distinción, and that (ii) even small rural
towns are susceptible to convergence to regional or national standards due to increased
mobility, education, and contact.
References:
Auer, P. and F. Hinskens (1996). The convergence and divergence of dialects in Europe.
New and not so new developments in an old area. Sociolingüística 10, 1-30.
407
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Ávila Muñoz, A. M. (1994). Variación reticular e individual de s/z en el Vernáculo Urbano
Malagueño: Datos del barrio de Capuchinos. Analecta Malacitana 17, 343-367.
Britain, D. (2012). Countering the urbanist agenda in variationist sociolinguistics. In M.
Meyerhoff and E. Schleef (eds.). Dialectological and folk dialectological concepts of
space (pp. 12-30). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Boersma, P. and D. Weenink (1999-2016). Praat: A system for doing phonetics by
computer. Version 6.0.04 [computer program]. http://www.praat.org.
Hernández Campoy, J. M., and J. A. Villena Ponsoda (2009). Standardness and
nonstandardness in Spain: dialect attrition and revitalization of regional dialects of
Spanish. International Journal of Sociology of Language 196-197, 181-214.
Lasarte Cervantes, M. C. (2010). Datos para la fundamentación empírica de la escisión
fonemática prestigiosa de /Ɵs/ en Andalucía. NRFH 58 (2), 483-516.
Melguizo Moreno, E. (2007). La variación de /θs/: Estudio comparativo de dos muestras de
población de Granada. ELUA 21(1), 1-16.
Moya Corral, J. A., and E. García Wiedemann. (1995). El habla de Granada y sus barrios.
Granada: Universidad de Granada.
R Development Core Team (2010) [online]. R: A language and environment for statistical
computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Available at:
http://www.R-projects.org.
Villena Ponsoda, J. A. (1996). Convergence and divergence in a standard-dialect
continuum: Networks and individuals in Málaga. Sociolinguistica 10, 112–137.
Villena Ponsoda, J. A., and F. Requena Santos (1996). Género, Educación y Uso
Lingüístico: La variación social y reticular de S y Z en la ciudad de Málaga.
Lingüística (ALFAL) 8, 5-51.
408
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¿LE MOLESTA EL RUIDO O LA MOLESTA EL RUIDO? A STUDY OF VERBS WITH
ALTERNATION BETWEEN ACCUSATIVE AND DATIVE CASE-MARKING
Doina Repede
University of Sevilla
Keywords:
Sociolinguistics, variation, transitive/intransitive verbs, leísmo.
Abstract:
This presentation deals with the topic of leísmo aparente (Fernández-Ordóñez, 1999)
or falso leísmo (RAE, 2009), that is to say, the use of Spanish clitics le(s), la(s), lo(s)
with verbs (Le/la ayudó, le/la molesta, le/lo escucha) and constructions (Le/la obligó a
estudiar, Le/la llaman la Divina, Se le/la respeta) that vary their casual government.
This phenomenon appears in Spanish language in the Americas (Parodi, Luna y
Helmer, 2012) and territories where the pronoun system of case prevails, as a
consequence of the particular evolution of these verbs through the history: government
reinterpretation, ambiguous constructions and etcetera.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the verbs that vary between the transitive and
intransitive government (atraer, agradar, conocer, inquietar, querer, pillar, ver, etc.) in
Seville and to see to what extent this phenomenon is determined by the nature of the
construction and the different organization of the clause.
In order to provide an answer to the research question of this paper, two types of
questionnaires have been designed. E.g.
1. —Dónde está Juan. No le veo. Yo suelo decir___
Mi padre siempre está quejoso. Ahora LO molesta comer en este
restaurante Yo suelo decir ____
2. — ¿Dónde está Juan? No…… veo.
Juanito está empapado;…… ha pillado una gran tormenta en la calle
jugando.
Each questionnaire contains one hundred fifty-two sentences with empty spaces to fill
in with a Spanish clitic pronoun (singular and plural).
Twenty-four subjects with ages ranging from 18 to 25 participated in the study here
presented; they were classified into two groups: 12 men and 12 women. All of the
participants were university students and they were born in Seville.
For this, we based our analysis on twelve linguistic variables (number, genre, type of
subject, polarity and etcetera). In general, the results show that the transitive
construction appears with an animate subject that comes ahead. On the contrary, with
inanimate subject and, specially, with a sentence form, the intransitive construction
prevails.
References:
Fernández Ordoñez, I. (1999). Leísmo, laísmo y loísmo. In I. Bosque and V. Demonte
(eds.). Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española vol. 1. (pp. 1317-1397).
Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
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Gutiérrez Ordóñez, S. (1999). Los dativos. In I. Bosque and V. Demonte (eds.).
Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española vol. 1 (pp. 1323-1339). Madrid:
Espasa Calpe.
Parodi, C., K. V. Luna and A. Helmer. (2012). El leísmo en América y España:
bifurcación de una norma. Bulletin of Hipanic Studies 89(3), 217-236.
Real Academia Española and Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española
(2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa Libros.
Vázquez Rozas, V. (1995). El complemento indirecto en español. Santiago de
Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Colección Lalia: Series
Maior, 1.
410
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EXPLORING THE RELATIONAL RESPONDING TASK (RRT) AS A NEW MEASURE
OF LANGUAGE ATTITUDES
Laura Rosseel
University of Leuven
FWO, Research Foundation Flanders
Dirk Geeraerts
University of Leuven
Dirk Speelman
University of Leuven
Keywords:
Social meaning of language variation, language variation and change, Dutch, language
attitudes, RRT.
Abstract:
For decades, quantitative language attitude research has known little methodological
innovation (Speelman et al. 2013). Yet, in the last few years, linguists have started to
overcome this deadlock and have turned towards social psychology for new attitude
measures. Especially the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has proven a successful new
addition to the sociolinguist’s toolbox (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2012; Pantos & Perkins
2012; Rosseel et al. 2015; Loudermilk 2015). Despite its relative success, the IAT has
a number of limitations, such as the fact that it measures the association between two
concepts (e.g. ‘I’ and ‘skinny’) without controlling for the relationship between those two
concepts (e.g. ‘I am skinny’ vs. ‘I want to be skinny’). The Relational Responding Task
(RRT), a novel implicit attitude measure recently developed by social psychologists (De
Houwer et al. 2015), makes up for exactly that limitation by presenting participants with
full propositions expressing beliefs rather than loose concepts.
In this paper, we will present research which explores the RRT as a novel measure of
language attitudes. In our study, we measure the social meaning of two varieties of
Dutch in Belgium: Standard Belgian Dutch (SBD) and tussentaal, a more colloquial
variety which, according to some, is spreading and may be competing with SBD in
certain contexts (Grondelaers & Speelman 2013). It has been hypothesized that the
rise of tussentaal is enabled by a new modern type of dynamic prestige which
competes with the traditional prestige of SBD. We use the RRT to check whether
speakers indeed associate the two varieties with different types of prestige. In addition
to presenting the results of this study, our paper will reflect upon the usefulness of the
RRT as a new measure for (socio)linguists to study social meaning of language
variation.
References:
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2012). The Implicit Association Test and sociolinguistic meaning.
Lingua, 122 (7), 753–763.
De Houwer, J. Heider, N. Spruyt, A. Roets and S. Hughes (2015). The relational
responding task: toward a new implicit measure of beliefs. Frontiers in
Psychology, 6 (article 319).
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Grondelaers, S., and D. Speelman (2013). Can speaker evaluation return private
attitudes towards stigmatised varieties? Evidence from emergent
standardisation in Belgian Dutch. In T. Kristiansen and S. Grondelaers (eds.).
Language (De)standardisations in Late Modern Europe Experimental Studies
(pp. 171–191). Oslo: Novus.
Loudermilk, B.C. (2015). Implicit attitudes and the perception of sociolinguistic
variation. In A. Prikhodkine and D. Preston (eds.). Responses to Language
Varieties. Variability, Processes and Outcomes (pp. 137-156). Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Pantos, A.J., and A. W. Perkins (2012). Measuring Implicit and Explicit Attitudes
Toward Foreign Accented Speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology
32 (1), 3–20.
Rosseel, L., D. Speelman and D. Geeraerts (2015). Can social psychological attitude
measures be used to study language attitudes? A case study exploring the
Personalized Implicit Association Test. Proceedings of the 6th Conference on
Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics.
Speelman, D., A. Spruyt, L. Impe and D. Geeraerts (2013). Language attitudes
revisited: Auditory affective priming. Journal of Pragmatics 52, 83–92.
412
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Yeísmo in Majorcan Spanish: Phonetic variation in a bilingual context
Assumpció Rost Bagudanch
Universitat de les Illes Balears
Keywords: Spanish Phonetics, phonetic variation, bilingualism, yeísmo, dialectology
Traditionally, studies of Spanish language have focused on dialectal variation
but little attention has been paid to Spanish when in contact with Catalan. Yet, there
have been some interesting incipient works on this subject (i.e., Blas Arroyo 1999,
Sinner & Wesch 2008), most of them regarding morphological and syntactic aspects of
language contact. Besides, they usually concentrate on Spanish in contact with
Peninsular Catalan, rather than Spanish in contact with varieties of Catalan.
In this paper, we would like to zoom in on the subject of the phonological merger
process, which is considered to be completed in most parts of Spanish linguistic
domain (see Hualde 2005, Rost 2014, Scarpace, Beery & Hualde 2015) and which also
occurs in Majorcan Catalan (Prieto 2004, Recasens 1991, Veny 1987, 1993): yeísmo,
which implies the neutralization of the /ʎ/ - /j/ opposition, in favour of the delateralized
option. However, yeísmo is not expected to behave in the same way in Spanish and
Majorcan Catalan. According to Veny (1978, 1987, 1993) or Prieto (2004), it is
necessary to distinguish between yodización –the merger arising from the historical
Latin contexts Lj, C’L, T’L, G’L– and yeísmo – the merger arising in other contexts, also
known as non-historical yeísmo. As stated by such scholars, the former is a typical
feature of Balearic Catalan, whereas the latter is not.
Bilingualism in Majorca evidences the close contact between the Spanish and the
Catalan phonetic systems. Romera (2003) indicates that this contact is acting as
inhibitor of yeísmo in Majorcan Spanish, for Balearic Catalan maintains /ʎ/ in some
contexts, as explained before. Hence, we would like to determine whether Majorcan
Spanish evolves in the same direction as Peninsular Spanish. Previous works on
yeísmo (Rost 2014, 2015, Scarpace, Beery & Hualde 2015) have proved that
Peninsular Spanish shows a high degree of variation, with allophones ranging from
semivocalic and approximant variants, to affricates or even stops. By contrast, the
aforementioned literature on Catalan language does not recognize the same degree of
variability. In this paper we want to study whether the phonetic realizations for both /ʎ/
and /j/ categories (orthographic <ll> and <y>) are the same in Peninsular and in
Majorcan Spanish. If proven otherwise, we intend to find out if there is an influence of
Majorcan Catalan.
To achieve these goals, we have compared spontaneous speech of five Spanish
speakers from Madrid, none of whom could neither produce nor perceive the ancient
contrast between /ʎ/ and /j/, to that of five bilingual speakers born and raised in
Majorca. As we wanted to examine speech in the most natural conditions, we recorded
unguided interviews on familiar topics. We took into account the acoustic
characteristics of all /ʎ/ and /j/ utterances, as well as their intensity and duration values.
The first results seem to point out that, as hypothesized, the speakers from Madrid
show greater variance in the production of /j/ than the speakers from Majorca. In this
case, their phonetic realizations seem to correspond to the phonetic solutions stated for
Majorcan Catalan.
References:
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Blas Arroyo, J. L. (1999). Spanish and Catalan in the Balearic Islands. International
Journal of the Sociology of Language 184, 79‑93.
Hualde, J. I. (2005). The Sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prieto, P. (2004). Fonètica i fonologia: els sons del català. Barcelona: Editorial
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
Recasens, D. (1991). Fonètica descriptiva del català (Assaig de caracterització de la
pronúncia del vocalisme i del consonantisme del català al segle XX). Barcelona:
Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
Romera, M. (2003). La variedad del castellano actual en Baleares. Moenia 9, 359-381.
Rost, A. (2014). Una panorámica del yeísmo: ¿un proceso acabado o en
construcción?. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana XII/23, 141163.
Rost, A. (2015). A vueltas con el yeísmo: producción fonética, percepción y cambio. In
A. De Lucas Vicente, A. Gordejuela Senosiáin, D. Izquierdo Alegría, F. Jiménez
Berrio & M. Casado Velarde (eds.). Lenguas, lenguaje y lingüística.
Contribuciones desde la Lingüística General (pp. 417-428). Pamplona: Servicio
de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra.
Scarpace, Beery and J. I. Hualde. (2015). Allophony of /ʝ/ in Peninsular Spanish.
Phonetica 72, 76-97.
Sinner, C. and A. Wesch (eds.). (2008). El castellano en las tierras de habla catalana.
Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert.
Veny, J. (1978). Estudis de geolingüística catalana. Barcelona: Edicions 62.
Veny, J. (1987). Els parlars catalans (síntesi de dialectologia). Barcelona: Editorial
Moll.
Veny, J. (1993). Yeísmo histórico y tratamiento de /x/ en asturiano y catalán. Lletres
asturianes: Boletín Oficial de l’Academia de la Llingua Asturiana 50, 27-37.
414
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ABOUT CURRENT LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE OF AND ATTITUDES TOWARDS
LOW GERMAN
Astrid Rothe
Andrea Kleene
Institut für Deutsche Sprache
Keywords:
Low German, statistical analyses, language attitudes.
Abstract:
People in Northern Germany are known for their linguistic closeness to the Standard
German language. Besides, the traditional Low German is fading within the broader
context of a diminishing diglossic situation in Northern Germany. These dynamic
circumstances challenge an elicitation of the linguistic competence in Northern
Germany.
Who does understand Low German and who speaks it? What are the typical occasions
in which the regional language is being used? Who is using the range of Low German
in the media and culture? Which representations do the people in Northern Germany
have regarding the Low German and how do they evaluate Low German and how
Standard German?
These questions, among others, are followed up by a common research project of the
Institute of Low German (‘Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache’, INS) and the Institute of
German (‘Institut für Deutsche Sprache’, IDS). The core of the project is a survey which
is representative for the resident population of Northern Germany at the age of 16 and
above (Ehlers et al. in press). It is conducted by a dedicated institute for election
analyses. Overall, 1.632 people of eight different federal states were asked during
telephone interviews.
Ultimately we would like to gain detailed knowledge about the competence of and the
attitudes to Low German. Based on this, the language could be more easily promoted
and it could be more efficiently be used for the purpose of the “European Charter for
Regional or Minority Languages”.
One part of the talk will show the development of Low German while comparing the
recent survey with surveys of 1984 (Stellmacher 1987) and 2007 (Möller 2008).
Furthermore, on the basis of statistical analyses we discuss correlations between
sociodemographic and other substantial details to the attitudes towards Low German.
Thus, we consider the importance of the factors gender, age, level of education and
origin in relatedness to the question whether Low German should be promoted or not.
Finally, we will focus on a comparison of the evaluation of Low German and Standard
German.
References:
Ehlers, C., R. Goltz, A. Kleene, A. Plewnia and A. Rothe (2016). Status und Gebrauch
des Niederdeutschen. Erste Ergebnisse einer repräsentativen Erhebung.
Mannheim: IDS.
Möller, F. (2008). Plattdeutsch im 21. Jahrhundert. Bestandsaufnahme und
Perspektiven. Leer: Schuster (Schriften des Instituts für niederdeutsche
Sprache. Bd. 34).
Stellmacher, D. (1987). Wer spricht Platt? Zur Lage des Niederdeutschen heute. Eine
kurzgefaßte Bestandsaufnahme. Leer: Schuster (Schriften des Instituts für
niederdeutsche Sprache. Bd. 14).
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A VARIATIONIST ACCOUNT OF FOCALIZATION STRATEGIES IN BASQUE
Lorena Sainz-Maza Lecanda
Ohio State University
Keywords:
Basque, focus, variation, exhaustivity.
Abstract:
It has been generally assumed that constituents conveying narrow information focus in
Basque must appear in immediate preverbal position (e.g. (1a)), rendering “in-situ” focus
instantiations unacceptable (e.g. (1b)) (Ortiz de Urbina 1989, Elordieta 2001, Arregi 2003,
inter alia). However, this study provides empirical evidence that constituents conveying
information focus can also be expressed in-situ. It is shown that immediate preverbal vs.
in-situ information focus variation is constrained by discourse-pragmatic effects having to
with exhaustivity (Szabolsci 1981, Kiss 1998, Horvath 2007, among others) as well as
external factors, namely language proficiency and education level.
(1) When did you buy that shirt?
a. [F Atzo]
erosi
Yesterday
nuen
alkondara.
buy.PRF aux.PST
shirt.ABS
‘(I) bought (it) [F yesterday].’
b. # Alkondara
Shirt.ABS
erosi
buy.PRF
nuen
aux.PST
[F atzo].
yesterday
‘(I) bought (it) [F yesterday].’
It has been argued that Hungarian speakers place focused constituents in immediate
preverbal position only if they imply exhaustivity; that is, the idea that the element
conveying information focus is the only or maximal element satisfying the predication.
Otherwise, information focus expressions remain in-situ (Horvath, 2007). In order to test
the possible effects of exhaustivity in Basque, a forced-choice task was administered to 60
Basque speakers via SurveyGizmo (Vanek and McDaniel, 2006). Three linguistic
conditions were tested: 1) exhaustive vs. ambiguous questions, 2) only-phrases vs. evenphrases, 3) universal quantifier everyone vs. universal quantifier every. Additionally,
subjects received a sociodemographic questionnaire and Basque proficiency test. The
data were analyzed using mixed-effects models and conditional inference trees in R.
Results show that Basque speakers choose the immediate preverbal focus variant
significantly more often than in-situ focus within exhaustive domains (i.e. exhaustive
questions, focused expression containing only-phrases, the universal quantifier everyone).
These findings interact with participants’ Basque proficiency level and education as it is
highly proficient and highly educated participants that show a favorable effect towards
preverbal information focus in these exhaustive environments.
This first empirical exploration of Basque focus from a variationist standpoint has revealed
that, like in Hungarian, the structural realization of Basque information focus is variable,
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uncovering a strong association between immediate preverbal focus and exhaustivity. The
different selection patterns reported between more proficient and less proficient Basque
speakers suggest that the effects of exhaustivity may be acquired at a late stage in the
acquisition process.
References:
Arregi, K. (2003). Focus on Basque movements. Cambridge, MA: MIT PhD dissertation.
Elordieta, A. (2001). Verb movement and constituent permutation in Basque. Leiden:
Leiden University dissertation.
Horvath, J. (2007). Separating focus movement from focus. In S. Karimi, V. Samiian and
W. K. Wilkins (eds.). Phrasal and clausal architecture: Syntactic derivation and
interpretation (pp. 108-145). Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kiss, K. É. (1998). Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74, 245-273.
Ortiz de Urbina, J. (1989). Some Parameters in the Grammar of Basque. Dordrecht: Foris.
Szabolcsi, A. (1981). The semantics of topic-focus articulation. In J. Groenendijk (ed.).
Formal methods in the study of language (pp. 513-541). Amsterdam: Matematisch
Centrum.
Vanek, C. and S. McDaniel. (2006). Surveygizmo. Boulder: Widgix LLC.
417
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SOCIETAL AND INTRAGROUP VARIATION – CORRELATING WITH TYPE OF
SOCIETY?
Helge Sandøy
University of Bergen
Keywords:
Variation, intragroup, change, real time.
Abstract:
Labov (1994: 83) shows us how some types of linguistic change can be defined by the
features stable and unstable in the individual and in the community where e.g.
communal change is reflected in the feature unstable in both. This typology has a
historical dimension; in the synchronic perspective we can wonder whether variability
demonstrates certain patterns, and whether possible patterns of variation correlate with
types of society. As linguistic change and variation are interrelated, such correlations
could help us understand more of the change processes. For instance, is a pattern of
large in-group variation a precondition for collective linguistic change in a community,
and under what societal conditions do such variational pattern arise? Etc.
Koinéization processes start with an unstable social structure and a very broad range
of linguistic variation (Kerswill & Trudgill 2005, Neteland 2014). On the other hand, we
often consider a stable community to be characterized by homogeneity. These are the
extremes on an axis where we want to discern different patterns of variation in between
and to understand the societal conditions for those. The range of variation can be
understood as the pot of linguistic resources that are available for the individual in
order to establish thesociocultural identity indaily interaction.
With such questions in mind, I intend to analyze the extent of intra- and inter-group
linguistic variation in the 16 societies that are represented in the sociolinguistic
corpus Talebanken and correlate them with various characteristics, e.g. on size,
industrial and socioeconomic structure, urbanity, in-migration, contact with other
communities, school structure and cultural focusing.
These societies have already been analyzed in real time studies (with time spans
varying from 20 to 40 years), and thus we have an opportunity to study variation
patterns in a historical dimension. The advantage of using Talebanken is that the data
from the previous studies, now stored in this corpus, have been collected and
processed in accordance with the same methodological principles just in order to make
comparative investigations possible.
So far sociolinguistic studies have normally been based on means at the group level.
For this particular investigation a simple way of describing variation is to calculate the
means of standard deviation for all linguistic variables for all individuals. This method
has already demonstrated great differences in the range of variation, and therefore the
next step is to establish a typology of variation and to look for correlations with the
indicated societal characteristics and with the extent of linguistic change, which is
established in the previous studies for the localities in question. The results will be
presented in the talk.
References:
Kerswill, P. and P. Trudgill (2005). The birth of new dialects. In P. Auer, F. Hinskens
and P. Kerswill (eds.). Dialect change. Convergence and divergence in
European languages, (pp. 196–200). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Neteland, R.. (2014). Koinéforming av industristedtalemål. Sosiolingvistisk studie av
språkutviklingen i Sauda og Årdal de siste hundre årene. Bergen: University of
Bergen.
419
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ADDRESS FORMS IN ECUADORIAN SPANISH: LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES
TOWARDS PRONOUNS OF ADDRESS AND USE OF NOMINAL AND RITUAL
ADDRESS FORMULAE
María Sancho Pascual
Daniel M. Sáez Rivera
Complutense University of Madrid
Keywords:
Pragmatics, pronouns of address, nominal and ritual address formulae, Ecuadorian
Spanish, linguistic attitudes.
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to complete the analysis on Ecuadorian Spanish address forms
already prompted by Sáez/Sancho (2016), in order to amplify and add nuances to the
descriptions of Ecuadorian Spanish address forms repertoire already fullfilled by
researchers such as Toscano (1964) and Placencia (1996, 2010), among others.
Linguistic attitudes towards pronouns of address used in nowadays Ecuadorian
Spanish will be therefore analyzed, and a description of the use of nominal and ritual
address formulae in Ecuador will be also provided. Our study has been performed
using a sample of 28 informers with high level education, pre-stratified according to sex
and dialectal origin. The address forms questionnaire developed by Molina Martos for
the PRESEEA project, with some alterations for obtaining finer grained data on types of
“voseo”, was employed for data gathering.
References:
Placencia, M. E. (1996). Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish. Multilingual Journal of
Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Communication 15:1, 13-34.
Placencia, M. E. (2010). El estudio de formas de tratamiento en Colombia y Ecuador.
In M. Hummel et al. (eds.). Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo
hispánico (pp. 341-373). México: El Colegio de México.
Toscano, H. (1964). El español hablado en el Ecuador. Presente y futuro de la lengua
española. Actas de la Asamblea de Filología del I Congreso de Instituciones
Hispánicas, vol. I (pp. 111-125). Madrid: Instituto de Cultura Hispánica.
Sáez Rivera, D. M. and M. Sancho Pascual (2016). Nuevas aportaciones a la
descripción del sistema de formas pronominales de tratamiento de la población
ecuatoriana. Paper presented at the XII Congreso Internacional de Lingüística
General, Universidad de Alcalá (Madrid, España), 23-25 May 2016.
420
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SOCIAL AND LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON THE AVAILABLE LEXICON IN
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Inmaculada Clotilde Santos Díaz
University of Málaga
Keywords:
Lexical availability, language
vocabulary.
acquisition, applied
linguistics, teacher training,
Abstract:
Lexical availability studies began with the elaboration of basic French by Gougenheim,
Michéa, Rivenc and Sauvageot (1956). The main objective was to teach French to
immigrant people and inhabitants of French colonies. Numerous applications of this
discipline appeared later. In the field of sociolinguistic, Ávila Muñoz and Villena
Ponsoda (2010) carried out a study to know which factors influence on the lexical
competence. They pointed out the role and impact of social network and social position
on the vocabulary. Nevertheless, currently there are no studies in foreign language
accomplishing an accurate research about the multifactorial groups of variables that
determines the available lexicon.
The purpose of this contribution is to know which factors have an impact on the lexical
competence in foreign language. The sample is made up of 171 students of the
Master's in Secondary Education Teaching. The data has been collected through a test
of lexical availability including nine centres of interest in English and French as a
foreign language and a social survey focused on the linguistic background of
respondents.
Statistical analysis has been carried out sequentially and justifiably in order to
corroborate or refute the theoretical assumptions: univariate analysis to present the
variables; bivariate analysis to know the relation between two variables; and
multivariate analysis to know the influence of extra linguistic variables on the
dependent variable, that is, the lexical decentralization index (LDI). This variable
measures the lexical ability gathered by the lexical availability test. Its calculation takes
into account the least compatible words or only written by a minority of students and
the relation between the word and the centre of interest. This way, this index shows not
only the number of words given by informants but also the degree of decentralization
and the connection with the centre of interest.
The results revealed a close relationship between the available lexicon and two others
factors: the available lexicon in mother tongue and those mainly related to the learning
of a foreign language. Lineal regression model and causal model show that the
importance of others factors such as the motivation in foreign language teaching, the
foreign language exposure and the speciality of the master chosen. There are other
factors, like the knowledge of other foreign languages, that maintain a significant
relation with the LDI. However, they are redundant in the multivariate models because
of their relation with the speciality of the master. The results try to be useful not only for
the applied linguistics but also for the academic curriculum of initial teacher training
programmes.
References:
Ayora Esteban, C. (2006). Disponibilidad léxica en Ceuta: aspectos sociolingüísticos.
Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz.
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Ávila Muñoz, A. M and J. A. Villena Ponsoda (eds.) (2010). Variación social del léxico
disponible en la ciudad de Málaga. Málaga: Editorial Sarriá.
Gougenheim, G., R. Michéa, P. Rivenc and A. Sauvageot (1956). L’élaboration du
francais élémentaire. Paris: Didier.
Lightbown, P. and N. M. Spada (2006). How Languages are learned (3.ª ed.). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
422
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FACTORS AFFECTING PASSIVE VOCABULARY
Inmaculada Clotilde Santos Díaz
University of Málaga
Keywords:
Passive vocabulary, technical term test, lexical availability, language learning, mother
tongue.
Abstract:
The starting hypothesis of this contribution is that sociolinguistic behaviour and learning
language background have an impact on the vocabulary. The study of Ávila Muñoz and
Villena Ponsoda (2010) has been taken as a precedent for the incorporation of a
technical term test. The basic principle of the test is to recognize technical terms and
related them with one of the centres of interest used in a lexical availability test. That
way, it is possible to know the passive vocabulary. It has been proved that a person
can be able to recognise some lexical items but he is not necessarily able to use these
words in an appropriate context as part of his active vocabulary (Terrel, 1986).
To gather the data, 171 postgraduate students fulfilled a detailed sociological
questionnaire and an identification technical test. It leads to more than 500 variables
that allows an in-depth knowledge of the study sample and, consequently, of its social,
cultural and academic characteristics. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis
have been carried out to explain statistically the behaviour of the linguistic variable.
The multiple and causal regression analysis – that measures factors that influences the
ability to identify technical terms– present a weak adequacy model in Spanish as a
mother tongue. The coefficient of multiple correlations is 0,116 and the chi-square is
not significant (51,402) but it is considerably greater than an adequate level (around 2).
The Root Mean Square Error of Approximation RMSEA is quite high (0,264). However,
a suitable model should present a level lower than 0,05.
The intermediate variables are the lexical competence in Spanish, the reading habits
and the exposure to cultural programs. The social class has a direct influence on three
variables: 0,216 on available lexicon, 0,218 on reading habits and 0,175 on cultural
programs. In this way, social class not only determines the linguistic variables but also
other extra linguistic factors that influence on the ability of identifying technical terms,
such as the exposure to cultural programs and the number of books read during a year.
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Direct effects
Indirect effects
Total effects
Lexical
competence in
Spanish
0,186
0,000
0,186
Speciality of the
Master
-0,103
0,000
-0,103
Reading habits
0,109
0,015
0,124
Cultural programs
0,140
0,003
0,137
Social class
0,120
0,079
0,199
Table 1. Model causal effects on the passive vocabulary
Due to the weakness of the model, the results contribute only to know which variables
could influence the knowledge of technical items: the available lexicon, the reading
habits, the exposure to cultural programs, the speciality of the master’s degree and the
social class. These findings corroborate the high incidence of the study level on the
passive vocabulary. It homogenizes the results and causes a lower the incidence of
other variables.
References:
Ávila Muñoz, A. M and J. A Villena Ponsoda (eds.) (2010). Variación social del léxico
disponible en la ciudad de Málaga. Málaga: Editorial Sarriá.
Elley, W. and F. Mangubhai (1983). The impact of reading on second language
learning. Reading Research Quarterly 19, 53-67.
Gougenheim, G., R. Michéa, P. Rivenc and A. Sauvageot (1956). L’élaboration du
francais élémentaire. Paris: Didier.
Strauss, A. L. (1987). Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Terrell, T. (1986). Acquisition in the natural approach: The binding/access framework.
The Modern Language Journal 70, 213–227.
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A NEW CLASSIFICATION OF CENTRES OF INTEREST IN LEXICAL AVAILABILITY
STUDIES
Inmaculada Clotilde Santos Díaz
University of Málaga
Keywords:
Lexical availability, centre of interest, classification, word organisation, vocabulary.
Abstract:
Since the beginning of lexical availability studies, Gougenheim, Michéa, Rivenc and
Sauvageot (1964: 189-190) pointed out the different behaviour presented by centres of
interest. A priori, French researchers differentiated between different homogeneity
levels and they showed the suitability of certain centres among others due to the lexical
availability.
This distinction is present in the majority of comparative results. Centres are classified
according to the total number of words, number of different words and the cohesion
index (Carcedo González, 2000; Samper Hernández, 2002; Ávila Muñoz y Villena
Ponsoda, 2010; Bellón Fernández, 2011, among others). Moreover, certain
researchers, such as Hernández Muñoz (2006), Tomé Cornejo (2011) and SánchezSaus Laserna (2011), have already presented a classification based on the internal
structure of centres.
After analysing the existing taxonomies and the general results of a study carried out in
Spanish, French and English, this communication proposes a new classification of
centres of interest according to their prototypicity. The main objective is to know the
behaviour of each centre considering three indexes: cohesion index, that measures the
relation between the average of words given by an informant and the total number of
different words in this centre; the centrality index that shows the distribution of nuclear
words according to the total number of different words of a centre; and the connectivity
index that presents the strength of the relationship between words in each centre.
The result is a structural index that presents the homogeneity of a centre, the
organization of nuclear words and the strength of connections between different words.
This numerical expression contributes to organize the centres of interest in a
continuum. At one extreme, it is placed the most prototypical centre, Human body parts.
At the other extreme, it is located the most relational centre, that is the less prototypical
centre, Computer and Internet. The rest of centres are positioned between this
continuum that helps to define its structure. For instance, Clothes and Means of
transport are close to the most prototypical centre; The school: furniture and school
material is located in an intermediate level and the rest of centres, Food and drink, The
city, Games and entertainments and Professions and Jobs present similar results to
the most relational centre.
This classification is the same in the three languages of the current study and it is very
similar to other studies. Nevertheless, this proposal can be altered by psycholinguistic
and sociolinguistic factors of each sample. The presented taxonomy tries to complete
the theoretical classifications with practical results. For that reason, this study has
incorporated all the words given by informants in contrast with other studies that
incorporate only the words directly related to each centre.
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Graphic 1. Centres of interest in the prototipicity continuum
References:
Gougenheim, G., R. Michéa, P. Rivenc and A. Sauvageot (1964). L’élaboration du
français fondamental (I degré): Étude sur l’élaboration d’un vocabulaire et d’une
grammaire de base. Paris: Didier.
Hernández Muñoz, N. (2006). Hacia una teoría cognitiva integrada de la disponibilidad
léxica. El léxico disponible de los estudiantes castellano-manchegos.
Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.
426
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SOCIOLINGUISTIC EVALUATIONS AND DIALECTAL IDENTIFICATIONS ABOUT
VARIETIES IN CONTACT WITH GALICIAN DIALECTS
Irene Santos Raña
Instituto da Lingua Galega, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Keywords:
Linguistic variation, perceptual dialectology, sociolinguistics, dialectal identification,
metalinguistic speech.
Abstract:
The frameworks of Linguistic variation and Sociolinguistics share many points and
speakers’ metalinguistic speech is an important one. The goal of this research is to
read up on how speakers categorise and evaluate the variation and the language
contact between Galician, Spanish, Portuguese and Astur-Leonese varieties. The
fieldwork of this study includes several places on the north-west of the Iberian
Peninsula, where the varieties quoted above coexist and where political and linguistic
borders come equally into play. The intricacies of the language contact and dynamics
in this setting are interesting in this research from the point of view of the Perceptual
Dialectology (PD), a linguistic sub branch that analyses speakers´ metalinguistic
speech through their evaluation of linguistic variation. In this way, the objectives of this
work are (i) to find out the features in which people perceive the variation and to know
how they evaluate them, (ii) to figure out how they categorised the variation and (iii) to
learn how they use the varieties.
Since the emergence of PD, researchers have been using different methodological
approaches to register language perceptions. This paper focusses on the presentation
of the data collection method as a tool to gather sociolinguistic information. The method
comprises two consecutive parts. The first component consists of the gathering of
linguistic stimuli and the second is the formulation of the data collection document.
Firstly, as some researchers maintain stimuli works as a given context to informants
avoiding that each one has to imagine one (Meyerhoff et al. 2015: 86). In order to
mitigate this drawback, we extracted short audio recordings from sociolinguistic
interviews conducted with native speakers of the different varieties involved. The
purpose of the interview was to collect the most salient variants in each linguistic
variety.
Secondly, the structure of the actual data collection method, which contains the stimuli,
was designed following both the procedures of DP and a recent work of Stefan
Dollinger, which summarizes the main structure of a questionnaire in Social
Dialectology. This arrangement includes questions about “behaviour and experience”,
“knowledge”, “beliefs and opinions” and “attitudes” regard to varieties and context of
use (Dollinger 2015: 236). The method applied in this work combines quantitative and
qualitative techniques. On the one hand, the quantitative items deal with rating tasks
about similarity, difference and correctness suggested by the varieties involved.
Moreover, dialect identification tasks are included. On the other hand, the qualitative
questions take part of a semi structured interview to gather explanations to the
evaluations and judgments.
In addition to outline the method, the presentation is going to include the first results of
the research.
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References:
Dollinger, S. (2015). The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Meyerhoff, M., E. Schleef and L. Mackenzie (2015). Doing Sociolinguistics. London:
Routledge.
Preston, D. R. (ed.) (1999). Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Winford, D. (2003). An introduction to contact linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
428
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TOWARDS AUTOMATIC GEOLOCALISATION OF SPEAKERS OF EUROPEAN
FRENCH
Yves Scherrer
Jean-Philippe Goldman
University of Geneva
Keywords:
Geolocalisation, dialect identification, feature selection, regional French.
Abstract:
Starting in 2015, Avanzi et al. (2016) have launched several online surveys to inquire
about regionalisms in European French (France, Belgium and Switzerland). Here, we
investigate the use of data from these surveys for automatic speaker geolocalisation,
both as a playful incentive to attract participants for further inquiries and as a scientific
analysis method of the already collected data.
Following Leemann et al. (2016), the problem of automatic speaker geolocalisation
consists in predicting the dialect/regiolect of a speaker (typically, a speaker that has not
participated in the survey) by asking a set of questions (typically, a small subset of the
surveyed variables). Given our motivations, the success of a speaker geolocalisation
method should not only be assessed by the percentage of correct answers, but also by
its ability to entertain and surprise potential participants. Three parameters influence
this success:
•
The number and type of questions to be asked. No more than 20 questions
should be asked to keep the attention span short.
•
The number and type of the areas to predict. The areas should reflect the
reduced amount of regional variation in current French, but too large areas
could make the problem look trivial and uninteresting.
•
The accuracy of the predictions. The method obviously should make as good
predictions as possible, but we estimate that about 2/3 of correct predictions are
required for a sustainable level of participant involvement.
We present a simulation framework that allows us to evaluate different parameter
settings, using solely the survey data in a leave-one-out fashion.
In a first set of two experiments, we start by determining an areal partition based on
political or on linguistic criteria (e.g. hierarchical clustering), and then apply the
shibboleth detection algorithm of Prokić et al. (2012) to find the most characteristic set
of questions for each area.
In a second experiment, we do not fix the areal partition in advance, but keep the
original localisation information (i.e., départements, provinces or cantons). In order to
find the optimal set of questions, we use recursive feature elimination (Guyon et al.
2002). Once the questions are determined, we dynamically expand the predictions to
n-best areas or neighbors.
With both methods, we reach the desired accuracy threshold with comparable area
sizes and number of variables (about 20). However, the variables selected by the
second approach intuitively correspond better to the variation patterns observed in the
original survey data.
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References:
Avanzi, M., C. Barbet, J. Glikman and J. Peuvergne (2016). Présentation d’une
enquête pour l’étude les régionalismes du français. In Actes du 5ème congrès
mondial de linguistique française (CMLF) (pp. 1-15). Tours, France.
Guyon I., J. Weston, S. Barnhill and V. Vapnik (2002). Gene selection for cancer
classification using support vector machines. Machine Learning 46(1-3), 389422.
Leemann, A., M. J. Kolly, R. Purves, D. Britain and E. Glaser (2016). Crowdsourcing
language change with smartphone applications. PLOS ONE.
Prokić, J., Ç. Çöltekin and J. Nerbonne (2012). Detecting Shibboleths. In Proceedings
of the EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH (pp. 72-80). Avignon,
France.
430
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SOCIAL MEANINGS OF DISCOURSE MARKERS AND DISFLUENT SPEECH
Erik Schleef
University of Salzburg
Keywords:
Discourse markers, pauses, perception, social meaning.
Abstract:
This study explores the issue of where social meanings may come from and how they
change when several linguistic features co-occur. It has been assumed that social
meanings derive from (a) their users (e.g. Trudgill and Giles 1978), or (b) the social
contexts in which they are used (e.g. Labov 2001). However, some structures may also
derive social meaning from the linguistic context in which they are used. Many
discourse markers, e.g. like and you know, co-occur with pauses and other disfluency
markers. Linguistic context may create social meaning for these particular discourse
markers. This is difficult to test after social meanings have already developed but it is
possible to test (1) whether certain functions of you know and like even share
meanings with disfluency markers, such as unfilled pauses and (2) what contribution, if
any, such unfilled pauses make when they co-occur with you know and like.
This study explores these questions by conducting perceptual tests with several
guises:
(a) speech without noticeable pauses and discourse markers,
and the same speech with…
(b) three 300ms unfilled pauses inserted,
(c) three discourse particles like (D’Arcy 2007) inserted
(d) three discourse particles like inserted and 300ms unfilled pauses preceding them
(e) three imprecision markers you know (Holmes 1986) inserted
(f) three imprecision markers you know inserted and 300ms unfilled pauses preceding
them.
Stimuli (a) to (f) were prepared for two female, mid-20s speakers and three different
topics, resulting in a total of 36 stimuli. Data were collected in Northern England in
2015. 668 respondents (352 female, 316 male; 307 MC, 361 WC), of which the
majority were between the ages of 20 and 45, rated three stimuli each on scales such
as intelligence, casualness, etc. in a between-subjects design.
Respondent ratings were subjected to mixed effects linear regressions in R. Regarding
(1), excerpts with unfilled pauses are heard as less certain and confident than the
neutral guise, but they are also heard as more educated and posh. You know and like
share with unfilled pauses only the former meanings – when they are preceded by a
pause but also when they occur on their own. Despite some similarities, the meaning
profiles for the discourse markers and pauses are considerably different, which makes
it unlikely that discourse markers have derived social meanings from pauses. Instead,
like and you know generate their disfluency meanings on their own by appearing to
break up expected standard syntactic structure.
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As for (2), both realisations of like are rated as less articulate, less reliable, less polite,
etc. than the neutral guise. These and similar character traits do not emerge for the two
versions of you know. Instead, you know and like share some social and
conversational traits. Finally, the realisations of like and you know with inserted pauses
show higher effect sizes for all significant scales, i.e. unfilled pauses increase the
strength of meanings already present, rather than adding new ones. These findings
provide additional support for a theory of indexicality that is not meaning-additive but
meaning-interactive.
References:
D’Arcy, A. (2007). Like and language ideology: disentangling fact from fiction. American
Speech 82, 386-419.
Holmes, J. (1986). Functions of you know in women’s and men’s speech. Language in
Society 15, 1-22.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P and H. Giles. Sociolinguistics and linguistic value judgements: correctness,
adequacy and aesthetics. In Coppieters and Goyvaerts (eds.). Functional
Studies in Language and Literature (pp.167-190). Ghent: Story-Scientia.
432
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U NÄR I SO, ES GEIT UME DIALÄKT HIE: QUOTATIVE VARIATION IN BERNESE
SWISS GERMAN
Christa Schneider
David Britain
Sarah Grossenbacher
University of Bern
Keywords:
Quotatives, Swiss German, Variationist approach, ethnolect.
Abstract:
Whilst there have been a multitude of variationist studies examining the changing
quotative system of English, especially the diffusion of innovative BE like (e.g.
Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999, Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009), examinations of the
quotative systems of other languages (see Buchstaller and Van Alphen 2012) have
largely been descriptive (e.g. Guardamagna 2010) or anchored in discourse analytic
approaches (e.g. Mazeland 2006), or examining one type of quotative (e.g. Foolen et al
2006), with few examining the linguistic and social constraints that shape speakers’
preferences for certain variants over others (see, however, Palacios Martinez 2014,
Cheshire et al, forthcoming). Research on German has been relatively limited and
largely tackles quotatives from a conversation analytic perspective (e.g. Golato 2000,
Bagi 2006, Imo 2007, Mertzlufft 2014). Here, we conduct a variationist analysis of the
quotation system of a variety of German, Bernese Swiss German (BSG).
All tokens of quotatives were extracted from a corpus of recordings of conversations
with 19 working-class young adults from the western parts of the city of Bern in which a
third of the population are not Swiss. We therefore have recordings from speakers of
Swiss, but also, for example, Bosnian, Bangladeshi and Albanian backgrounds.
We found that all constitutive elements of the quotative were variable in BSG: presence
of a subject (present in (1), absent in (2)); presence of a verb (3 and 4); and presence
of so (= like) (5 and 6)
(1) när i so 'nei' (then I [no verb] like 'no')
(2) u när so 'uuuhh' (and then like 'uuuhhh')
(3) hei si gseit 'ja, das gits o nume bi de Usländer' (they said 'yes, that exists only
among foreigners')
(4) när si so 'ja, di zwöi wuchenänd bini wäg gsi' (then she [no verb] like 'yes, I was
away for these two weekends')
(5) u i bi so 'hahahahaha' (and I'm like 'hahahahaha')
(6) u när chunnt är 'chum schnäu mit' (and then he comes 'just come with me')
Our results showed that:
-
Verbless quotatives as in (4) are found more among women than men. The
latter preferred to use säge (= say), see (3);
So was used frequently, and was predominantly but not exclusively found in
verbless quotatives, as in (4), with the result that so was found more among
women than men. An alternative form for ‘like’, wie, often heard in quotatives in
Bern, was very rarely used.
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-
-
So was considerably more common when there was an overt 1st singular
subject than when there was a 3rd singular subject, and rarer still with other
subject types.
Quotatives are often accompanied by a temporal adverb, especially när (= after
this), and, exclusively among women, immer wieder (=time and again).
We are able to demonstrate, consequently, that the quotative system in contemporary
working-class BSG is shaped by a range of social and linguistic constraints. Further
research is needed in order to assess the extent to which these patterns are locally
oriented, or shared across other varieties of Swiss German.
References:
Buchstaller, I. and I. Van Alphen (eds.). (2012). Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and Crossdisciplinary Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Buchstaller, I. and A. D’Arcy (2009). Localised globalisation: A multilocal, multivariate
investigation of be like. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15, 291-331.
Cheshire, J., S. Fox, P. Gardner-Chloros and M. Secova (fc). New quotatives in
London English and Paris French: Parallel pathways? Journal of French
Language Studies.
D’Arcy, A. (2012). The diachronic of quotation: Evidence from New Zealand English.
Language Variation and Change 24, 343-69.
Foolen, A., I. van Alphen, E. Hoekstra, H. Mazeland and E. Pascual (2006). Het
quotatieve ‘het’: Vorm, functie en sociolinguïstische variatie. Toegepaste
Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 76, 137-149.
Golato, A. (2000). An innovative German quotative for reporting embodied action: Und
ich so/und er so ‘and I’m like/and he’s like’. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 29-54.
Guardamagna, C. (2010). When doing is saying: a constructional account of fare (‘to
do’) as a verbum dicendi in Italian. In G. Bota, H. Hargreaves, C-C. Lai and R.
Rong (eds.). Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in
Linguistics and Language Teaching 4, 51-79.
Imo, W. (2007). Inszenierungen eigener und fremder Rede durch Konstruktionen mit
dem Verb ‘sagen’. Gidi Arbeitspapierreihe 8, 1-16.
Mazeland, H. (2006). "VAN" as a quotative in Dutch: Marking quotations as a
typification. In T. Koole, J. Nortier and B. Tahitu (eds.). Artikelen voor de 5e
Sociolinguïstische Conferentie (pp. 354 – 365). Delft: Oburon.
Mertzlufft, C. (2014). Er so (.) nee: ich hab keinen SCHISS: Quotativkonstruktionen mit
so in Mädchentelefonaten. In H. Kotthoff und C. Mertzlufft (eds.).
Jugendsprachen: kulturelle Stilisierung und mediale Ressourcen (pp. 373-406).
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Palacios Martinez, I (2014). The quotative system in Spanish and English youth talk: A
contrastive corpus-based study. Miscelania 49, 95-114.
Tagliamonte, S. and R. Hudson (1999). Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative
system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3 (2), 147-72.
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LANGUAGE VARIATION IN BERNESE SWISS GERMAN
Christa Schneider
University of Bern
Keywords:
Dialectology, Swiss German, mobility, language contact.
Abstract:
In the atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS) (cf. Hotzenköcherle et al. 19622003) we find data on the greater area of Bern (Berner Mittelland), collected around
1944. Since then, only very specific factors of this particular linguistic variety have been
examined, e.g. Hodler 1969 on Bernese German syntax, Marti 1976 on Bernese
German grammar more generally or Siebenhaar 2000 on social varieties in the city of
Bern, but the dialect has not been examined in its entirety. Therefore, developments
which origin in language contact or speaker mobility and have effectively influenced the
dialects of this region, have not been documented to the present day.
In my project the focus is on language change in the research area and on reasons for
the present changes. Currently I collect new data for Bern and its greater area
according to selected variables already surveyed in the SDS, and I then compare the
new data to the original data. In addition to the variables originating in the SDS, also
some new variables are taken into account. Of special interest are borrowings from
foreign languages, e.g. the realization of engl. steak (stɛɪk vs. ʃtɛik(x) vs. ʃti:kx) or
recent lexical changes as from Swiss German Nidle (ni:dləә) [cream] to Rahm (rɑ:m), a
variant which is mainly used in southern Germany and Austria. My survey includes 20
places in the greater area of Bern where I record 4 speakers per place. The speakers
are classified in three age groups (18-35, 35-65, 65+) and I also take an agriculturalist
into account. This occupational group is meant to be more traditional in respect of
language, as the language atlas of Middle Franconia (cf. Mang 2004) shows
repeatedly. In this respect, my project differs clearly from the SDS, where mainly
NORMs have been taken into account (one or two per place).
I suggest the main reasons for language change in my research area in speaker
mobility and migration movement. Already the present, relatively small set of data
shows tendencies, which support my suggestions, as e.g. the decline of pronunciation
according to Staub's law (/n/--> ø_fricative; with vowel lengthening and/or
diphthongisation) shows. Whereas the pronunciation of the variable Fenster [window]
was represented by (fæiʃtəәɾ) in the majority of places examined in the SDS within the
greater area of Bern, today the realization (fænʃtəәɾ) is common to be found.
Currently, more variables and places are examined in order to present the shift of the
isogloss as soon as possible.
References:
Baumgartner, H. and R. Hotzenköcherle (1962-2003). Sprachatlas der deutschen
Schweiz. Bern, Basel: Francke Verlag.
Baumgartner, H. (1940). Stadtmundart: Stadt- und Landmundart: Beiträge zur
bernischen Mundartgeographie. Bern: Lang.
Christen, H., E. Glaser and M. Friedli (2012). Kleiner Sprachatlas der deutschen
Schweiz. Frauenfeld: Verlag Huber.
Hodler, W. (1969). Berndeutsche Syntax. Bern: Francke Verlag,
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Mang, A. (2004). Sprachatlas von Mittelfranken. Sprachregion Nürnberg (Band 6).
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.
Marti, W. (1985). Berndeutsch-Grammatik für die heutige Mundart zwischen Thun und
Jura. Bern: A. Francke.
Siebenhaar, B., F. Stäheli and R. Ris (2000). Stadtberndeutsch: Sprachporträts aus
der Stadt Bern. Murten: Licorne-Verlag.
436
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SYNCHRONY AND DIACHRONY OF PAST PARTICIPLES IN EUROPEAN
PORTUGUESE
Scott Schwenter
Eleni Christodulelis
Ashlee Dauphinais Civitello
Mark Hoff
Chelsea Pflum
Ohio State University
Keywords:
Portuguese, participles, perfects, variation, change.
Abstract:
Some verbs in Portuguese have two past participle forms: one regular, formed by adding do to the stem, and the other irregular, either identical to the 1SG present indicative, or a
distinct form. According to traditional grammars (Thomas 1969, Ganho & McGovern 2004,
inter alia), participle selection for these verbs is rigid. The perfect auxiliaries ter/haver
‘have’ take the regular form, while the irregular form occurs with the passive/adjectival ‘be’
auxiliaries ser/estar. However, some authors (Perini 2002; Simões 2008) observe that
irregular participles may occur with ter/haver in contemporary Portuguese. Here, we
demonstrate that irregular participles in European Portuguese (EP) are actually used
frequently with perfect ter/haver and that the variation observed is better described in
terms of (1) the behavior of individual verbs, based on frequency considerations, and (2)
whether the irregular participle is identical to the 1SG present indicative.
To test our hypotheses, we searched for regular and irregular participial forms of 58 verbs
in the Corpus do Português (Davies & Ferreira 2006), an online corpus of 45 million words.
In order to examine the effects of both dialect and diachrony, both spoken and written data
from Portugal, as well as data from the 19th and 20th centuries, were included. An
exhaustive search identified a total of 21 verbs displaying participle variation in the 20th
century data. A total of nearly 800 tokens of these verbs were coded for ten independent
predictors and submitted to mixed-effects multivariate analysis (logistic regression) in R
with lexical verb as a random effect.
Our results show that traditional grammatical descriptions of participle selection are both
inaccurate and incomplete. Irregular participles are actually used more overall with
ter/haver (68%) than regular participles (32%) in the 20th century. Additionally, the lexical
verb is the most significant predictor of regular or irregular participle selection. Although
this variable lexical behavior goes unmentioned in grammatical descriptions, we found
strong correlations between greater lexical frequency of a verb as a past participle and
irregular participle choice. Beyond this lexical effect, a mixed-effects regression model
revealed that verbs whose irregular participle is identical to the 1SG present indicative
occur in the irregular form at a rate significantly higher than other verbs, a finding that
helps explain why newly-innovated participles also take this form (cf. Souza 2007). In the
diachronic analysis, we detected a statistically significant 26% increase in irregular
participle selection from the 19th to 20th centuries. Furthermore, a tense/aspect/mood
distinction not evident in the 19th century emerges as a significant constraint in the 20th.
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These results demonstrate that EP past participle variation is governed not by the
preceding auxiliary (‘have’ vs. ‘be’) but rather by the interaction of several linguistic factors,
chief among which are individual lexical verb frequency and the analogical matching of the
irregular participle with the 1SG present indicative. We conclude that the “doctrine of formfunction symmetry” (cf. Poplack et al. 2013) for participle choice in Portuguese, so often
proclaimed in grammatical descriptions, is wholly indefensible on empirical grounds.
438
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NORM AND IDENTITY.
SPOKEN STANDARD GERMAN IN A MINORITY CONTEXT: THE CASE OF SOUTH
TYROL (ITALY)
Christian Schwarz
University of Münster
Keywords:
Minority, German, spoken language, South Tyrol, norm.
Abstract:
In most of Europe's linguistic communities the diglossic constellations of rural dialects
vs. standard varieties has turned into diaglossic constellations accompanied by
phenomena like dialect loss and the development of regional standards (cf. Auer
2005). Within the German speaking community the use of these regional standards is
rarely socially stigmatized and thus leads to their fairly relaxed use in various
situations.
A different, more normative attitude towards the use of spoken standard can
sometimes be observed in areas where German is in a minority context and finds itself
beneath the roof of an exogenous standard. This is for example the case in South Tyrol
where Italian represents the exogenous and German the endogenous standard (cf.
Egger 2001). The use of standard German is mainly restricted to written language and
formal situations whereas in everyday life a South Bavarian dialect is basically the only
way of communication among German speaking South Tyrolians. Nevertheless,
standard German, rather than dialect, is seen as an essential factor for keeping up the
connection to the German speaking communities outside Italy and for preserving ones
own ethnic identity.
In my paper I will discuss the linguistic manifestations of this attitude towards standard
German on the basis of a spontaneous speech corpus that was assembled among
school and university students in formal contexts (e. g. in interviews, oral exams). The
results show strong influences of the underlying dialects on the one hand and a strong
orientation to written Standard German on the other hand. However, contact
phenomena to Italian can hardly be observed. On the basis of these findings the
question will be raised whether the spoken German standard in South Tyrol can be
seen as just another regional standard among many or if it possesses exclusive
linguistic features that reveal its minority status.
References:
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s Sociolinguistic Unity, or: A Typology of European Dialect/
Standard Constellations. In N. Delbeque, J. van der Auwera and D. Geeraerts (eds.).
Perspectives on Variation. Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative. (pp. 7–42).
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Egger, K. (2001). Die deutsche Sprache in Südtirol. Einheitssprache und regionale
Vielfalt. Wien: Folio-Verlag.
439
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SYNTACTIC VARIATION ACROSS THE SOCIAL SPECTRUM: FIRST-PERSON
SINGULAR OBJECT USAGE
María José Serrano
University of La Laguna
Keywords:
Syntax, objects, first-person, speakers, cognition.
Abstract:
1.Theoretical framework
The principles and methods of the study of syntactic variation can greatly benefit from
the theoretical bases offered by cognitive linguistics, particularly its view of syntax as
inherently meaningful. In turn, this will make it possible to accommodate the
sociolinguistic side of variation; the generation of meaning through syntactic choice
results in the rise of the construction of personal identities. Variation can be considered
a matter of communicative choice in the sense that grammatical forms are totally
synonymous, therefore the principles and methods of the study of variation can greatly
benefit from the theoretical bases offered by cognitive linguistics, particularly its view of
syntax as inherently meaningful (García 2009, Langacker 2009). This paper will study
the cognitive foundations that give raise to the choice of first-person plural object
variants and their distribution across socioprofessional affiliations of speakers in media
genres. The most frequent variant is the omitted one “Nos contaron Ø la noticia” (“They
told us the news”) whereas the expressed one appears in diverse communicative
settings: “Nos contaron a nosotros la noticia” (Lit. “They told [us] the news to us”).
Speakers choose variants that consider more suitable for the accomplishment of their
communicative purposes.
2. Methodology
The analysis of the variation of the Spanish first person plural verbal objects (nos/’a
nosotros’—us/’to us’) will be made in the Corpus Conversacional del Español de
Canarias (CCEC). This corpus facilitates to examine and compare a fairly wide range
of mass-media genres in which different types of speakers participate. Speakers were
classified according to their socioprofessional affiliations (journalists, politicians, private
individuals and professionals).
The variation of the first-person plural verbal object variation will be measured by
means of the statistical package Rbrul (Johnson 2009). It will be also calculated the
overall frequency of clauses with first-person plural object (nos/ ‘a nosotros’ [‘to us’]) as
absolute variable multiplying the token number in each genre by 10,000 and dividing it
by its total word number.
3. Preliminary results
The statistical patterning of the variation reveals the existence of meaningful
differences across the socioprofessional affiliations of speakers. In line with their
distribution across communicative domains and genres, the choice of each variant
appears to have some relationship to the construction and development of
socioprofessional identities. Politicians and private individuals are generally more
inclined to using the expressed variant, whereas journalists show a preference for the
omitted, which seems to help them reduce the suggestion of personal responsibility, as
well as promote objectivization of the content. Quantitative patterns observed are
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amenable to explanation through the qualitative analysis of how the inherent cognitive
meanings of grammatical persons are projected on communicative situations.
References:
García, E. C. (2009). The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs: Cognitive Constraints on
Spanish Clitic Clustering. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Johnson, D. E. (2009). Getting off the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixedeffects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistic Compass 3(1), 359-383.
Langacker, R. W. (2009). Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
441
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DIALECT LEVELLING OR SHIFT: LEXICAL OUTCOMES OF ŠTOKAVIANČAKAVIAN CONTACT IN CENTRAL DALMATIA
Lucija Simicic
Ivana Skevin
University of Zadar
Keywords:
Dalmatia, Croatian-Čakavian, dialect levelling, shift, lexical variation.
Abstract:
Out of the three main dialect groups of the Croatian language – Kajkavian, Čakavian,
and Štokavian – it is the latter that has been the dominant one both geographically and
politically since the 19th century at least. However, each one of these groups is marked
by a high degree of internal variation at all levels of linguistic structure. The dialects of
the Čakavian group, which are the focus of this study, are mostly spoken in Dalmatia,
along the East Adriatic Coast. Despite the high level of innovation characteristic of
south-east Čakavian dialects, they are still conspicuously marked by heavy Romance
influence, which is mostly discernable on the lexical level. Romance lexical elements
originate from the now extinct Dalmatic languages as well as from old dialectal varieties
of Italian that functioned as proper languages in the past centuries (Venetian and
Triestine, as well as Italian). Although Štokavian and Čakavian have been in close
contact for centuries, one of the consequences of more recent developments have
brought about mostly unidirectional advergence of local Čakavian varieties toward the
supra-dialectal Dalmatian koine heavily dominated by the Split urbanolect, on the one
hand, and to a lesser degree towards the Croatian standard variety, on the other. The
aim of the paper is to analyze the scope of lexical variation found in SE Čakavian in
order to determine the degree of shift or levelling taking place. We do this by means of
apparent time analysis of several local insular SE varieties of Čakavian. It has already
been shown that the Romance lexical stratum has been prone to erosion and
substitution with alternative models. Our focus is on analyzing the relative resistence of
certain parts of the lexicon, the preferred linguistic models in the processes of levelling
and change, the motives for maintenance and shift found at the lexical level, and finally
the linguistic outcomes of the mentioned processes as well as their role in local
identification of the speakers through language.
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EXCLUSION ATTITUDE LABELS IN SLAVIC MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARIES:
LEXICOGRAPHIC CONSTRUAL OF STANDARD: SUBSTANDARD VARIATION
Danko Sipka
Arizona State University
Keywords:
Variation, standard, substandard, lexicography, Slavic.
Abstract:
The present research is informed by cognitive sociolinguistics (as advocated by Geeraerts
et al. 2010) and communicative metalexicography (as proposed in Young and Peng, 2007).
These theoretical frameworks are deployed in the analysis of exclusion attitude labels in
four major contemporary monolingual dictionaries of Slavic languages: Russian (Ožegov
and Švedova, 1992), Polish (Żmigródzki et al., 2012), Serbian (Vujanić et al., 2011), and
Slovenian (Bajec et al., 2000). These four dictionaries stem from very similar traditions of
normative linguistics with clearly delineated standard from substandard language forms. In
that scheme of things, linguistic authorities, such as influential institutions and linguists
define and police the border of substandardness. Monolingual general dictionaries have a
two-way communication with the society. On the one hand they are at the receiving end of
normative authorities (i.e., they are expected to follow general delimitations of the standard
and substandard sphere. On the other hand, lexicographic strategies, in particular the use
of attitude labels, are an agent of normative enforcement. The present analysis addresses
the types attitude labels and their role in the construal of substandardness. A catalog of
the most common strategies of this kind of labeling is established in a bottom-up metadata
gathering from the dataset of these four dictionaries.
There is a variety of means by which the exclusion from the standard language is
performed. The range of strategies goes from a very rare direct prohibition to pointing to
the fields traditionally considered non-standard to pointing to the features incompatible
with the standard language as defined here. All analyzed dictionaries use primary
exclusion labels, pointing to non-standard fields of usage and secondary exclusion labels,
pointing to their non-standard features. Primary exclusion labels are generally more
frequent but the number of secondary exclusion labels is substantial. Both categories of
labels, primary and secondary, have fuzzy edges. With the exception of the Russian
dictionary, where the category of non-standard colloquial is clearly established, in all other
dictionaries colloquial actually means informal and the judgements of the acceptability in
the standard language (as defined here) may vary. It is also true that the authors are
equally concerned with marking certain fields within the standard language (e.g., technical
use) as they are with excluding items from the standard. The use of exclusion and nonexclusion labels is equally substantive.
References:
Bajec, A. et al. (2000). Slovar slovenskega knjižnega jezika. Ljubljana: Slovenska
akademija znanosti in umetnosti.
Geeraerts, D., G. Kristiansen and Y. Peirsman (2010). Cognitive Linguistics Research:
Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Ožegov, S. I. and N. J. Švedova (1992). Tolkovyj slovar’ russkogo jazyka. Moskva: Az’.
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Vujanić, M. et al. (2011). Rečnik srpskoga jezika. Novi Sad: Matica srpska.
Yong, H. and J. Peng (2007). Bilingual Lexicography from a Communicative Perspective.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Żmigrodzki, P. et al. (2012). Wielki słownik języka polskiego. Kraków: Instytut Języka
Polskiego PAN.
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PULLING OUT ALL THE STOPS?
CAREGIVER AND CHILD IN THE ACQUISITION OF A STEREOTYPED BRITISH
VARIABLE
Jennifer Smith
University of Glasgow
Sophie Holmes-Elliot
University of Southhampton
Abstract:
Glottal replacement is ‘one of the most dramatic, wide-spread and rapid changes to
have occurred in British English in recent times’ (Trudgill, 1999:136). Despite this rapid
rise in use, it remains ‘widely regarded as ugly and also a lazy sound’ (Wells, 1982:35),
one of the most overtly stigmatised variables in the UK.
These characteristics of glottal replacement – rapid expansion in the face of overt
stigma – presents an interesting question regarding ‘transmission’ of this variable from
caregiver to child (Labov, 2007:346). In Child Directed Speech (CDS), caregivers have
been shown to avoid stigmatised forms in their speech to their young children (Foulkes
et al., 2005, Smith et al 2013). Given its highly stigmatized profile, glottal replacement
may be a key focus of concern for caregivers, as highlighted in this extract between
Charlie (2;10) and his mother Amy:
Amy:
Do you want jam and butter on here, Charlie?
Charlie:
Yeah.
Amy:
Jam and butter on your toast?
Charlie:
Jam and bu[ʔ]er.
Amy:
What is it? What is it darling?
Charlie:
What Mummy?
Amy:
What would you like?
Charlie:
Bu[t]er.
Amy:
Bu[t]er. That's right.
How does such overt social condemnation correlate with actual language use between
caregiver and child? In this paper we tackle this question by conducting an analysis of
glottal replacement in the speech of 14 pre-school children (2;10-4;2) in every day
interaction with their primary caregivers in a community in north east Scotland, and
compare their use to general adult norms.
Variationist analysis of over 2500 variable contexts shows that despite overt stigma,
caregivers and children use rates of glottal replacement in line with community norms.
Further analysis shows that while the social constraints of age and gender have no
significant effect on use, linguistic constraints do: when compared to adult norms,
intervocalic contexts such as butter in the extract above are used less in both caregiver
and child speech. This suggests that stigma, and hence suppression of [ ] in CDS is
reserved for particular linguistic contexts only in the transmission of this variable from
caregiver to child.
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We explore how these results shed light on the interaction between language attitudes
and language use in the acquisition of a rapidly expanding, yet highly stigmatised
stereotype of British speech.
References:
Labov. W. (2007). Transmission and Diffusion. Language, 83.2: 344-387
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. and D. Watt. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed
speech. Language 81(1). 177-206.
Smith, J., Durham, M. and H. Richards. (2013). The social and the linguistic in the
acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. Linguistics 51(2), 285-324
Trudgill, P. (1999). Norwich: endogenous and exogenous change. In Foulkes and
Docherty (eds.) Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles (pp 124–140).
London: Arnold.
Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English 1: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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PROSODY AND CODE-SWITCHING AT THE COMPLEMENT CLAUSE
Jomathan Steuck
Rena Torres Cacoullos
Penn State University
Keywords:
Prosody, code-switching, complementation, Spanish, English.
Abstract:
Models of code-switching (CS) appeal to some notion of equivalence or congruence,
whereby CS is seen to occur at junctures at which linguistic structure is homologous
(e.g., Muysken 2000). Per the Equivalence Constraint (Poplack 1980), bilinguals avoid
CS at points of word order conflicts. If so, how do they deal with variable equivalence
sites (Torres Cacoullos & Poplack 2016)? For Spanish-English bilinguals such a
variable equivalence site is the realization and placement of the complementizer ‘that’,
which is absent most of the time in English but near-categorically present in spoken
Spanish. Integrating prosody and syntax into the analysis of CS, we ask whether
bilinguals use prosodic separation of CS boundaries at sites of variable equivalence.
(1) .. and you were surprised que era el ~Rudy? ‘and you were surprised that it was
~Rudy?’
[NMSEB 09 La Salvia, 0:01:15–0:01:17]
(2) (1.0) (H) creo que,
‘(1.0) I think that,
he=’s been dead for a while.
he=’s been dead for a while.’
[NMSEB 07 Basketball Teams, 32:44–32:45]
Data are from the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual corpus (Torres Cacoullos &
Travis, in preparation), which is comprehensively transcribed in Intonation Units (IUs).
Each IU appears on a single line marked for transitional continuity; pauses and
truncations are also represented (Du Bois et al. 1993). Material in the same IU has a
tighter syntactic relationship than material spread across IUs (Croft 1995:849-864). In
particular, complement clauses tend to be prosodically integrated with main clauses—
occurring in the same rather than in different IUs—in both monolingual English (78%)
and Spanish (68%) (Steuck 2016). If prosodic separation is a bilingual strategy for
managing variable equivalence, the rate of prosodic integration should be lower in CS
at the complement clause. Precisely such a trend is observed: the proportions of main
and complement clauses in the same IU are 78% (N=472) for bilinguals’ English, 64%
(N=479) for the same bilinguals’ Spanish, 54% (N=136) in the presence of material
from both languages in either clause, and 44% (N=43) when the languages are
juxtaposed at clause boundary, as in (1)-(2). Effects of intervening material and subject
type, however, are the same as in monolingual speech.
References:
Croft, W. (1995). Intonation units and grammatical structure. Linguistics 33, 839-882.
Du Bois, J. W. et al. (1993). Outline of discourse transcription. In J. Edwards and M.
Lampert (eds.). Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in Discourse (pp. 45–
89). Lawrence Erlbaum.
447
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Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español.
Linguistics 18, 581–618.
Steuck, J. (2016). Exploring the syntax-semantics-prosody interface: Complement
clauses in conversation. In A. Cuza, L. Czerwionka and D. Olson (eds.).
Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics: From theory to empirical evidence (pp. 73-94).
John Benjamins.
Torres Cacoullos, R. and S. Poplack (2016). Code-switching in spontaneous bilingual
speech.
National
Science
Foundation
#1624966,
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1624966
Torres Cacoullos, R. and C. E. Travis (in preparation). New Mexico Spanish-English
Bilingual corpus. National Science Foundation 1019112/1019122.
448
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LEXICAL-SEMANTIC PERSISTENCE AND INNOVATION
IN THE ROMANIAN VOCABULARY OF AFFECTIVITY.
CASE STUDY: /ENVY-JEALOUSY/
Gabriela Stoica
University of Bucharest
Keywords:
Emotion, emotional conceptualization, emotional meaning, lexical variation.
Abstract:
The presentation deals with the lexical-semantic analysis of a particular emotion
concept, Romanian /invidie/gelozie/ (envy/jealousy), focusing on the main diachronic
mutations that emerge over centuries in its conceptualization and lexicalization,
according to the more general evolution of the Romanian emotion lexicon. Based on a
representative corpus of Old and (Early) Modern Romanian texts (the 16th-19th
centuries) and within a combined theoretical and methodological framework (of both
lexical and historical semantics, as well as of cultural linguistics), we shall present the
historical dynamics of the lexicon of /envy/, together with its inherent conceptualsemantic innovations.
Envy/jealousy is one of the so-called social-moral emotions, constantly present in the
Romanian affective mentality and lexicon, and subject to important diachronic variation.
In Old Romanian, envy/gelousy is a hyper-conceptualized dysphoric emotion; the basic
lexemes used in designation are pizmă, zavistie, ciudă, words of Old Slavic Origin,
polysemeous, conveying various contextual meanings (“envy”, but also “hatred”,
“anger”, “revenge”, “regret”).
In the period of transition towards modernity (the beginning of the 19th century)
important changes undergo within the Romanian collective and affective mentality, as a
consequence of the cultural and, implicitly, linguistic reorientation of the society to a
new Western European cultural pattern, in which the affectivity and the individual
feelings are focused on and predominantly exhibited. Accordingly, the lexicon of /envy/
is restructured, becoming more complex and more refined; two basic means of lexicalsemantic renewal are instantiated: (a) the semantic change of the pre-existent terms
(the old words clarify their specific affective meaning: pizmă, zavistie “envy”; ciudă
“spite”); (b) the lexical enrichment and diversification: new words appear – more
accurate in designation –, lexical borrowings from Modern Greek (zule, zelotipie),
French (invidie, jaluzie) and Italian (gelozie). From conceptual-semantic point of view,
the salient innovation is the delineation of a new semantic facet of envy: the romantic
jealousy, undistinguished as such until the 18th century.
This etymologically hybrid aspect of the vocabulary tends to clarify towards the middle
of the 19th century; the Modern Greek lexical borrowings generally have a transitory
status, being eliminated and substituted by older or newer (Neo-Latin) synonyms; the
Latin-Romance lexical borrowings will prevail, delineating the present-day Romanian
lexicon of envy.
References:
Athanasiadou, A. And E. Tabakowska, E. (1998). Speaking of Emotions.
Conceptualization and Expression. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
449
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Blank, A. And P. Koch (1999). Historical Semantics and Cognition. Berlin and New
York: de Gruyter.
Closs Traugott, E. and R. B. Dasher (2005). Regularity and Semantic Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
East, M. P. and F. N., Watts (1999). Jealousy and envy. In T. Dalgleish and M. J.
Power (eds.). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (pp. 571-588). New York:
John Wiley and Sons.
Fontaine, J. F. R., K. R. Scherer and C. Soriano (eds.). (2013). Components of
emotional meaning. A sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joseph, B. D. And R. D. Janda (eds.). (2006) The handbook of historical linguistics.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Novakova, I. And A. Tutin (eds.). (2009). Le lexique des émotions. ELLUG: Université
Stendhal Grenoble.
Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural Conceptualisations and Language: Theoretical
Framework and Application. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
450
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TRACING A MODERN-DAY ISOGLOSS IN SOUTH SWEDEN
Mathias Strandberg
Uppsala Universitet
Keywords:
Scanian, South Swedish, dialects, diphthong, diphthongisation, isogloss.
Abstract:
At the end of the Second Northern War, the Danish province of Scania was ceded to
Sweden, becoming the country’s southernmost province. Linguistically, the province
was a transitional area between Zealandic Danish dialects and the dialects of southern
Sweden, and would continue as such for centuries – an actual language shift did not
occur until the 19th century, when in the course of a few generations the traditional dialects were effectively replaced by standard Swedish in most parts of Sweden. Substantial variation still exists however, foremostly on the phonetic and phonological levels.
Sweden’s new linguistic landscape has only been mapped out to a limited extent, and
that of Scania is virtually untouched: it remains to be seen what major types of Scanian
Swedish can be identified and where the most important isoglosses run. The exploration of Scania’s new dialect geography is well warranted in and of itself, but the province’s background as a former Danish province and a linguistic transitional area do not
make it any less of a compelling task.
In my paper, I will present the results of a first effort to trace what I hypothesise to be
the most important present-day isogloss in the province of Scania and indeed one of
the most important present-day isoglosses in all of South Sweden: the northern boundary of an essentially South Scanian area where all nine long vowels of Swedish – /i, y,
ʉ, u, e, ø, o, ɛ, ɑ/ – are realised as diphthongs, as opposed to only four or five – /i, y, ʉ,
u/ and to some extent /o/ – in the northern parts of the province. Diphthongs are a wellknown trait of present-day Scanian Swedish, but few people outside of Scania, even
linguists, are fully aware that Scanian Swedish varies remarkably with respect to the
realisation of diphthongs and to how many of the long vowels are diphthongised.
The study seeks to establish both an approximate tracing of the isogloss – where does
it run? – and the sound values of all of the long vowels on either side of it. It remains to
be seen whether the diphthongisation of all nine long vowels adheres to one and the
same border or if the isogloss breaks up in a bundle along any part of the corridor that
is studied, which stretches roughly from the town of Ängelholm in the northwest to the
parishes of Maglehem and Brösarp in the mideast.
Data is presently being collected on 24 sites along the hypothetical stretch of the isogloss, mostly in relatively small rural communities. Two persons – a man and a woman
– born in 1960 or later are interviewed and recorded on each site for 30 minutes, yielding a body of data of 12 hours of spontaneous speech. If my hypothesis is correct, the
study will result in an approximate but fairly robust tracing of the isogloss (bundle),
which will be presented in a set of maps and discussed extensively. I will also touch
upon the social and political circumstances that may lie behind the isogloss.
References:
Bruce, G. (2010). Vår fonetiska geografi: Om svenskans accenter, melodi och uttal.
Lund: Studentlitteratur.
451
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REGIOLECT OR STANDARD? HOW SOUTHERN GERMAN BASIC DIALECTS
DEVELOP. METHODOLOGICAL QUESTIONS AND SOME RESULTS
Andrea Streckenbach
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br.
Keywords:
Linguistic change, apparent time, regiolect.
Abstract:
South Germany has been very well covered with linguistic investigations at least from
Georg Wenkers survey in the 1870s on, when he asked the teachers of nearly every
town in his area to fill in a survey with translations into the typical local dialect. By now,
many projects of different size and aim have collected speech data in various points in
time and with different characteristics. The access to those corpora offers many
possibilities for the investigation of linguistic change in real and apparent time. At the
same time the handling of a high number of subcorpora demands the reflection of the
methods in use and raises questions like: "How conservative is the speech data of the
older informants in this specific corpus?", "Does the traditional interrogation and dialect
translation task lead to 'older' data on the time scale than spontaneous speech data?"
"How do we know if irregularities in the development of a variable are due to language
change or due to methodological differences between the data collections?" I would
like to illustrate some aspects with the help of data from the Upper Rhine Area and
from Franconia. Both areas stand out with an etremely good coverage of speech data
collections from different times. On that more theoretical basis I would then point to
some results that can be obtained with the methods explained before. In this context I
would like to go into the question of which variables tend to a standard realisation and
in which cases a regiolectal variant is established.
452
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PERCEPTUAL DIALECTOLOGY: FACTORS INFLUENCING GEOGRAPHICAL
PERCEPTIONS IN GALICIAN LANGUAGE
Soraya Suárez Quintas
Instituto da Lingua Galega, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Keywords:
Perceptual dialectology, Galician language, geographical perceptions.
Abstract:
Since the emergence of Perceptual Dialectology studies in the end of the last century,
there has been a big amount of investigations in relation to non-linguists’ opinions
towards dialectal variation. However, those investigations have specially focused on
geo-linguistic variation in big areas such as the EEUU (e.g., Preston, 1989; Cramer,
2010), England (e.g., Montgomery, 2007), Japan (e.g., Long, 1999), Korea (e.g., Jeon,
2012)…; and there is a lack of research about perceptive dialectal judgements
regarding minority languages or languages spoken in smaller regions.
This paper presents the results of a study conducted during this year in Galicia (Spain)
and its main objective is to analyse speakers’ perceptions on dialectal variation in the
Galician linguistic domain. We interviewed 180 speakers from 45 different Galician
villages and we carried out an analysis of their knowledge and perceptive assessments
over geo-linguistic variation in that region. The obtained data were analysed by using
QGIS tool and R statistical software.
Regarding to non-linguists’ geographical perceptions of dialectal variation, it is
remarkable that the varieties which stigmatized linguistic features are the best
recognised and geo-referenced, even for the majority of the speakers who live in
distant places from those speaking areas. Moreover, it is worth noting that some
factors such as age or level of studies seem to influence on the better recognition of
the different Galician geographical varieties: older people with higher level of academic
instruction tend to recognise more accurately the dialectal regions traditionally
established by dialectologists.
Related to that, when asking informants an open-ended question about the differences
they perceive between their own form of speech and the one from people who live in
different Galician places, they tend to refer mostly to some phonetic features
(especially those imbued with strong pejorative connotations) and some lexical ones
which differ from one region to another.
References:
Cramer, J. (2010). The Effect of Borders on the Linguistic Production and Perception of
Regional Identity in Louisville, Kentucky. University of Illinois at Urbana.
Unpublished PhD thesis. Champaign.
Jeon, L. (2012). Drawing boundaries and revealing language attitudes: Mapping
perceptions of dialects in Korea. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of North
Texas.
Long, D. (1999). Geographical Perception of Japanese Dialect Regions. In D. R.
Preston (ed.). Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology (pp. 117-198). Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
453
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Montgomery, C. (2007). Northern English Dialects: A Perceptual Approach.
Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Sheffield.
Preston, D. R. (1989). Perceptual Dialectology: Nonlinguists' Views of Areal Linguistic.
Dordrecht: Foris.
454
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STATIC VS. DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF VOICE QUALITY: A LONDON CASE STUDY
Anita Szakay
Macquarie University
Eivind Torgersen
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Keywords:
Linguistic innovation, London, voice quality, dynamic and static analysis.
Abstract:
This study investigates voice quality in London English, using the acoustic measure H1H2. We compare the speech of 28 Inner London (Hackney) speakers of mainly non-Anglo
background with the speech of 14 Outer London (Havering) Anglo speakers. Inner London
has been shown to exhibit linguistic innovation, most likely as the outcome of dialect and
language contact (e.g. Cheshire et al., 2011).
The first part of the study aimed to determine whether voice quality forms part of the
innovative linguistic features in inner London. The speech of 42 speakers was
phonemically forced-aligned and manually corrected, and a total of 10,601 vowels were
analyzed at the static midpoint. A linear mixed effects model of H1-H2 showed significant
effects of the linguistic variables f0, intensity, F1 and segment duration. In addition, a
significant interaction was found between ethnicity and gender (Fig.1). Hackney men have
a more breathy phonation (higher H1-H2) than Havering men. The opposite is true for
females, where Hackney women are more creaky (lower H1-H2) than Havering women. In
fact, they are more creaky than the Hackney men. This is interesting on two counts. First,
traditionally women are believed to exhibit a more breathy phonation than men due to
vocal fold physiology. Second, Simpson (2012) argues that the H1-H2 measure inflates
breathiness values for females. The fact that we see higher H1-H2 values for Hackney
men, and lower H1-H2 values for Hackney women suggests that the inner-London
speakers use voice quality for sociolinguistic purposes. In Outer London we find a more
traditional pattern, with Havering females sounding more breathy, and Havering males
sounding more creaky.
The second part of the study used a dynamic analysis of voice quality, concentrating on
the diphthong in the word ‘like’. We measured H1-H2 at five equidistant points in 279
vowels. The results reveal significant trajectory differences between our speaker groups,
showing that Hackney female vowels in ‘like’ start out more breathy and end in creaky
voice with a sharp H1-H2 drop mid-vowel (Fig.2). Hackney males also show a similar
pattern, however, the drop is later in the vowel and not as dramatic. Havering speakers
maintain a steady phonation throughout the vowel showing no significant temporal effects
on H1-H2. Taken together, these results demonstrate that voice quality is a sociophonetic
marker of gender and ethnicity in London, and also indicate that a dynamic analysis of
voice quality can reveal novel patterns in the data that would remain invisible if
measurements were restricted to vowel midpoints.
455
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References:
Cheshire, J., P. Kerswill, S. Fox and E. Torgersen (2011). Contact, the feature pool and
the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 15, 151–196.
Simpson, A. P. (2012). The first and second harmonics should not be used to measure
breathiness in male and female voices. Journal of Phonetics 40, 477–490.
Figure 1
Figure 2
456
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THE ZERO ADVERB IN BRITISH DIALECTS
Sali A. Tagliamonte
University of Toronto
Keywords:
Adverbs, adverb formation, suffix –ly, zero adverb, variation, change.
Abstract:
This paper examines an area of ongoing variability in English —adverb formation with the
suffix -ly, e.g. slow/slowly —and uses a large archive of synchronic dialect data from the
UK to uncover new evidence about the current state and historical trajectory of this
process. Earlier research demonstrated that the newer variant –ly rose in frequency from
Middle English into Early Modern English (Nevalainen 1994, 1997); however both
historical and synchronic variation abounds (Opdahl 2000), as in (1).
(1) I’m going along so quietØ you know just walking up through quietly.
Utilizing comparative sociolinguistic methods and a suit of statistical techniques including
mixed effects models, the possible steps in this process can be inferred from crossdialectal and cross-generational perspectives. The results reveal that English adverbs are
a variegated system comprising different types, intersecting processes and pan-dialectal
and locally situated patterns. Some intensifiers, e.g. near, are retained in small
communities of Scots origin while others, e.g. awful are typical of Scots in general, while
intensifying adverb really is a supra-local dominating form. Sentential adverbs such as
‘obviously’, e.g. “James had obviously seen the light”, appear to be a newer layer in the
system, overwhelmingly occurring with –ly and abundant in recent generations of
speakers.
In sum, independent linguistic processes operate on both intensifying and sentential
adverbs. In contrast, manner adverbs reflect the systemic core of the adverb system.
Variation is endemic across space and time and is consistently constrained by the
semantic interpretation of the adverb as abstract vs. concrete, a characteristic that can be
traced to Middle English (e.g. Jespersen 1961). Taken together, these results expose the
complexity of English adverb system and demonstrate that adverb formation provides an
ideal site for uncovering historical processes in synchronic data. The study offers a prime
example of the linguistic insights that can be gained by studying variation in geographic
and social space.
References:
Jespersen, O. H. (1961). A modern English grammar on historical principles: Part IV.
London: Bradford and Dickens.
Nevalainen, T. (1994). Aspects of adverbial change in Early Modern English. In
Kastovisky, D. (ed.). Studies in Early Modern English (pp 243-259). Berlin and New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Opdahl, L. (2000). LY or zero suffix? A study in variation of dual-form adverbs in presentday English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
457
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VARIATION AND EXCLUSION IN THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF URBAN
NICOSIA (CYPRUS)
Christiana Themistocleous
University of Reading
Keywords:
Linguistic Landscape, immigration, Cyprus, exclusion, discursive construction of space.
Abstract:
Nicosia, the capital of the Republic of Cyprus, is an energetic city often attracting
people from various countries around the world who seek employment and better
opportunities in life. According to the 2011 census (Cyprus Statistical Service, 2015),
Nicosia’s foreign national population has increased from 9.4% in 2001 to 20.6% in
2011. To investigate linguistic diversity, the 2011 census included the question: ‘Which
language do you speak best?’. The majority of the participants chose Greek, yet a
number of other languages such as Romanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Arabic, Filipino, Sri
Lankan and Vietnamese were among those mentioned in the census.
This means that the different waves of immigration in the island have resulted in
changes to the languages spoken in Cyprus and the continuous influx of people in
Nicosia enhances the ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity in the area, making this
city an ideal context to investigate in terms of multilingualism.
The official languages of the Republic of Cyprus are Greek and Turkish, while English
enjoys prestige as an international language and the language of commerce and
tourism. The questions is, however, are the languages brought by immigrant
communities in Cyprus visible or excluded from the Linguistic Landscape of the
capital?
This preliminary study is part of a bigger project exploring ‘Multilingualism in Cyprus’
and it has two objectives: 1) to map the Linguistic Landscape of Nicosia’s city centre
focusing on immigrant languages, and 2) to explore visibility and/or exclusion of
immigrant languages in the Linguistic Landscape of this area.
Exploratory fieldwork was carried out for four weeks in September – October 2016 by
collecting photographic data from central areas where major commercial activity takes
place. Public and private signs were collected in order to detect major features of
sociolinguistic regimes in the area (Blommaert, 2013) and to study the degree of
visibility /exclusion of immigrant languages in the public space (Ben-Rafael, 2006). To
date, more than 1000 photos have been collected.
Initial studies on Linguistic Landscape mainly used quantitative methods of analysis in
order to contrast the presence or absence of different languages in ‘top-down’ and
‘bottom-up’ signs (see Backhaus 2006; Ben-Rafael et al. 2006). In this study however, I
use qualitative methods of analysis to explore the discursive and symbolic construction
of space (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010) and how it is shaped by wider economic, political
and ideological mechanisms.
References:
Ben-Rafael, E., E. Shohamy, M. H. Mara and N. Trumper-Hecht (2006). Linguistic
landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel.
International Journal of Multilingualism 3(1), 7-30.
458
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Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes:
Chronicles of complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Cyprus Statistical Service (CYSTAT) (2015). Population census 2011 -Volume 1:
General demographics, immigration and employment. Available at:
http://www.mof.gov.cy/mof/cystat/statistics.nsf/All/8C0C908964C02BEFC2257F
030037EDE6?OpenDocument&sub=1&sel=1&e=&print (accessed 25 October
2016).
Jaworski, A. and C. Thurlow (2010). Semiotic landscapes: Language, images, space.
London: Continuum.
Rubdy, R. and S. Ben Said (2015). Conflict, exclusion and dissent in the Linguistic
Landscape. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
459
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DIASPORA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE: SOCIAL CLUBS AND THEIR ROLE IN
LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE
Natasha Tolimir-Hoelzl
University of Hamburg
Keywords:
Yugoslavia, diaspora, linguistic divergence, transnationalism.
Abstract:
In my paper I would like to present research on a social club and its heritage
language(s) in Northern Bavaria, which was founded 40 years ago by Yugoslav
migrants.
The club, a place for initial help for the newly arrived, soon comprised many sub-clubs
such as football, chess, folklore-dance, and has had many different phases, which
mirrored Yugoslavia’s development in a micro way and is one example of many similar
clubs within Germany.
When the club was founded, Yugoslavia was a country consisting of six republics and
two autonomous provinces. Its standard was Serbo-Croatian with two scripts.
Additionally, Slovene, Albanian and Macedonian were regional languages and Tito was
the head of this socialist, yet block-free, state.
During the four decades of its existence, the club has seen many changes in its homecountry and has changed accordingly. While socialist holiday festivities were a central
part of its early years, the disintegration and the political disputes surrounding the
Balkan crisis later also became subject within the club, eventually leading to its
separation into a Yugoslav and a Croatian club - both of which are, ironically enough,
to this very day located on the very same premises and which take turn in annual town
festivities with stands.
The linguistic disintegration from Serbo-Croatian to Bosnian/ Croatian/ Serbian went
hand in hand with the countries disintegration and eventually also reached the
diaspora.
I have interviewed three age groups, male and female within the Croatian and
Yugoslav club regarding their attitudes, their possibly changed linguistic affiliations and
their wishes concerning their heritage language today.
The results show that there are clear differences within the single age groups and that
perceptions concerning Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian differ quite dramatically
according to age and to some extent also to gender.
On one hand the influence of virtual networks has changed diasporic life at large,
mainly that of its younger generations. The views of the already decreasing founding
generation on the other hand are of great value for the understanding of the whole
topic from a diachronic perspective.
I have chosen a qualitative approach, which very much differs from my so far
quantitative research on linguistic divergence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It has to
some extent similarities to perceived dialectology and is planned to be the start of an
international comparison of social (Yugoslav) clubs and their perception of and
influence on their heritage language worldwide.
References:
Greenberg, R. D. (2004). Language and Identity in the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
460
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Preston, D. R. (1989). Perceptual Dialectology: Nonlinguists' Views of Areal Linguistics.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Tolimir-Hölzl, N. (2011). Linguistic Divergence in Bosnia: considerations about vertical
and horizontal levelling. In J. A. Fishman (ed.). International Journal of the
Sociology of Language.
Tolimir-Hölzl, N. (2013). Language attitudes in the Republika Srpska: Eliciting some
truth from behind the propaganda. In S. Grondelaers and T. Kristiansen. (eds.).
Experimental studies of changing language standards in contemporary Europe
SLICE, vol 2. Oslo: Novus Forlag.
461
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VARIATION AND CHANGE IN FUTURE TEMPORAL REFERENCE IN FRENCH
Anna Tristram
Queen’s University Belfast
Keywords:
Variation, change, French, morphosyntax, future.
Abstract:
It is well known that the French of France has been the subject of fewer variationist
analyses than Canadian French. While this imbalance has begun to be redressed in
recent years, variation in morphosyntax has still received less attention in this variety.
This paper addresses a major area of French morphosyntax, the future temporal
reference system of the French of France.
Previous studies of the future temporal reference system in Canadian French have
revealed conflicting patterns of variation and change with regard to the principal
variants in use: the inflected future (IF) and the periphrastic future (PF). Broadly, while
use of the PF is (slowly) increasing in Laurentian, at the expense of the IF (Poplack &
Dion 2009; Poplack & Turpin 1999), Acadian French shows the opposite pattern (King
& Nadasdi 2003), as the IF remains productive in this variety. Meanwhile, studies on
Montréal French (Blondeau 2006; Wagner & Sankoff 2011) have revealed an increase
in use of the IF over time, though this has been attributed to age-grading slowing or
reversing a historical change for increased use of the PF.
In this paper, I present an analysis of data from the ESLO (Enquêtes Sociolinguistiques
à Orléans) corpus. Two sub-corpora, dating from 1969/74 and 2014, are used to
conduct an analysis of diachronic change in French future temporal reference system.
While there is evidence of a decrease in the use of the IF, it remains productive in this
variety. A corresponding increase in the use of the PF is evident. The paper will focus
on the question of temporal semantics, asking whether the common view that temporal
‘distance’ versus ‘proximity’ is indeed the key determining factor in the French of
France and if not, which other factors are at work.
References:
Blondeau, H. (2006). La trajectoire de l’emploi du futur chez une cohorte de
Montréalais francophones entre 1971 et 1995. Canadian Journal of Applied
Linguistics / Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée 9(2), 73-98.
King, R. and T. Nadasdi (2003). Back to the Future in Acadian French. French
Language Studies 13, 323-337.
Poplack, S. and N. Dion (2009). Prescription vs. praxis: The evolution of future
temporal reference in French. Language 85(3), 557–587.
Poplack, S. and D. Turpin (1999). Does the Futur Have a Future in (Canadian)
French? Probus: International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics 11(1),
133-64.
Wagner, S. E. and G. Sankoff (2011). Age grading in the Montréal French inflected
future. Language Variation and Change 23(03), 275-313.
462
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APPARENT TIME VARIATION IN THE BASQUE LANGUAGE
Lorea Unamuno
University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU)
Keywords:
Sociolinguistic, dialectology, generational variation and Basque language.
Abstract:
When examining the synchrony of a language, linguistic variation is a main feature, and
age is one of the most important agents of such variation; in spite of that, research on
the Basque language from a sociolinguistic point of view has started not long ago and
has only recently been undertaken by the EUDIA research team. The philological
standpoint has more frequently been the objective of linguistic research and
grammatical analysis of the Basque language.
Labov (1994, 2001, 2010), Trudgill (2002, 2011), Milroy & Gordon (2003), Chambers &
Trudgill (1994), Auer (1998), Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2003) and Tagliamonte`s
(2006, 2012) are well-known works in sociolinguistics. From this viewpoint, in the last
years Aurrekoetxea (2003, 2004, 2006, 2008a) is applying the latest theories of Europe
to Basque dialectology and Aurrekoetxea (2007, 2008b, 2010), Ariztimuño (2009),
Ezenarro (2008), Ormaetxea (2008, 2011), Ormaetxea et al. (2010), Santazilia (2009)
and Unamuno & Aurrekoetxea (2013) come to similar conclusions in their studies.
Basically, they all agree on the following: the influence of standard Basque on the
everyday language of young people is quite noticeable; while older people are more
attached to the “base dialect” (Bellmann 1998) and similarly to what has happened in
other languages which underwent a standardization process earlier, a process of
withdrawal from the ‘base dialect’ and approximation to the standard is taking place in
Basque too.
This research project is understood in the context of putting together the Sociogeolinguistic atlas of the Basque language – EAS project (Aurrekoetxea & Ormaetxea
2006). This project (based on the EDAK corpus, a large dialectal corpus of the spoken
Basque language) encompasses two male generation different kinds of data
(morphological, phonological, syntactic, and lexical) by applying a questionnaire of 201
questions of 100 towns, due to the fact that the goal of the project is to study
intergenerational linguistic variation in all Basque-speaking areas.
Based on this data, 16.400 responses will de analyzed to study the language variation
which is taking place across generations in the Basque language. We measure the
degree of variation between two generations using ANOVA. The quantitative analysis
will be examined locality by locality to know where the degree of variation is higher or
less and for that purpose we are going to use PCA statistical technique and SPSS
statistics base or the tool DiaTech for statistical analysis.
This contribution adds to the research work previously carried out in some villages of
the Basque Country, that is, it is part of the study of the sociolinguistic variation which
the Basque language is undergoing. For this purpose, a range of different linguistic
parameters (phonology, morphology and syntax) are examined. As a result, we will be
able to more accurately visualize the language variation is taking place across
generations in the Basque language, and to analyze the evolution of the sociolinguistic
variation that the Basque language is undergoing.
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References:
Ariztimuño, B. (2009). Tolosako eta Ataungo hizkerak: hizkuntz bariazioa eta
konbergentzia joerak [Linguistic Variation and levelling in Tolosa and Ataun
dialects]. Uztaro 72, 79-96.
Auer, P. (1998). Dialect levelling and standard varieties in Europe. Folia Linguistica 32,
1-9.
Aurrekoetxea, G. (2003). Euskalkiak estandarraren uholdepean (Arratiako kasua). In
Ahozkotasuna aztergai (pp. 167-185). Bilbao: Mendebalde Kultura Alkartea.
Aurrekoetxea, G. (2004). Estandar eta dialektoen arteko bateratze-joerak (ikuspuntu
teorikotik begirada bat). Uztaro 50, 45-57.
Aurrekoetxea, G. (2006). Hizkuntza estandarraren eta dialektoen arteko bateratze
joerak. In J. Lakarra and J. Hualde (eds.). Studies in Basque and Historical
Linguistics in Memory of R. L. Transk, ASJU XL (pp. 133-160). UPV.
Aurrekoetxea, G. (2007). Grammatical and Lexical Variation in the Basque Language,
Linguistica Atlantica vol 27-28, 15-20.
Aurrekoetxea, G. (2008a). Bariazio soziolinguistikoa Dimako euskaran. Euskalingua
12, 17-26.
Aurrekoetxea, G. (2008b). Different patterns of geolinguistic structure. In G. BlaiknerHohenwart, E. Bortolotti, R. Dranceschini, E. Lörincz et al. (eds.). Ladinometria.
Festschrift für Hans Goebl zum 65. Geburtstag (pp. 9–18). Universität Salzburg
/ Freie Universität Bozen, Salzburg.
Aurrekoetxea, G. (2010). Sociolinguistic and Geolinguistic Variation in the Basque
language. Slavia Centralis 1, 88-100.
Aurrekoetxea, G. and J. Lormaetxea (2006). Research project - Socio-geolinguistic
atlas of the Basque language. Euskalingua 9, 157-163.
Bellmann, G. (1998). Between base dialect and standard language. Folia Lingüística
32, 23-34.
Chambers, J. and P. Trudgill (1994). La Dialectología. Madrid: Visor Libros.
Eckert, P. and S. McConnell-Ginet (2003). Language and Gender. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Ezenarro, A. (2008). Etxebarria eta Bolibarko bariazio linguistikoa [Linguistic Variation
in Etxebarria and Bolibar]. Uztaro 67, 59-84.
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic change. Volume 2: Social factors. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Labov, W. (2010). Principles of Linguistic change. Volume 3: Cognitive and Cultural
factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, L. and M. Gordon (2003). Sociolinguistics: Method and interpretation. Oxford:
Blackwell.
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Ormaetxea, J. L. (2008). Otxandioko hizkera: adinaren araberako bariazioa [Dialect of
Otxandio: Age Variation]. Fontes Linguae Vasconum 108, 249-262.
Ormaetxea, J. L. (2011). Apparent time variation in Basque. Dialectologia 6, 25-44.
Ormaetxea, J. L., A. Ensunza and L. Unamuno (2010). Variación sociolingüística del
euskera basada en el corpus EDAK. CILC10 kongresuan aurkeztutako
txostena. A Coruña.
Santazilia, E. (2009). Luzaideko hizkuntz bariazioa. [Linguistic Variation in Luzaide].
Fontes Linguae Vasconum 111, 219-248.
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2006). Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2012). Variationist Sociolinguistics. Change, Observation,
Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P. (2002). Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P. (2011). Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic
Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Unamuno, L. and Aurrekoetxea, G. (2013). Dialect levelling in the Basque Country. In
N. S. Roberts and C. Childs (eds.). Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics
19(1), 152-167.
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ONGOING LANGUAGE CHANGE IN THE CATALAN-SPEAKING COUNTIES OF LA
FRANJA, ARAGON (SPAIN)
Esteve Valls
University of Barcelona
Keywords:
Advergence, border effect, divergence, diglossia.
Abstract:
In Valls et al. (2013), we investigated several linguistic changes which are ongoing in
north-western Catalan using a contemporary corpus. We took advantage of a range of
dialectometric methods that allowed us to calculate and analyze the linguistic distance
between varieties in apparent time from an aggregate perspective. Specifically, we paid
attention to the process of structural dialect loss due to linguistic advergence to
standard and eastern Catalan in many north-western Catalan dialects located in
Catalonia (Spain) and Andorra. We also provided evidence that the dialect leveling
taking place in these two areas strongly contrasts with the (apparent) relative stability
of the Catalan dialects on the other side of the Catalan-Aragonese border in Spain,
where Catalan is not an official language. We proved that these opposite sociolinguistic
situations (Catalonia and Andorra have strong language policies to support Catalan,
whereas Aragon does not) have triggered a twofold process of vertical advergence
between the Catalan spoken in Catalonia and Andorra towards the prestigious
varieties, on the one hand; and of horizontal divergence between these dialects and
those located in Aragon, on the other hand. As a consequence, this situation has
notably strengthened the border differences between Aragon and Catalonia during the
last 80 years. This paper was one of the first attempts to study the border effects not
only between regions belonging to different countries, but also between different
administrative regions within the same country. In addition, we investigated the
different roles of urban versus rural areas, providing support for the view that the
spatial and hierarchical diffusion patterns are complementary.
In this paper, we will focus on the Catalan varieties spoken in Aragon to more closely
examine whether the border effect is also due to the (less important in quantitative
terms) evolution of the local dialects. We hypothesize that these varieties might have
evolved simultaneously as a result of internal and external factors. As these varieties
are not being influenced by standard Catalan, several intrasystemic changes might be
taking place. At the same time, the pressure of standard Spanish, which is perceived
as the prestigious model as a result of the diglossic situation, might also be favouring a
second process of vertical advergence (see Auer & Hinskens 1996) between the
Catalan spoken in this region and standard Spanish which might be irreversible.
References:
Auer, P. and H. Frans (1996). The convergence and divergence of dialects in Europe.
New and not so new developments in an old area. Sociolinguistica 10(1), 1-30.
Valls, E., M. Wieling and J. Nerbonne (2013). Linguistic advergence and divergence in
north-western Catalan: A dialectometric investigation of dialect leveling and
border effects. Literary and Linguistic Computing 28(1).
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STANDARD DUTCH IN THE SCHOOL LANGUAGE OF UPPER MIDDLE-CLASS
PUPILS: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY
Inge Van Lancker
Ghent University
Keywords:
Standard Dutch, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, language and education.
Abstract:
In modern-day Europe, standard languages are undergoing changes (see e.g. Deumert
& Vandenbussche, 2003), and Flanders constitutes no exception. Often, both linguists
and laymen refer to the language use of Flemish teen-agers and adolescents,
supposedly full of lexical borrowings and linguistic “mistakes”, to proclaim that the end
of Standard Dutch is near. However, in recent studies, Flemish teenagers and
adolescents were observed to play around with linguistic varieties - including the
standard (see e.g. Jaspers, 2006) - and norms in an innovative and creative manner
(Jaspers & Vandekerckhove, 2009), which suggests that the standard is still present
and vital.
While existing studies mainly focus on groups of immigrant, low-achieving and working
class youth, the spoken language of high-achieving, middle class and mono-ethnically
white teen-agers still remains unknown. Nevertheless, these teen-agers are relevant
subjects in the research on standard languages, given that they can be considered
precursors of standard language change (Van Lancker, 2016 (in press)). That is why a
sociolinguistic ethnography was executed at a Flemish secondary school, mapping out
the spoken language use in educational contexts of specifically that kind of pupils. The
questions discussed are (a) how standard the default school language of these pupils
is, (b) whether this proportion of “standardness” meets the expectations of the school
staff, and (c) how important the pupils find Standard Dutch inside and outside school.
A quantitative and qualitative analysis of different types of data - observations with field
notes, audio recordings of spontaneous speech, Facebook posts, written documents
and audio-recorded interviews - does not point in the direction of the end of Standard
Dutch. The study namely demonstrates that the majority of the pupils underline the
importance of the existence and maintenance of Standard Dutch in school settings and
beyond. Furthermore, the pupils are willing (and able) to use the standard in specific
contexts such as apologies to teachers, oral presentations, reading tasks, but also job
interviews and encounters with strangers. However, instances of the standard are fairly
exceptional in the recorded language of the pupils. Yet, one might wonder whether this
has ever been any different (see e.g. Van de Craen & Willemyns, 1985 for similar
observations more than 30 years ago). Moreover, the oral language proficiency of the
pupils seems to meet the teachers’ expectations. The pupils’ use of Dutch with a few
regional elements and some infringements of the strict norm is evaluated by the
teachers as suitable in school contexts, which indicates that the norm itself is being
modified.
Thus, all aspects considered, the language use and perceptions of these pupils seem
to suggest that the changes of the Flemish standard language might merely result in a
transformation of its suitability and form, instead of in its complete redundancy.
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References:
Deumert, A. and W. Vandenbussche (2003). Germanic Standardizations. Past to
Present. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Jaspers, J. (2006). Stylizing Standard Dutch by Moroccan boys in Antwerp. Linguistics and
Education 17(2), 131-156.
Jaspers, J. and R. Vandekerckhove (2009). Jong Nederlands. Nederlandse Taalkunde 14(1), 27.
Van de Craen, P. and R. Willemyns (1985). Standaardnederlands en dialekt op school, thuis en
elders. Brussel: VUBPress.
Van Lancker, I. (2016). The reflexive imperative among high-achieving adolescents: a Flemish
case study. AILA Review 29(1), 114-140.
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ISLEÑO SPANISH’S VOYAGE: FROM THE CANARY ISLANDS TO TODAY’S
DIASPORA ACROSS THE UNITED STATES
Fabiola Varela García
University of Wisconsin
Abstract:
In 1778 over 1,500 families from the Canary Islands settled in Saint Bernard Parish in New
Orleans as part of Governor Galvez’s colonial efforts on behalf of the Spanish crown
(Gallarre, 903). The dialect preserved by these early colonizers’ descents is a XVIII
century Spanish variety kept alive thanks to abundant Caribbean, Portuguese, French and
American English borrowings. Isleño Spanish has been spoken for over 200 years in the
Louisiana swamps by a community which does not exist today because hurricane Katrina
forced its dismantling in 2005. (MacCurdy, 1948a, 1950b; Armstead 1979, 1989-1981,
1983a; Fortier, 1984; Lipski, 1984, 1987, 1990; Coles1991).
The fact that the Isleño dialect survived without any contact or influence from academic
Spanish favored the generalized presence of nonstandard linguistic forms in its local norm.
Colloquialisms, which never made it to standard Spanish in other regions, survived as
prescriptive language in the grammar of the oldest Isleños who were considered the
community’s linguistic authorities and repositories.
Isleño’s phonology didn’t change much from 1950 to 1990 i.e; truje ‘traje’, mesmo ‘mismo’
(Mc Curdy, 1950; Lipski,1990) whereas Isleno’s unstressed vocalic system seemed quite
unstable, ie.; legarto ‘lagarto’, estión ‘ostión. The consonantal system maintained
aspiration of Latin etymological ‘f’ ie.; jaser ‘hacer’<facere; the interdental oclusive > /l/ in
word initial,ie., lefunto ‘ difunto’, and consonantal metathesis,i.e; ardento ‘adentro’ marde
'madre', in a seseante region with generalized /s/ aspiration and deletion. Consonants /l/ y
/r/ are also weakened and suffer rhoticism and lateralization (Coles, 1991). Lastly, lack of
word final velar /n/ is possibly the only unique feature of Isleño Spanish (Coles, 1991).
Gender and number instability is attested in the morphology, ie.; el/la sartén ; ‘pies/pieses’.
Only ustedes as 3.pl.person subject pronoun is used. Interrogative cuál coexists with cuálo
y cuála. Radical vowel o–does not become a diphthong o>ue in the present indicative or
subjunctive, i.e.; yo vola ‘yo vuelo’,’yo vuele’.The vocabulary is full of Latin-American
Spanish borrowings, i.e; jaiba,’cangrejo’ barbú, ‘salmonete’ and Gallicisms, i.e., cribis ‘
cangrejo’, and more recently from English, i.e.; grosería’grocery store’, guachiman
‘watchman.
Recent semantic transfers from English,i.e.; jugá un instrumento ‘tocar un instrumento’,
and syntactic calques such as llámame patrás ‘ call me back’, code-switching and verbal
morphological simplification, especially evident in semi- speakers, have prompted some
linguists to consider Isleño Spanish as a dying language (Lipski, 1990).
In 1998 I carried out sociolinguist interviews in Saint Bernard Parish where I collected
linguistic samples of great value today. They are possibly among the last recordings which
preserve the community language before its diaspora throughout the United States took
place in 2005.
In this paper we are presenting the linguistic analysis of Isleños’ grammar in its latest
stages the way a 102 year old speaker, Chelito Campos (deceased), and Irvan Perez
(deceased) 75 years old had preserved itit before the community as such ceased to exit.
Both speakers enjoyed well deserved recognition beyond their community limits. Both
were remarkable décimas singers, compositions of an extraordinary ethnolinguistic value.
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WHAT’S UP WITH WHATSAPP? THE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON DUTCH
YOUTHS’ SCHOOL WRITINGS
Lieke Verheijen
Radboud University
Keywords:
Social media, computer-mediated communication, writing, literacy, youth language.
Abstract:
Youths in the Netherlands have become hooked on social media. The informal language
they use in computer-mediated communication (CMC) often deviates from the standard
language rules on grammar and orthography (Crystal 2008). This has raised concerns
that the constant use of CMC may negatively affect youths’ more formal literacy skills
(Spooren 2009; Verheijen 2013). A large-scale empirical study was conducted to
examine whether social media indeed affect school writings. 400 Dutch youths, of
different educational levels and age groups, were tested at secondary and tertiary
educational institutions between September 2015 and March 2016. Participants wrote an
essay to test their writing skills, and filled in a questionnaire to measure their CMC use.
The essays were analysed with T-Scan software (Pander Maat et al. 2014). 27 relevant
variables were selected out of the numerous variables provided by T-Scan. These 27
variables were reduced with an exploratory factor analysis to four writing components:
lexical richness, syntactic complexity, writing productivity, and formality. Scores on the
questionnaire items were reduced to eleven CMC variables. Linear multiple regressions
were conducted with the factor scores of the four writing skills variables as outcomes,
and the eleven CMC variables plus three demographic variables (age group, educational
level, gender) as predictors. Results revealed that more computer-mediated
communication variables positively affect writing skills than negatively. It turned out that
passive engagement with CMC, by heavy reliance on one’s mobile phone and
consumption of social media messages, can hinder writing skills, whereas active and
creative production of language via CMC – via various genres, from an earlier age, with
many people, and including textisms – can in fact help in developing writing skills.
Moreover, it was found that lower educated youths’ writing skills are most at risk of being
affected, but at the same time can also benefit most from social media.
References:
Crystal, D. (2008). Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Pander Maat, H., R. Kraf, A. van den Bosch, N. Dekker, M. van Gompel, S. Kleijn, T.
Sanders, & K. van der Sloot (2014). T-Scan: A new tool for analyzing Dutch text.
Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal, 4, 53-74.
Spooren, W. (2009). Bezorgde ouders? De relatie tussen chat en schrijfkwaliteit. In W.
Spooren, M. Onrust, & J. Sanders (Eds.), Studies in Taalbeheersing 3 (pp. 331–
342). Assen: Van Gorcum.
Verheijen, L. (2013). The effects of text messaging and instant messaging on literacy.
English Studies, 94(5), 582–602.
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471
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SPANISH VARIETIES IN CONTACT: ACCOMMODATION OF YOUNG AND ADULT
ARGENTINEAN IMMIGRANTS IN THE CITY OF MALAGA. ACOUSTIC,
MORPHOLOGICAL AND LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF THEIR LINGUISTIC BEHAVIOUR
María Clara von Essen
University of Málaga
Keywords:
Immigrant, accommodation, dialectal contact.
Abstract:
In this paper, which is a previous study of a more complex project, we will analyse the
linguistic behaviour of a group of young Argentinean immigrants (from the city of
Buenos Aires) that migrated to the city of Malaga, Spain, at a very young age (between
4 and 8 years). Our first goal is to establish the degree of accommodation or
convergence they show towards this new variety of Spanish they have contact with.
Subsequently, we will compare the results of this group to the results of a group of
adult immigrants in order to determine what kind of differences they exhibit in their
degree of accommodation.
Since the immigrants are expected to accommodate to the variety of Malaga (at least
in some degree), and in this variety emerges a new “intermediate variety” (which is
between the national standard and the vernacular varieties of Andalusia [Villena
Ponsoda 2008; Villena and Vida 2015]), we will also focus our attention on
determining: a) to which variety do the immigrants accommodate to, that is whether
they prefer the intermediate variety of the city of Malaga or the national standard
variety, b) whether there are differences in the degree of convergence or
accommodation when compating both groups (younger immigrants vs. adults), c) what
features (pronunciation, morphological and lexical) do immigrants modify or
accommodate to for being less salient, d) what degree of coherence do these new
“immigrant varieties” show (and if there are differences in the degree of coherence
when comparing the results of young and adult immigrants).
In order to determine the degree of accommodation or convergence of these groups,
we will focus our attention on very specific pronunciation, morphological and lexical
features:
1. The pronunciation of, perhaps, the more salient feature of Argentinean Spanish, that
is the pronunciation of /ʝ/, that shows very different realisations in Buenos Aires,
Argentina: [ʒ] or [ʃ] in comparison to those of the intermediate variety of Malaga: [j] or
[ʝ]. 2. The maintenance (or loss) of seseo, that is the pronunciation of origin of /θ/ as [s̪].
3. The realisations of /s/ consonant in the end of the syllable (maintenance, lenition,
loss) and in syllabic coda before a voiceless occlusive (resilabification) (Villena and
Vida 2015). 4. The address forms detected during the interview: tú vs. vos; ustedes vs.
vosotros and verbal forms (vos querés vs. tu quieres; ustedes comen vs. vosotros
coméis). 5. The rate of appearance of lexical units related to each one of the varieties
in contact (colectivo vs. autobús/ tío vs. pibe/ cuadra vs. acera and so on).
We will also study how these features interact or correlate with the background of the
interviewer (Argentinean vs. Spanish interviewer) (von Essen, 2016).
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References:
Villena Ponsoda, J. A. (2008). Sociolinguistic patterns of Andalusian Spanish.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 193-194, 139-160.
Villena Ponsoda. J. A. and Vida Castro, M. (2015). Between local and standard
varieties: horizontal and vertical convergence and divergence of dialects in
Southern Spain. In I. Buchstaller and B. Siebenhaar (eds.). Proceedings of the
8th ICLaVE Conference. Leipzig. Ámsterdam: John Benjamins (in press).
von Essen, M. C. (2016). Variedades del español en contacto: acomodación
sociolingüística de una comunidad de inmigrantes argentinos en la ciudad de
Málaga. Análisis acústico de las variantes alofónicas de /ʝ/. Lengua y
Migración/Language
and
Migration
8:2,
7-43.
http://lym.linguas.net/Download.axd?type=ArticleItem&id=165
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LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT AND NATIONALISM IN THE BALKAN PERIPHERY:
THE CASE OF THE VLASHKI/ZHEYANSKI-SPEAKING LINGUISTIC MINORITY IN
CROATIA
Zvjezdana Vrzic
University of Rijeka
New York University
Keywords:
Istro-Romanian, conceptions of identity, self-ascription, state policy.
Abstract:
The Vlashki/Zheyanski language (ISO 639-3: ruo; Istro-Romanian) is a severely
endangered language spoken on the Istrian peninsula, a multiethnic and multilingual
border area of Croatia. The Vlashki/Zheyanski-speaking village communities are in the
final stages of language shift to Croatian (Author, 2016). The transhumant ancestors of
today’s Vlashki/Zheyanski speakers inhabited Istria in the early 16th century. It is posited
that they moved away from the Eastern Romance core a thousand or more years ago
(Mallinson 1990:303).
Based on the analysis of community members’ attitudes, collected by means of a
sociolinguistic questionnaire, oral histories and focus group conversations, this paper
discusses the conflict between the complex identities embraced by the Vlashki/Zheyanski
speakers and more simplistic conceptions of their identity assumed by outsiders.
Istria has belonged to four different states in just the last one hundred years and its
populations’ identities are typically fluid, multiple and layered (e.g. Ballinger 2004, Banovac
2004, Sujolđić 2008) as well as strongly regionalist. As such, they are at odds with
conceptions of identity in other areas of Croatia, and the wider Balkan region, where more
clearly nationalist attitudes prevail. Like their Croatian-speaking neighbors,
Vlashki/Zheyanski speakers often express affiliation with one or more national identities
(Croatian and/or Italian) in combination with the Istrian regional identity. In addition, they
also stress the importance of the village affiliation and the vital role their language plays in
it.
The views expressed by the Romanian state diverge starkly from these community
attitudes toward identity. The Vlashki/Zheyanski-speaking communities do not think of
themselves as a diasporic minority of the Romanian nation and have a clear sense of
historical and cultural differences. The Romanian law, in contrast, views all longstanding
minority populations of the Balkans, speaking different varieties of Eastern Romance, as
‘Romanians in the diaspora’, on a par with Romanian nationals, irrespective of their varied
political and cultural histories and diverse self-ascribed identities. Vlashki/Zheyanskispeaking Istrians are included in this category. Based on community members' accounts
and this author's own exposure, the paper provides examples of more recent activities of
Romanian state representatives and other actors, in line with this policy, that were
received with confusion and resistance among the community members.
Finally, the paper reflects on how this longstanding misconception and disregard of
communities’ own identity choices may be yet another micro-factor in their language shift
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to Croatian. The frustration and distress connected to the pressures to embrace an identity
in conflict with the local experience and own views has had the effect of further distancing
many community members, in particular, the youngest ones, from their linguistic heritage
and the associated distinctive, but local, identity as well.
References:
Ballinger, P. (2004). Authentic hybrids in the Balkan borderlands. Current Anthropology
45(1), 31-60.
Banovac, B. (2004). (Re)konstrukcija socijalnog prostora periferije. Revija za sociologiju
vol. 35(3–4), 95–112.
Mallinson, G. (1990). Romanian. In The World’s Major Languages, ed. by Bernard Comrie
(pp. 303-321). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sujoldžić, A. (2008). Istrian identities and languages in contact. Suvremena lingvistika
65(1), 27-56.
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ANALYZING SIMULTANEOUS TALK IN THE UK’S TALK SHOWS: CONVERSANTS’
STATUSES AND STRATEGIES
Phalangchok Wanphet
Nord University, Norway
Keywords:
Simultaneous talk, TV talk show, socioeconomic class, interruption, overlap.
Abstract:
Conversation Analysis (CA) researchers speculate that, because “speaker-change recurs
or at least occurs” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974, 700), the chance that there
is more than one speaker at a time is possible, but brief if it occurs. The
conversational feature of social interaction is broadly known as simultaneous talk,
which includes overlaps, where the aim of the second speaker is to be cooperative and
supportive, and interruption, where the second speaker wants to compete for the floor.
This study aims to explore simultaneous talk that occurs in the UK’s talk shows. Although
this phenomenon has been widely explored in several encounters such as family talk
(Tannen, 1981), classroom interaction (Jones and Thornborrow, 2004), doctor-patient
interaction (West, 1984), etc., many of these studies relate the phenomenon to the
gender of the speakers (the seminal work by Zimmerman and West 1975, 1983).
However, very few explore simultaneous talk between the host and guest in TV talk shows
simply because of the intended rarity of this phenomenon. The purpose of a TV talk show
is that the audience’s understanding should be maintained at all times in order that the talk
can continue. This is supported by Sacks et al. 1974 who state that simultaneous talk has
to be solved as soon as possible so that conversational repair is not needed, as
conversational repair can take several turns to fix. In addition, TV, in general, talk show
hosts should facilitate and encourage the answer from the guest, and not take the whole
floor or become the main speaker.
This study analyzes the simultaneous talk that occurs in UK talk shows whose the host
interviewed guests from different socioeconomic classes on different occasions. An
analysis of the chat show ‘Parkinson’, which was popular in the UK, suggests that
simultaneous talk involving the host and guests has different functions and yield outcomes
which are dependent on the status of the guests. Also, the frequency and length of the
simultaneous talk negatively correlate to how the host perceives the status of the guests to
be. This study concludes that the occurrence of simultaneous talk can be predicted in
relation to how the status of conversants is perceived by the conversants and that it is a
socioeconomic class-related phenomenon.
References:
Jones, R. and Thornborrow, J. (2004). Floors, talk and the organization of classroom
activities. Language in Society 33, 399-423.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696-735.
Tannen, D. (1981). New York Jewish conversational style. International Journal of the
Sociology of Language 30, 133-149.
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West, C. (1984). When the doctor is a “lady”: Power, status and gender in physicianpatient encounters. Symbolic Interaction 7, 87-106.
West, C. and Zimmerman, D. (1983). Small insults: A study of interruptions in cross-sex
conversations between unacquainted persons. In B. C. Thorne, C. Kramarae, and
N. Henley (eds.). Language, gender and society (pp. 102-117). Rowley, MA:
Newbury House.
Zimmerman, D. H., and Candace W. (1975). Sex roles, interruptions and silences in
conversation. In B. Thorne, and N. Henley (eds.). Language and sex: Difference
and dominance (pp. 105-129). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
477
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DECLARED LANGUAGE BEHAVIOUR AMONG ETHNO-LINGUISTICALLY MIXED
FAMILIES IN ESTONIA
Anastassia Zabrodskaja
Tallinn University
University of Tartu
Keywords:
Family language policy, language ideologies, multilingualism, Estonian, Russian.
Abstract:
Estonia’s large Russian-speaking population was formed mainly through immigration
during the Soviet period (1944–1991). In independent Estonia, Russians found
themselves socially in a subordinate position, as speakers of a language that was not
the dominant language. During the Soviet era a strong oppositional identity among
ethnic Estonians resulted in Estonian language maintenance in all domains of life
(including its intergenerational transmission by mixed couples). In the post-Soviet
context, due to rapid foreign and second language learning among the Estonianspeaking and Russian-speaking populations and the lack of oppositional identity to
English as a lingua franca, forms of multilingualism have acquired a more diffuse
character. Current Estonian laws and policies do not facilitate the maintenance of
Russian or other languages. Language, citizenship and education laws regulate only
the knowledge and use of the Estonian language.
I concentrate on the intergenerational transmission of heritage languages in interethnic
Estonian-Russian and Estonian-x families. During Soviet time Russian became the
dominant language of ethnic Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars and members of a
number of other ethnicities in the territory of the Soviet Union who settled in Estonia
during the Soviet period. Thus, under Estonian-x families I mean families where one of
the partners is not an ethnical Estonian or Russian (often being representatives of the
“third” ethnicities such people are still Russian-speakers).
The paper analyses how family language policy choices and parents’ linguistic
experiences affect the language of the child’s education. I conducted individual semistructured in-depth interviews on family language choice patterns with 36 couples from
Estonian-Russian and Estonian-x families. The couples were chosen to reflect the
sociolinguistic diversity of Estonian regions – a bilingual capital Tallinn, dominantly
Russian-speaking Ida-Viru county (north-eastern part of Estonia) and dominantly
Estonian-speaking Southern Estonia; and three different age groups (25-39, 40-59 and
over 60 years old). The couples represent the traditional family model.
The goal was to specify the patterns of intergenerational language transmission in
families using Estonian and Russian as one of their home languages, and to contribute
to a theory explaining intergenerational language transmission processes in a changed
sociolinguistic situation. The interview was framed on the already used questionnaire in
“Languages on the coach. Family plurilingualism in the Catalan-speaking territories”
([original in Catalan Les llengües al sofà. El plurilingüisme familiar als països de
llengua catalana] edited by Boix-Fuster and Torrens 2011). The interview consisted of
three parts: (1) the socialization of each individual; (2) the socialization of the couple;
and (3) the socialization of the children.
The results show that the external linguistic environment has a strong influence on
home language: in Russian-speaking towns, it is more likely Russian in Estonian-
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Russian families; in Estonian-speaking towns, it is more likely Estonian in EstonianRussian and Estonian-x families. In an Estonian-dominant language environment,
children in Estonian-Russian families do not retain the heritage language, preferring to
speak Estonian, as often this is the language of their education. It is noteworthy that
Russian, even though a minority language in Estonia, is well transmitted even in
Estonian-Russian mixed families living in a Russian linguistic environment.
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GENDER, CLASS AND LANGUAGE VARIATION IN BEIJING
Hui Zhao
University of Kansas
Keywords:
Language variation, Beijing, Mandarin Chinese, gender, class.
Abstract:
Recent sociolinguistic studies on language variation have suggested a complex
interaction between speakers’ gender roles and social mobility ([1]) rather than a
simple sex and/or class distinction ([2]). Similar results were found in Zhang’s ([3])
research on Beijing managers in late 1990s. 20 years after the Chinese economic
reform, the study proposes that the use of Beijing Mandarin (BM) is conditioned by
gender and professional identity, and the local vernacular attracted little prestige while
the non-local/cosmopolitan variants were preferred for a middle-class identity. Situated
in the same city but two decades later, the current study further explores the
relationship between gender, class and language variation in BM in a context where
economic and social transformations have taken place and have potentially changed
speakers’ ideology around class, gender and languages.
In this paper, I examine the use and perception of Beijing Mandarin and the standard
language (Modern Standard Chinese) among Beijing-born university students in Beijing
in relation to several social factors (gender, social class, career choice, and future
aspiration). Dialect choice in this context can further our understanding of gender and
class in China, in part by establishing whether, and how, the local vernacular may be
challenging the status of the standard.
The study uses data from both sociolinguistic interviews – conducted with 21 Beijingers
with different class backgrounds, career plans, and future aspiration – and perceptual
experiments with 80 native Chinese listeners. I focus on three thus far unexamined
linguistic variables – neutral tone, intensifier te, and classifier omission. Mixed-effects
regression models were fitted to the data and three main findings are highlighted: first,
class alone is not a driving force: career choice, closely related to the strength of
standard language ideology in an industry (e.g. business vs. language teaching),
together with gender and future aspiration (measured by the student’s level of upward
mobility and career preparation) appear to offer better explanations for the use of
Beijing features. Secondly, some familiar gender patterns were observed here: women
use intensifiers more than men while men tend to use the local variants more than
women. Finally, although Beijing Mandarin behaves, as expected, like a vernacular
variety in both interview data and experiment results, it seems to lack the stigma often
associated with vernaculars and is possibly gaining prestige, as demonstrated in
participants’ metalinguistic commentaries and use of local variants across careful and
casual speech.
The findings first suggest that in investigating language variation in Beijing, gender and
class should be considered together (and with other relevant factors). Moreover, I offer
evidence showing that BM – traditionally a vernacular – is gaining status (at least
locally) and potentially challenging the status of standard Chinese in Beijing.
References:
Eckert, P. (1989). The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation.
Language Variation and Change 1(3), 245-267.
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Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington:
Center for Applied Linguistics.
Zhang, Q. (2005). A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the
construction of a new professional identity. Language in Society 34 (3), 431-466.
481
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GEOGRAPHY VERSUS STYLE IN THE HISTORY OF CENTRAL BASQUE
Eneko Zuloaga
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Keywords:
Prestige, literary dialects, gravity model, Basque, language history.
Abstract:
Since the evolution of linguistic systems occurs in connection to the speakers’ sociohistorical situation (Conde Silvestre & Hernández Campoy 2012: 1), historical
linguistics has increasingly drawn on insights from sociolinguistics to understand
language change (Salmons 1990: 71), although well known problems tend to
(re)appear when studying the past of a linguistic variety: the sources are rarely
numerous and extensive enough, and we cannot always know about them as much as
we would like to (cf. Laing 2004).
This paper deals with 18th century central or “Guipuscoan” dialect of Basque. The goal
is to contribute to the theory of language change by analyzing the influence of literary
style and the tendency towards hyperdialectalism. In particular, I discuss the
application of two morphophonological rules (cf. Manterola 2015: liv) which differentiate
the occidental and central varieties of Basque: occidental -a + a > -ea (dissimilation)
and central -a + a > -a (assimilation).
The paper is based on two 18th century sources: the works of Larramendi, the first
grammarian of Basque, and letters written by a noble women. Larramendi was clearly
aware of both rules and used one or another depending on his audience. However, in
the letters there is no -a + a > -ea dissimilation. The problem is that dissimilation was in
fact expected in those letters due to geographical reasons. I will try to show how
methods and interpretations of historical sociolinguistics help provide an explanation of
these facts. Firstly, I will argue that it is possible that the author chose a more
prestigious and hyperdialectal language-style; precisely, the one put forward in
Larramendi’s grammar (1729). Alternatively, it could be the case that, although the
dissimilation had already spread to the author’s birth town, it was not yet diffused to
rural zones, where the woman lived. I will claim that the second explanation is more
likely according to the gravity model of linguistic diffusion (cf. Trudgill 1974 and
Taeldman 2005). In sum, the paper seeks to explore methods and problems of
historical sociolinguistics.
References:
Hernández Campoy, J. M. and J. C. Conde-Silvestre (eds.). (2012). The Handbook of
Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Laing, M. (2004). Multidimensionality: Time, Space and Stratigraphy in Historical
Dialectology. In M. Dossena and R. Lass (eds.). Methods and Data in English
Historical Dialectology (pp. 49-93). Bern: Peter Lang.
Larramendi, M. (1729). El impossible vencido. Arte de la lengua vascongada.
Salamanca: Antonio Joseph Villagordo.
Manterola, J. (2015). Towards a history of Basque morphology: articles and
demonstratives. Unpublished PhD dissertation.
Salmons, J. (1990). The context of language change. In E. C. Polomé (ed.). Research
Guide on Language Change (pp. 71-96). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
482
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Taeldeman, J. (2005). The influence of urban centres on the spatial diffusion of dialect
phenomena. In P. Auer, F. Hinskens and P. Kerswill (eds.). Dialect change:
Convergence and divergence in European languages (pp. 263-284).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trudgill, P. (1974). Linguistic change and diffusion: description and explanation in
sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3/2, 215-246.
483
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AUDIO MINING AND LANGUAGE CHANGE RESEARCH: DISCLOSURE OF A
FRISIAN-DUTCH RADIO ARCHIVE
Jelske Dijkstra
Fryske Akademy
Hans Van de Velde
Fryske Akademy
Emre Yilmaz
Radboud University
Frederik Kampstra
Omrop Fryslân
Jouke Algra
Omrop Fryslân
Henk van den Heuvel
Radboud University
David van Leeuwen
Radboud University
Keywords:
Speech database, radio broadcasts, bilingual speech recognition, language
variation, media language.
Abstract:
Studying language variation using speech corpora is generally problematic in
minority languages. Usually there are only a few resources available, and financial
sources to expand existing corpora or to build new ones are often limited. In the
FAME! (Frisian Audio Mining Enterprise) Project, a spoken document retrieval
system is built for the disclosure of a large archive containing radio broadcasts
of the Frisian regional broadcasting corporation (Omrop Fryslân). Frisian is a
minority language spoken in the province of Fryslân in the north of the
Netherlands and has about half a million speakers. This archive comprises
approximately 2600 hours of audio fragments, in both Frisian and Dutch, covering a
period of 50 years’ time (1950-2000). The topics of the radio programs are very
diverse, varying from culture, history, literature, sports, nature, agriculture, politics,
society to languages.
The spoken document retrieval system is developed in the first place to
enable journalists to find and re-use old broadcasts. But at the same time, it will offer
research possibilities for linguists interested in language variation and change and
in code-switching.
The radio archive contains recordings in both Frisian and Dutch, and within
one fragment there is often code-switching between both languages. Consequently,
the ASR-system we are building has to be bilingual too. We will study whether a
merged Frisian-Dutch model and lexicon or two separate systems results in
better speech recognition. These archived audio recordings will be disclosed with
newly developed Frisian automatic speech recognition (ASR) using the Kaldi toolkit.
A manually transcribed and annotated subset of 18.5 hours of radio
broadcasts, containing randomly chosen audio fragments from the archive, is used to
train acoustic
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models for Frisian. This subset forms the speech database FAMous and consists of
203 audio segments of approximately five minutes long extracted from various radio
programs. Further, large text corpora are used to build language models for Frisian.
Together with a phonetic lexicon containing over 70,000 words these language
resources are the building blocks of the ASR-system.
Next to speech recognition, speaker recognition is built in the spoken document
retrieval system. After disclosure of the radio archive it will be possible to search it
thoroughly and retrieve audio fragments on specific topics as well as specific persons.
This offers many research possibilities in language variation within the Frisian
language, but also on language change in real time. Further, it will be possible to
conduct longitudinal studies on language change across the life-span, since several
persons appear multiple times in the real-time corpus. The poster will present the
methodology used to disclose this speech corpus with 50 years of radio broadcasts.
References:
Povey, D., Ghoshal, A., Boulianne, G., Burget, L., Glembek, O., Goel, N., Hannemann,
M., Motlíček, P., Qian, Y., Schwarz, P., Silovský, J., Stemmer, G. and Veselý,
K. (2011). The Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit. IEEE 2011 Workshop on
Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Hilton Waikoloa Village, Big
Island, Hawaii, US: IEE Signal Processing Society.
Yılmaz, E., Andringa, M., Kingma, S., Dijkstra, J., Kuip, F. van der, Van de Velde, H.,
Kampstra, F., Algra, J., Heuvel H. van den and Leeuwen, D. van (2016). A
Longitudinal Bilingual Frisian-Dutch Radio Broadcast Database Designed for
Code-switching Research. Proceedings LREC Portorož, Slovenia, 4666-4669.
485
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ANDALUSIAN PRONUNCIATION AND DICTATORSHIP: THE DISCOURSE OF
ANDALUSIAN FRANCOIST POLITICIANS
Rocío Cruz Ortiz
University of Granada
Keywords:
Andalusian, pronunciation, politicians.
Abstract:
Andalusian has distinctive features compared to northern Spanish. These distinctive
features of the Spanish spoken in Andalusia reside mainly in the use of allophones and
peculiar pronunciations of many phonemes which have different joints in the northern
varieties of Spanish. That is, the differences are primarily phonetic and, secondarily,
morphological, syntactical and lexical.
We present a study of variation in the speech of eight Andalusian ministers ranging
from 1939- the year the Spanish Civil War ends and the Francoist dictatorship beginsuntil 1975, when the dictatorship ends following Franco’s death. This study is part of a
wider project, which includes analyses of other politicians to make up a total of 36
people through various periods of Spanish political life.
Besides this, we find it interesting that, despite the existence of numerous studies on
the Andalusian linguistic modality, the pronunciation of Andalusians, the differences of
this modality within Andalusian territory and its geographical limits, there are few
studies on the evolution of maintenance or loss of the vernacular Andalusian features
in formal contexts outside the borders of this region. In the same way, something
similar has happened with the political discourse, which especially in recent years has
received considerable attention as a subject of study. However, it is curious to see how
such research has focused almost exclusively on the pragmatic and lexical field, with
very little attention given to the phonic component.
The ministers of Andalusian origin at the stage we study are:
1. José Solís Ruiz
2. Manuel Lora-Tamayo Martín
3. Julio Salvador y Díaz-Benjumea
4. Adolfo Baturone Colombo
5. Julio Rodríguez Martínez
6. José Utrera Molina
7. León Herrera Esteban
8. Rafael Cabello de Alba y Gracia
For each of these political personalities we analyse two oral texts, divided between a
speech and an interview, each of 3 minutes, 6 minutes of audio in total. An exception is
made in the case of Adolfo Baturone, about whom we could not find interviews, such
that we study only 6 minutes of speech.
Subsequently, the study takes into account the main features that usually characterize
Andalusian and which are, broadly:
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- The sibilants S / θ.
- The opening of the final vowels.
- The behaviour of the implosive consonants.
- The pronunciation of /x/
- The treatment of the intervocalic consonants, especially -d-.
Ultimately, the goal is to get closer to the reality of the Andalusian variety and its
alteration by contact in very formal settings to another embodiment of Spanish (the
most prestigious in this case) with particular attention paid to those features which are
the first to disappear and those that survive outside of its borders.
487
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INVESTIGATING PHONETIC CORRELATES OF UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY IN
URBAN SCOTTISH SPEECH
Victoria Dickson
University of Edinburgh
Keywords:
Variationist sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, Scottish English, social class, class
mobility.
Abstract:
Social class has long been a subject of importance to the study of language variation
and change, and continues to be a vital parameter of consideration for research in
variationist sociolinguistics. However, there remains little discussion of the factors that
determine social class. Studies of class mobility in variationist work are relatively
sparse, the prevailing focus limited to contrasts between static social class groups.
The present study explores the relationship between class mobility and sociophonetic
variation in the context of urban Scottish speech. Results are presented from an
auditory analysis of two phonetic variables in a corpus of spontaneous speech
collected in Edinburgh, Scotland. These variables, noted to be socially stratified in
distribution, are (1) the glottal replacement of /t/ in word-final and non-foot-initial onset
positions, e.g. bu[ʔ], moun[ʔ]ain (c.f. Speitel & Johnstone 1983; Stuart-Smith 1999),
and (2) the phonemic distinction of /w/ and /ʍ/, whereby sounds represented
orthographically with wh are realised as [ʍ], e.g. [ʍ]isky, some[ʍ]ere (Stuart-Smith
2004: 61). Conversational speech was recorded from monolingual Edinburgh natives,
aged 57-69 years, representing three socioeconomic groups: Working Class (WC),
Established Middle Class (EMC) and New Middle Class (NMC), the third category
comprising speakers who had experienced upward mobility over their lifetime. Social
class was operationalised on the basis of a speaker’s educational background and
career, compared with that of their parents.
Distributional patterns across the three socioeconomic groups indicate widespread use
of the glottal variant and the merging of /ʍ/ with /w/ in WC speech, while EMC
speakers show a comparatively high rate of the prestigious alveolar [tʰ] realisation of /t/
and variable retention of the [ʍ] realisation. Strikingly, the upwardly mobile NMC group
shows the highest production rate of the [tʰ] and [ʍ] variants. Thus, despite their
arguably intermediate socioeconomic status (having transitioned from working class to
middle class), the NMC speakers exceed the proportion of overtly prestigious variants
observed for EMC speech. This result mirrors findings by Dickson and Hall-Lew (2015)
of a NMC cross-over pattern in the realisation of non-prevocalic /r/ in Edinburgh. It is
argued that this distinctive pattern reflects a contrast in language ideology between
upwardly mobile speakers and those of a stable socioeconomic status. The present
analysis aims to build on existing research to offer greater insight into the linguistic
representation of evolving class identities.
References:
Dickson, V. and L. Hall-Lew (2015). Class, Gender and Rhoticity: The Social
Stratification of Postvocalic /r/ in Edinburgh Speech. Poster presented at The
10th UK Language Variation and Change (1–3 September). University of York,
United Kingdom.
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Hans-Henning, S. and P. Johnston (1983). A sociolinguistic investigation of Edinburgh
speech. ESRC end of grant report. Swindon, United Kingdom.
Stuart-Smith, J. (1999). Glottals past and present: A study of T-glottalling in
Glaswegian. Leeds Studies in English 30, 181–204.
Stuart-Smith, J. (2004). Scottish English: Phonology. In B. Kortmann, K. Burridge, E.
Schneider, R. Mesthrie, and C. Upton (eds.). A Handbook of Varieties of
English: 1: Phonology (pp.47-67). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
489
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THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF MÁLAGA: BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION AND
LOCAL IDENTITY
Diana Esteba Ramos
University of Málaga
Daniel M. Sáez Rivera
University Complutense of Madrid
Keywords:
Linguistic Landscape, globalization, local identity, loanwords, Málaga.
Abstract:
Following a preliminary study on the Linguistic Landscape of Malaga (Esteba Ramos,
2014; Esteba Ramos/Sáez Rivera, 2014), some issues deserve further research, and
some of these can be most appropriately depicted on a poster containing photographs.
On one hand, the Málaga Linguistic Landscape shows traits of globalization, with the
presence of several languages (mainly but not only English) especially in the city
center, owing to tourism, and a surprising scarcity of immigrant languages and Spanish
American varieties (e.g., the Silent LL pattern established by Castillo/Sáez, 2011;
Sáez/Castillo, 2012). English, however, is also present in urban art graffiti, signs for
businesses, and numerous services (e.g., lawyers, real estate, health services) are
offered to permanent or long-term residents in many foreign languages. On the other
hand, local identity is publicly showcased in the form of written representations of
phonic and lexical traits of the Spanish spoken in Málaga, e.g., bars named “Er
Compá” or “Er Quezada”, and menus offering “nubes” (coffee with milk), “campero”
(Málaga’s characteristic sandwich of ham and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese
and mayonnaise sauce) or “pitufos” (small sandwiches). The latter phenomenon has
been also observed in another town in Andalucía (see Pons Rodríguez, 2011).
Loanwords like Arabic “shawarma”, “showarma” or even “chouorma” in the same street
menus are a bridge between local and global Linguistic Landscape in Málaga.
References:
Castillo Lluch, M. and D. M. Sáez Rivera (2011). Introducción al paisaje lingüístico de
Madrid. Lengua y Migración 3, 73-88.
<http://dspace.uah.es/dspace/bitstream/handle/10017/10822/introduccion_castil
lo_LM_2011.pdf?sequence=1>
Esteba Ramos, D. (2014). Aproximación al paisaje lingüístico de Málaga: préstamos y
reflejos de una realidad lingüística plural. Recherches 7, 165-187. Université de
Strasbourg.
Esteba Ramos, D. and D. M. Sáez Rivera (2014). A Comparison of Immigrant
Languages and Varieties in the Linguistic Landscape of Two Towns in Spain:
Madrid vs. Málaga. Linguistic Landscapes 6, “Hope and Precarity,” (pp. 9-11).
April 2014. Cape Town, South Africa: University of the Western Cape.
http://riuma.uma.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10630/7482/Presentation%20
Cape%20Town%20DEf.pdf?sequence=3.
Pons Rodríguez, L. (2011). El paisaje lingüístico de Sevilla. Sevilla: Diputación de
Sevilla.
Sáez Rivera, D. M. and Castillo Lluch, M. (2012). The Human and Linguistic
Landscape of Madrid (Spain). In C. Hélot, M. Barni, R. Janssens and C. Bagna
(eds.). Linguistic Landscapes, Multilingualism and Social Change: Diversité des
approaches (pp. 309-328). Bern: Peter Lang.
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SOCIOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS ABOUT INTERVOCALIC -/D/- IN THE SPEECH OF
MERIDA´S REGION
Elena Fernández de Molina Ortés
University of Granada
Keywords:
Sociolinguistic, phonetic, intervocalic /d/, extremenian.
Abstract:
D-dropping is a widespread phenomenon in the casual speech of European Spanish
and is a sound that has been studied in various sociolinguistic research of Spanish
(Carbonero, 1982, Samper Padilla, 1990; Calero, 1991; Gómez, 1994; Molina, 1999;
Moreno Fernández, 2004; Molina, 2006; Moya Corral, 2008; Gómez Molina, 2010).
The presence of sound in the system, either as a form of participle, either nouns and
monomorphemics forms and their effect so common in the spoken language have led
to the realization of the dental from maintenance to weakening and even, in some
contexts, to the total elision.
In this poster we will contribute to research on the spread of phenomenon in Spanish.
We will focus more specifically in the speech of Merida´s region, in Extremadura
where, according to traditional studies, it is an area where is normally found the
weakening and elision of the sound in intervocalically position (González Salgado,
2003a, 2003b). To do this, we will make an analysis of the different variants of dental
fricative - /d/ - intervocalically in the speech of Merida´s region in which we will not only
study the distribution of the /d/ in the region but also we will study the linguistic factors
that have influence in the maintenance, the weakening or loss. We will emphasize,
among others, in the gramatical function of sound or the pre-post vocalic context.
Furthermore, given that the extent of weakening and elision of the fricative is due to
geolinguistic and sociolinguistic factors, we will present an analysis which will be
advised if any social factors such as gender, age or the instruction of the informants
having influences on the selection of variants in the speech of the region.
References:
Calero, M. A. (1991). Estudio sociológico del habla de Toledo: segmentos fonológicos /s/ y /J/. Lleida: Pagés.
Carbonero, P. (1982). El habla de Sevilla. Sevilla: Biblioteca de temas sevillanos.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (2010). Mantenimiento y elisión de la /d/ intervocálica en el
español de Valencia. Verba: Anuario galego de filoloxia 37, 89-122.
Gómez Serrano, A. (1994). Aspectos sociolingüísticos del habla de Linares (Jaén).
PhD dissertation. Málaga: Universidad de Málaga.
Molina Martos, I. (1999). La fonética de Toledo. Contexto Geográfico y Social. Alcalá
de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá.
Molina Martos, I. (2006). Innovación y difusión del cambio lingüístico en Madrid.
Revista de Filología Española 86/1, 127-149.
Moreno Fernández, F. (2004). Cambios vivos en el plano fónico del español: variación
dialectal y sociolingüística. In R. Cano (ed.). Historia de la lengua española (pp.
973-1010). Barcelona: Ariel.
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Moya Corral, J. A. (2008). Datos del Estudio sociolingüístico del español de Granada.
Reunión de coordinación científica. Universidad de Lleida.
Samper Padilla, J. A. (1990). Estudio lingüístico del español de las Palmas de Gran
Canaria. Las Palmas: Caja de Canarias.
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THE FUTURE OF EXTREMEÑO IN ITS ACCULTURATION PROCESS TO
STANDARD CASTILIAN
Carmen Ferrero
Moravian College Pennsylvania
Keywords:
Extremeño, Spain, dialectology, sociolinguistics.
Abstract:
Extremeño is the linguistic variation spoken in the autonomous community of
Extremadura and the southern region of Salamanca, Spain. The northern form of this
“habla”, as the Extremadurans like to call it, is the Jurdano-cacereño, which some
linguists list under the Asturleonés linguistic family. Other two forms of Extremeño are
the Cástuo (term coined by Luis Chamizo in the 1920´s) and the Alentejana-extremeña
variation on the border region of Portugal. Some linguists consider Extremeño to be a
mere phonetic variation of more standardized forms of Castilian, which explains the
lack of esteem this dialect has historically had, and the inevitable tendency towards
assimilation with the more prestigious Castilian varities.
The first part of this paper summarizes recent opinions presented in studies and
discussed in linguistic forums about the lack of social esteem of the Extremeño dialect
and its current situation, by scholars such as Pablo Gonzálvez González, autor of the
first and only Gramática Extremeña, Pedro Cañada, president of the “Asociación de
amigos del extremeño”, Juan Martín Hoyos, who has focused his attention on the
linguistic diversity within the extremeño dialect itself, Plácido Ramírez, who carried out
the only field study about the linguistic varieties in the areas of Tierra de Barros and the
Comarca de Baldíos, and Severiano Talavera, an advocate for fostering the study of
this dialect and preserving it as a rich legacy. This section also comments on the very
few studies published in English about Extremeño, such as Manuel Ariza´s essay on
the sociolinguistic varieties in Malpartida de Plasencia and Serradilla.
The second part of the paper presents an overview of the current situation of
Extremeño according to members of the legislative body of the Junta de Extremadura
(Extremadura Autonomous Government) on linguistic policies. It also analyzes the
opinion of educators regarding the linguistic identity, as well as the loyalty of speakers,
particularly younger ones, towards Extremeño. It specifically focuses on the dilemma
that arises among the new generations when dealing with what is believed to be
linguistically correct and what is felt culturally owned, as well as the attitudes towards
the more prestigious linguistic communities in Castile. Moreover, the paper examines
the emotional components in the assessment that speakers make of their geographical
variety. The conclusions help in shedding some light on the future of the dialect in its
inevitable process of acculturation due to its very close contact with standard Castilian
varieties
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SOCIAL VARIATION IN THE USE OF METAPHORS WE LIVE BY IN THE CORPUS
PRESEEA IN GRANADA
Lorena Martín García
University of Granada
Keywords:
Metaphors, PRESEEA, Granada.
Abstract:
In this analysis we consider social factors that have influence in the use of metaphors
of everyday life in the Corpus PRESEEA in Granada (Moya et al 2007-2012). It is for
this reason that it has been necessary to follow the classification that Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) make about metaphors according to the reality they make reference to
or the domain they belong to. We can differenciate between orientational metaphors,
which have to do with spatial orientation, like in lo primero son mis hijos or cayó
enfermo. The second type is ontologic metaphors, which designate ideas related with
our experience, in terms of objects and substances, such as hay mucho odio en el
mundo or Vino a Nueva York en busca de fama y fortuna. And finally, we can also
distinguish between conceptual metaphors with examples like Juan se encuentra en un
callejón sin salida and temporal metaphors, like me tiré allí los dos años. The main
purpose of this analysis was to achieve that our study could contribute with more
information about this issue of metaphors we live by, but from a sociolinguistic point of
view. For this reason we had to detect if metaphors were used in an uniform way in the
extracted samples from the Corpus PRESEEA or if they depended on other variables
in the population. We had also to determine if the group of population that use them
most are women or men and if their studies have any influence in their use. Therefore,
we choose a population of study of 18 speakers selected from the Corpus PRESEEA in
Granada, where the speakers appear distributed depending on levels of study, age and
sex, and we carried out a descriptive-transversal analysis about this sample starting
with different transliterations of interviews made to men and women divided in groups
of age and having in mind the social factors mentioned. Since this research we have
reached the conclusion that there is a social distribution in the conducting of
metaphors. In fact, informers of high studies use the 38% of metaphors. They are
followed by informers of low studies, with a 33% of metaphors and finally, informers of
middle studies that use them in a 29%, because their use is more careful. On the other
hand, making a comparative study about the use of metaphors according to the
gender, women often employ more conceptual metaphors (they present 8.44 cases on
average in a text while men generally use 5.78 cases on average), followed by
ontological metaphors (2.33 while men use an overage of 1.56). Then, we find
temporal metaphors, where practically there is no difference in the use between
women and men, so they employ around 3.11 and 3.22 respectively. Lastly, we find
orientational metaphors, in which women use only one, while men use on average 1.89
and, it is for this that this result is not significant either to confirm that there is any
difference in use according to the sex. The final result is that men use a total of 12.45
metaphors on average in regards to women, that use 14.88.
References:
Barcelona, A. (2000). Metáfora y metonimia en la encrucijada: una perspectiva
cognitiva. Berlín / Nueva York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lakoff, G. y Johnson, M. (1980). Metáforas de la vida cotidiana. Madrid: Cátedra.
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Moya Corral, Juan Antonio (coord.). (2007). El español hablado en Granada. Corpus
para su estudio sociolingüístico. Nivel de estudios bajo, medio y alto. Granada:
Granada Universidad.
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SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF -TO POSTPOSITIONAL
CLITIC FORMS IN ONE NORTH RUSSIAN DIALECT
Ekaterina Gerasimenko
Alexey Vinyar
Higher School of Economics
Keywords:
Variationist sociolinguistics, dialect loss, language variation, phonology.
Abstract:
Our study is dedicated to the distribution of -to enclitic forms and sociolinguistic path of
its loss during the shift from dialectal to standard Russian in the villages of Ustja river
basin (North Russia, Arkhangelskaya oblast’). The data for analysis was taken from the
Ustja River Basin Corpus [Daniel et al. 2013]. The URB provides a collection of
spontaneous speech samples from speakers with different social characteristics.
For present study we have chosen 32 speakers with a sufficient number of (to) tokens
(8 men and 24 women born from 1922 up to 1975). These speakers were classified
according to their age, gender and social status in the village community. To formalize
the last feature, we have developed the system of indices based on speakers’
education level and occupation.
The first part of our study is dedicated to the dialectal system of distribution of enclitic’s
variants based on the data of speakers born before the 1930. The rules are based on:
syntactic conditions:
• /ot/ form appears when the host is a masculine singular nominative /
accusative noun;
• /tu/ with feminine singular accusative nouns (not included in our analysis due
to the low number of tokens);
• /ta/ with feminine singular nominative nouns;
phonological conditions (“overwriting” forms derived by syntactic rules):
• /ta/ after the host ending with /a/ vowel;
• /tu/ when the host ends with /u/;
• /to/ elsewhere.
While some variants (/tu/, /ta/) can be derived by both syntactic and phonological rules,
we consider these rules to be separate sociolinguistic variables and the loss of their
dialectal realizations is analysed separately.
Having phonetically analysed and transcribed 2619 tokens of the variants, we found
out that the paths of loss of the variables are different. The syntactic rule of /ot/ is
already lost and seems to be age-determined. The rule of /ta/ distribution is relatively
stable (even the speakers born in the 1950s have not lost this variant of the clitic), its
loss seems to depend on the age factor (p-value = 1.07e-09). The other ‘phonological’
variable, (tu), does not depend on age or gender (p-value = 0.2175). (tu) shows
correlations with the education and occupation index. The dialectal variant /tu/ is
preserved by the speakers who form the tightest connections in the social network of a
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village, while the standard variant /to/ is introduced by the ‘periphery’ of the community
(pattern similar to that described in [Milroy 1987]). It is worth mentioning that the loss of
(ta_nom) seems to be more connected with the loss of syntactically determined rule of
/ot/ than with the loss of the phonological rule of/ta/.
Thus, the loss of dialectal variants of -to enclitic is not a homogeneous process; the
variants are lost by different social groups differently.
References:
Daniel, M., N. Dobrushina and R. von Waldenfels (2013-2016). The language of the
Ustja river basin. A corpus of North Russian dialectal speech. Bern: Moscow.
<http://www.parasolcorpus.org/Pushkino>.
Milroy, L. (1987). Language and social networks. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
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VARIATION IN BASQUE WORD ORDER: A DIACHRONIC STUDY
Dorota Krajewska
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Keywords:
Syntax, word order, Basque, historical sociolinguistics.
Abstract:
This paper is concerned with two head-initial nominal constructions: relative clauses (1)
and phrases with the relational marker -ko (derived adjectival modifiers, (2)). While
preposed modifiers predominate nowadays, in old texts postposed variants are widely
attested too.
(1)
a. Prenominal relative clause
ardo-a
edan du-en
gizon-a
wine-DET
drink AUX-COMP
man-DET
‘the man who drank wine’
b. Postnominal relative clause
gizon ardo-a
edan
du-en-a
man
drink
aux-COMP-DET
wine-DET
‘the man who drank wine’
(2)
a. Prenominal -ko
b. Postnominal -ko
zeru-ko
jaun-a
jaun
zeru-ko-a
heaven-REL
lord-DET
lord
heaven-REL-DET
‘heavenly lord’
‘heavenly lord’
Traditionally considered an uninteresting calque from Romance syntax, these
constructions never attracted much attention (postnominal relative clauses were first
extensively treated in Oyharçabal 1987). More recently, morphological reconstruction
has led Lakarra (1995, 2013) to argue that postposed modifiers could be relics of an
older head-initial stage of the language. I argue that they are most easily explained as
(unsuccessful) language-internal innovations. In any case, regardless of their ultimate
source, their use in texts have not been studied. On the basis of a corpus of 16th-19th
century texts, this paper analyses linguistic and extra-linguistic factors which influence
the occurrence of the postnominal variants.
Postnominal adjectival modifiers are most common in western dialects and their
frequency decreases in towards the east. On the whole, their distribution is mostly
related to grammatical factors: the more a -ko modifier resembles canonical adjectives
(which in Basque follow the noun), the more it is likely to appear postposed.
With regards to postnominal relative clauses, the problem has to be tackled differently.
They are attested in all dialects, but there is a great deal of inconsistency in
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frequencies (even within the same dialect). This variation, however, cannot be
explained with linguistic factors. First, there is stylistic variation: e.g. in a 16th century
translation of the Bible 25% of relatives are postnominal, but in a catechism written by
the same person it is only 3%. Similar situation is found later as well: the postnominal
construction seems to be favoured in more formal registers (until certain moment). On
the other hand, postnominal RCs are more frequent in areas heavily influenced by
Romance languages and in cities and towns, regardless of the register. Finally, starting
in the 18th century in the southern dialects and later in the north, the construction starts
to be discouraged by normative grammarians and its frequency decreases.
References:
Lakarra, J. A. (1995). Reconstructing the Pre-Proto-Basque Root. In J. I. Hualde, J. A.
Lakarra and R. L. Trask (eds.). Towards a History of the Basque Language (pp.
189–206). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lakarra, J. A. (2013). Root Structure and the Reconstruction of Proto-Basque. In M.
Martinez-Areta (ed.). Basque and Proto-Basque. Language-Internal and
Typological Approaches to Linguistics Reconstruction (pp. 173–221). Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang.
Oyharçabal, B. (1987). Etude descriptive de constructions complexes en basque:
propositions relatives, temporelles, conditionelles et consessives. PhD thesis,
Université de Paris VII.
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SOCIOLINGUISTIC FACTORS IN THE USE OF VERBAL PERIPHRASES OF
OBLIGATION IN THE SPANISH OF GRANADA
Antonio Manjón-Cabeza Cruz
University of Granada
Keywords:
Sociolinguistic, grammar, verbal periphrases, PRESEEA, Granada.
Abstract:
There are four verbal periphrases in spanish which express obligation: deber+ inf.,
deber de+ inf., tener que + inf. and haber de + inf. Three of those are present in the
oral corpus that we studied:
(1) Son una vergüenza/// porque se meten// tan/ cosas tan profundas// que muchas
cosas que deben estar calladas// sacan a relucir. [GRAN-M32-035]
(2) Lo que son las cuerdas vocales lo que es donde se genera el sonido […]
donde debes de pro(palabra cortada) cómo debes de pronunciar/ [GRAN-H32H-09 ]
(3) Yo ahora ya para todo tengo que coger el coche// o el autobús// [GRAN-M12-022]
The pair of periphrasis deber (de) + inf. have been a preferent atention object since
they are discused from two perspectives. The first one consist in consider the two
variants as periphrasis. The second one lies in the discusión about if the existence of a
normative diferenciation between deber + inf., that has to express deontic modality and
deber de + inf., which has to express epistemic modality, is relevant.
We believe that the periphrasis data with to deber must match with the data from the
periphrasis tener que + inf. that competes with them.
To carry out this study we were based in the survey respondants from the corpus
PRESEEA from Granada, that points out to the inversión of the norm regarding deber
(de) + inf., to the dissappearance of haber de + inf. in the discourse and the primacy of
tener que + inf.
References:
Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2011). Deber (de) + infinitivo: ¿un caso de variación libre en
español? Factores condicionantes en un fenómeno de alternancia sintáctica.
RFE vol. 91, 1, 9-42.
Gómez Molina, J. R. (2013). Norma y uso de las perífrasis ‘deber + infinitivo’ / ‘deber
de + infinitivo’. In J. R. Gómez Molina (ed.). El español de Valencia. Estudio
sociolingüístico (pp. 71-108). Bern: Peter Lang.
Gómez Torrego, L. (1999). Los verbos auxiliares. Las perífrasis verbales de infinitivo.
In I. Bosque and V. Demonte (eds.). Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua
Española (pp. 3.223-3.390). Madrid: Espasa.
Moya Corral, J. A. (coord.) (2007/2009/2010). El Español hablado en Granada. Corpus
oral para su estudio sociolingüístico vol. 3. Universidad de Granada.
RAE and ASELE (2009). Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española. Madrid: EspasaCalpe.
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Samper, J., C. Hernández and M. Troya (1998-1999). El uso de deber + infinitivo y
deber de + infinitivo en la norma lingüística culta de América y España. BFUCh
(Homenaje a Ambrosio Rabanales) XXXVII, 1059-1083.
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MORE OR LESS NORWEGIAN? - ATTITUDES TOWARDS FOREIGN ACCENTED
SPEECH
Kristin Myklestu
Center for multilingualism in society across the lifespan, University of Oslo
Ragni Vik Johnsen
University of Tromsø, the Arctic University of Norway
Keywords:
Language attitudes, foreign accent, perception, multilingualism.
Abstract:
A common assumption is that friendly attitudes to a certain linguistic variety correlate
positively with exposure to, as well as the subjective comprehensibility of that specific
variety (cf. Dewaele and McCloskey 2014). The societal tolerance for language variation
is commonly emphasized as particularly characteristic of the Norwegian language
situation (cf. Trudgill 2002). Following the same logic one could argue that Norwegians
should have positive attitudes to all kinds of linguistic variation. As a result of an
increasing transnational migration and a growing number of people learning Norwegian
as a second language, the question of how far this tolerance stretches has been brought
to the fore. This poster addresses this question by combining findings from two
unpublished MA projects (Johnsen 2015, Myklestu 2015) on attitudes towards accented
speech among high school students (17-18 years) in Oslo. The data was collected using
a triangulation of methods, and the results will be presented in three parts: First, we will
present the results of a joint attitudinal survey, in which data were collected from more
than 200 high school students in Oslo. Second, we will show results from the verbal
visual guise test (Myklestu 2015, Røyneland 2016), and thirdly we will demonstrate how
attitudes and comprehensibility correlated in our material (Johnsen 2015). The main
findings suggests inter alia that a) the adolescents hold quite positive attitudes towards
accented Norwegian, but more so if the person speaks a non-standard variety, b) there
was no correlation between reported attitudes and comprehensibility. In the poster we
will present some possible explanations for these findings, as well as proposing possible
future research.
References:
Dewaele, J. and J. McCloskey (2014). Attitudes towards foreign accents among adult
multilingual language users. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development 36 (3), 221-238. Doi: 10.1080/01434632.2014.909445.
Johnsen, R. V. (2015). Relativt bra norsk» – En sosiolingvistisk studie av ungdommers
forståelse av og holdninger til norsk med utenlandsk aksent. Oslo: Universitetet
i Oslo.
Myklestu, K. (2015). Mer eller mindre norsk. Oslo: Universitetet i Oslo.
Røyneland, U. (2016, forthc.). Hva skal til for å høres ut som du hører til? Forestillinger
om dialektale identiteter i det senmoderne Norge. What should you sound like
to sound like you belong? Conceptions of dialectal identities in late modern
Norway. Nordica Helsingensia.
Trudgill, P. (2002). Sociolinguistic variation and change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
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DEFINITE ARTICLES IN (DUTCH) LOW SAXON AND NEIGHBORING VARIETIES
Jeffrey Pheiff
Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas
Keywords:
Low saxon, definite articles.
Abstract:
In (Dutch) Low Saxon dialects, the definite article can be omitted in non-generic
nominal phrases, as can be seen in examples 1–4 (taken from Ter Laan 1953, 35). The
‘Ø’ represents the omitted definite article.
1. Ø Zun schient
‘The sun is shining’.
2. Ø
‘The man is right’.
Jong
3. Ø
‘The boy sold the ram’.
Man
het
het
Ø
geliek
bok
verkòft
4. Dou Ø deur dicht
‘Shut the door’
Taken together, the phenomenon has been largely ignored, even today in the now
blooming field of dialect syntax, however, in the last few years, research has been able
to add some nuance to the brief descriptions from the dialects grammars. Dialect
geographic data suggest that the definite article is not left out in all contexts, but rather
that an interplay of factors seems to steer the omission of the definite article. The
relevant local dialects have been shown to drop definite articles with regard to certain
semantic factors (concerning numerus and gender of the substantive) (see Oosterhof
2008). In my dissertation project, I investigate not only the diachronic development and
areal distribution of this construction, but also the interplay of factors which explain its
synchronic variation. In addition to the Low Saxon dialects, the bordering (West)Frisian varieties will also be considered to offer a more detailed analysis of the
construction.
This poster presentation will focus on two particular sources of data: data made
available by the Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen (RNDA), which were collected by
the direct method for the relevant linguistic areas in the middle of the 20th century, as
well as data from the Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten (SAND), which
was collected between 2000 and 2003 using both the direct and indirect data collection
methods. By comparing these two sets of data, this poster will address the following
research questions:
•
Can areal differences between the local dialects in the middle of the 20th and
beginning of the 20th century be demonstrated?
•
Is this construction still stable in the local dialects, can we ascertain an
expansion in space, or has it been losing ground to the Standard Dutch
equivalent (see Reker 2008, 164)?
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•
Are there semantic or syntactic factors influencing the distribution of the
variants, and can these be shown in the synchronic variation or diachronic
development?
References:
Oosterhof, A. (2008). Deletie van het bepaald lidwoord in het Noord-Gronings. Taal en
Tongval Themanr 21, 73–108.
Reker, S. (2008). Talige beschrijvingen van de regio's: Groningen. In H. Bloemhoff, J.
V. Kooi, H. Niebaum and S. Reker. Handboek Nedersaksische Taal- en
Letterkunde (pp. 157–174). Assen: Van Gorcum.
Ter Laan, K. (1953). Proeve van een Groninger Spraakkunst. Winschoten: J. D. van
der Veen.
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WHAT DOES MOOD VARIATION INDICATE? MEASURING THE PRODUCTIVITY
OF THE ITALIAN SUBJUNCTIVE IN ACTUAL USE
Carmela Pietropaolo
University of Freiburg
Keywords:
Mood variation, subjunctive, type frequency, entrenchment.
Abstract:
The subjunctive mood in the Romance languages has undergone a structural
reorganization which affects both its semantic functions and the grammar of its usage.
Nowadays, mood variation, the alternation of different moods to convey similar
meanings, is a defining feature of speech in Italian and its sister languages, evinced in
synchronic observation.
Traditional accounts of the role of moods in grammar focus mainly on the semantic
opposition between subjunctive and indicative morphology. The subjunctive is thereby
categorized according to three main semantic functions it purportedly encodes:
epistemic, volitional and factual subjunctive. In the last decades, research from a
usage-based variationist framework has started to investigate both language-internal
and language-external parameters which can impact mood selection in discourse. In a
corpus sutdy, Poplack, Lealess and Dion noticed that lexical effects and a number of
morpho-syntactic factors predict retention of the subjunctive mood in spoken Quebec
French. More specifically, the governor verb appears to be the overriding constraint to
subjunctive selection followed by the lexical identity of the embedded verb. In
combination, the subjunctive-favoring matrix and embedded verbs account for 99% of
subjunctive morphology in the 21 century corpus yielding a chunking effect.
These findings raise questions about the productivity of the subjunctive in the
Romance languages and the mental representation of mood speakers own. Is there
room for a purely productive use of the subjunctive in speech? If so, is it confined to
specific interactional contexts where the subjunctive indexes certain registers and
sociolects?
The poster will report the results of a corpus study conducted on the Italian C-ORALROM speech corpus and compare them to the findings of a written elicitation task,
where productivity of subjunctive and mood variation is tested on nonce verbs.
The quantitative investigation pinpoints a number of morpho-syntactic factors which
correlate with selection of the subjunctive and open up interesting comparisons with
quantitative studies on French and Spanish. By means of a multiple regression
analysis, I probe the role of verb frequency, verb person, pronoun resolution and the
anaphoric interpretation of tense in the choice of mood. Ultimately, the study aims to
illustrate how these parameters interact with the pragmatic properties of the discourse
context. The lexicon of the subjunctive-selecting verbs is subject to a closer qualitative
analysis which illustrates that the subjunctive retains some degree of productivity in
formal or official conversations where low-frequency verbs belonging to formal
registers significantly correlate with retention of the subjunctive mood over the
indicative. In these contexts, contrary to evidence from Quebec French, no specific
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lexical effects of the main and the embedded verb can be found to impact mood
choice. Thus, the larger pragmatic context can be said to override specific lexical
associations with a certain mood.
In addition to the corpus study, the written production task probes speakers’ language
behavior with novel verbs. The experiment offers a more direct window into the vitality
of the subjunctive by exploring productivity of the morphological rules which generate
the subjunctive forms for each verb class. Furthermore, the written elicitation task
specifically controls for semantic and pragmatic features of the constructed sentences
disentangling these context-related variables from any possible lexical effects of the
verb. The two studies offer a comparison between speakers’ use of the subjunctive in
actual interaction and the degree to which they can generalize their knowledge of the
grammar of subjunctive to novel forms.
References:
Cresti, E. and M. Moneglia (ed.) (2005). C-ORAL-ROM: Integrated Reference Corpora
for Spoken Romance Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dardano, M. and P. Trifone (1997). La Nuova Grammatica della Lingua Italiana.
Bologna: Zanichelli.
Gudmestad, A. (2006). L2 Variation and the Spanish subjunctive: Linguistic features
predicting mood selection. In C. Klee and T. Face (eds.). Selected proceedings
from the 7th CLASP (pp. 170-184). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Poplack, S. (1990). Prescription, intuition et usage: le subjonctif français et la variabilité
inhérente. Langage et société vol. 54, 5-33.
Poplack, S., A. V. Lealess and N. Dion (2013). The evolving grammar of the French
subjunctive. Probs vol. 25, no. 1, 139-193.
Renzi, L., G. Salvi and A. Cardinaletti (ed.) (2001). Grande grammatica italiana di
consultazione. Bologna: il Mulino.
Repiso, I. (2015). Talking about counterfactual worlds: A comparative study of French
and Spanish. Journal of Romance Studies vol. 15, 52-72.
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STUDYING DIALECT ATTITUDES IN A NORTHERN NORWEGIAN CONTEXT
Monica Saetermo
University of Tromsø
Keywords:
Language attitudes, Norwegian dialects, direct approach, the matched guise technique,
speaker evaluation paradigm.
Abstract:
Research on language attitudes is usually grouped into three broad approaches: 1) the
analysis of the societal treatment of language varieties, 2) direct measures and 3)
indirect measures, usually referred to as the ‘speaker evaluation paradigm’ or the
matched guise technique, which was developed by Lambert and his colleagues in
Canada (Lambert et al. 1960) in the late 1950s. In my talk I will present a work-inprogress investigating attitudes towards dialect use and dialect change among
Norwegian internal migrants in a specific Northern Norwegian city by using a direct (2)
and an indirect (3) approach. The investigation is part of my PhD project, which
combines qualitative sociolinguistic methods, such as interviews and ethnographic
fieldwork, with quantitative methods, such as a survey and a matched guise test. The
survey is a direct approach to language attitudes in that it involves asking direct
questions about language evaluation, preference etc., while the indirect matched guise
technique involves using more subtle, and sometimes even deceptive, techniques than
directly asking questions. The instructions in the matched guise test are to listen to
audiotape recordings of a speaker reading a text and to fill in attitude-rating scales
immediately after each reading. Thus, the respondents are aware that it is an attituderating task, but they believe they are rating the various people, not the accent.
Certain difficulties with the direct approach in language attitudes research can make it
harder for researchers to get access to ‘private attitudes’. Tore Kristiansen (1991)
investigated language use and language change among adolescents in Denmark by
using both an indirect and a direct approach. He found that language change is
governed by subconsciously held values, that are more likely to be accessed through
indirect methods, rather than by consciously offered ones, accessed through direct
methods. Consciously held attitudes tend to correspond well with the ideology of elite
discourse. Garrett (2010) points out that people may operate with two value systems,
or two sets of attitudes, alongside each other, while only being conscious of one of
them.
As the data from my study is collected through a combination of approaches, using
both direct and indirect measures, it will be interesting to see if there is any
correspondence between reported and registered dialect attitudes. In my talk I will
present and discuss the use of direct and indirect methods in language attitudes
research, and the combination of such methods, with the preliminary findings from my
study as the main point of departure.
References:
Garrett, P. (2010). Attitudes to language, Key topics in sociolinguistics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kristiansen, T. (1991). Sproglige normidealer på Næstvedegnen. Kvantitative
sprogholdningsstudier. Doktoravhandling. København: Københavns universitet.
Lambert, W. E., R. C. Hodgson, R. C. Garner and S. Fillenbaum (1960). Evaluational
reactions to spoken languages. Journal of abnormal and social psychology 60,
44.
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CHANGING SOCIAL ROLES
Melanie Weirich
Adrian P. Simpson
Friedrich-Schiller University Jena
Keywords:
Social identity, sex-specific variability, vowel space, sibilant contrast.
Abstract:
It is known that speakers (and genders) express their social identity by varying in small
phonetic details (Foulkes & Docherty 2006). Speakers have several speech
registers they use depending on the situation, or who they are talking to (SAT, Giles &
Coupland 1991, Goldinger, 1998). A first hint that a profession can influence speech
patterns was found by Tielen (1992) who showed that female managers and male
nurses could be perceptually discriminated from females and males with other
professions. However, we are rarely in the position to observe any long term speech
patterns that may occur when taking up a new position. In other words, it is difficult
to measure whether the person spoke differently before or changed as a result of
performing in a new role. However, one such role change which is predictable,
can be observed and may be accompanied by changes in speech behavior is
becoming a parent.
Our short-term longitudinal study investigates the speech of 80 mothers and fathers
before the birth of their first child and during the first year of the infant. The focus of the
study is not solely on infant-directed speech, but in particular on the potential impact of
being the primary caregiver on adult-directed speech. Data acquisition takes place
in two locations in Europe: Jena, Germany and Stockholm, Sweden. Acoustic
analyses comprise phonetic correlates of careful speech typically associated
with female speech, i.e. slower speech tempo, larger vowel spaces, larger
phoneme contrasts. Additional information is gathered regarding the involvement in
care-giving and socio-psychological factors including self-reported masculinity/
femininity ratings (TMF, Kachel et al. 2016). By collecting socio-psychological and
speech data at different time points within the first year, but also before the birth of the
child, we aim at disentangling causes and consequences.
Preliminary results of 12 German participants point to a relationship between
socio-psychological factors (TMF) and phonetic detail (vowel space size) already at
the first time of recording, before the birth of the child (see Figure 1, r =.67, p
< .05). Interestingly this is not solely based on the bipolar distribution of male and
female speakers, but on the variability in the male speakers regarding both factors.
Additional data of more speakers at different time points during parental leave will
show if this relationship is sound and reflects changing social roles.
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References:
Foulkes, P. and G. Docherty (2006). The social life of phonetics and phonology. JPhon
34, 409-438.
Giles, H. and N. Coupland (1991). Language: Contexts and consequences. Keynes:
University Press.
Goldinger, S. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psych.
Rev. 105, 251–279.
Kachel S., M. C. Steffens and C. Niedlich (2016). Traditional Masculinity and
Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles. Frontiers in
Psychology 7, 956.
Tielen, M. J. T. (1992). Male and female speech. An experimental study of sex-related
voice and pronunciation characteristics. PhD dissertation. University of
Amsterdam.
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THE ROLE-PLAYING VARIETY OF NORTHERN NORWEGIAN CHILDREN WITH
EMPHASIS ON NOMINAL SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY
Bror-M. S. Strand
University of Tromsø, the Arctic University of Norway
Keywords:
Registers, child language, Norwegian, bidialectism.
Abstract:
It is a well-known phenomenon that preschool and primary school children in Norway
outside of the capital city (Oslo) area tend to use something resembling the Oslo
dialect, or «Standard East Norwegian» (henceforth standard Norwegian) when
engaging in roleplay (see e.g. Bjørlykke, 1996, p. 99). What is less known, however, is
i) how this linguistic register or style differs from their local dialect (but cf. Eliassen,
1998), and ii) how this register or style develops from its onset around three and
throughout the preschool years. I.e. i) what kind of transfer do we see from their local
dialect into their roleplaying register, and ii) are some features of standard Norwegian
acquired before others in the roleplaying register? These questions are the subject of
my ongoing PhD project.
In this poster I will use recordings of spontaneous speech from Northern Norwegian
children in Tromsø in a role-play setting to address the first of these questions with
regard to nominal syntax and morphology. The nominal syntax and morphology in
Tromsø differs in important ways from the standard variety. This includes the nominal
declension system, as in (1), the proprial article (see e.g. Johannessen & Garbacz,
2014), as in (2), and number agreement in predicate adjectives (see e.g. Åfaril &
Vangsnes, 2016), as in (3).
1.
Masculine:
kopp,
Feminine:
Neuter:
2.
3.
kopp-en,
kopp·a,
kopp·an
(Tromsø dialect)
1
kopp,
kopp-en,
kopp·er,
kopp·ene
(Standard Norwegian)
mug,
mug-the,
mug-s,
mug-s.the
hytta/-e,
hytt-a,
hytt-e
hytt-en
(Tromsø dialect)
hytte,
hytt-a
hytt-er
hytt-(e)ne
(Standard Norwegian)
cabin,
cabin-the,
cabin-s
cabin-s.the
øre,
ør-e,
ør-a,
ør-an
(Tromsø dialect)
øre,
ør-e(t),
ør-er,
ør-ene
(Standard Norwegian)
ear,
ear-the
ear-s,
ear-s.the
Har
du sett
???(ho)
Maja?
(Tromsø dialect)
Har
du sett
(*hun)
Maja?
(Standard Norwegian)
Have
you seen (PRON.fem)
Hus-an
e
Maja?
kvit
House·s-the COP
white
Hus-ene
er
hvit·e
House-s.the
COP white·PL
(Tromsø dialect)
(Standard Norwegian)
1
The standard forms are given in Norwegian Orthography and the Tromsø dialect forms in adapted
orthography. Letters in parentheses are optional or silent in speech.
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In addition, all feminine nouns can optionally have masculine (commune) gender
morphology and declension in standard Norwegian, whereas this is not the case in the
Tromsø dialect.
Tentatively, standard Norwegian can be regarded as the target language of the
roleplaying register. Thus transfer from the children’s local dialect in the roleplaying
register may shed light on the acquisition and processing of this sociolinguistic register.
References:
Åfaril, T. A. and Ø. A. Vangsnes (2016). Fleirtalsadjektiv i norsk. Paper presented at
the GRAMINO Grammatik i Norden 2016. Göteborg.
Bjørlykke, B. (1996). Barnespråk og barnekultur opp til sju år. Oslo: Cappelen
akademisk forl.
Eliassen, C. (1998). Rollelekspråk. Hovedfag: NTNU.
Johannessen, J. B. and P. Garbacz (2014). Proprial articles. Nordic Atlas of Syntactic
Structures (NALS) 1, 10-17.
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SPOCO, A SIMPLE YET EFFECTIVE INTERFACE FOR DIALECT CORPORA
Ruprecht von Waldenfels
University of Zurich
Michal Wózniak
Institute of Polish
Keywords:
Dialect corpus.
Abstract:
We present SpoCo, a simple, yet effective system for the web-based query of dialect
corpora encoded in ELAN that provides advanced concordancing functions as well as
user-driven correction of transcriptions.
In many dialectological projects, the lack of technological expertise and infrastructure
represents an important obstacle to the use of corpora in distributed projects. To meet
this challenge, SpoCo is designed to be easy to use and maintain, and to be adaptable
to different spoken corpora in a straightforward way. Simplicity is emphasized to
facilitate use by a wide range of users and research groups, including those with limited
technical and financial resources, and encourage collaboration and data exchange
across such groups.
SPOCO relies on existing technology, representing a straightforward wrapper to
CorpusWorkBench (Evert and Hardie 2014), a mature corpus manager that makes
advanced concordancing and statistical functions available. In distinction to other
interfaces for audio-aligned corpora, it makes audio chunks directly available for
download, so they can be analyzed in dedicated software such as PRAAT or others.
The addition of new texts is as simple as copying ELAN and audio files into dedicated
directories, while querying the corpus can be done with a comfortable query builder.
Relying on existing technology and pursuing a modular architecture, SpoCo is
developed bottom-up: it was initially devised for a the URB Corpus (Waldenfels et al.
2014) and is being continually adapted for use in other projects in a network of Slavic
dialect projects that cooperate in tool development and data sharing (see Rabus and
Šimon 2015). At the time of the conference, the software will have been published as
open source, and we look forward to finding new partners in its development.
References:
Evert, S. and A. Hardie (2011). Twenty-first century Corpus Workbench: Updating a
query architecture for the new millennium. In Proceedings of the Corpus
Linguistics 2011, Conference. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham.
Rabus, A. and A. Šimon (2015). Na novyx putjax isslidovanja rusins’kyx dialektu:
korpus rozgovornogo rusin’skogo jazyka. In K. Koporova (ed.). Rusin’skyj
literaturnyj jazyk na Slovakiji. 20 rokiv kodifikaciji / The Rusyn literary language
in Slovakia. 20th anniversary of its codification. IV. International Congress of the
Rusyn Language. Prjašiv, 23. - 25. 09. 2015, 40–54.
von Waldenfels, R., M. Daniel and N. Dobrushina (2014). Why standard orthography?
Building the Ustya River Basic Corpus, an online corpus of a Russian dialect. In
Komp’juternaja lingvistika i intellektual’nye technologii: Po materialam
ežegodnoj Meždunarodnoj konferencii «Dialog». Vyp. 13 (20), Moskva.
Bekasovo, 4 — 8 ijunja 2014 g. Izd-vo RGGU.
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INDEX OF AUTHORS
Aalberse, S..........................................................................................................................129
Adamou, E.. .........................................................................................................................201
Ahlers, T..............................................................................................................................167
Albelda Marco, M.. ..............................................................................................................115
Algra, J................................................................................................................................484
Álvarez Pérez, X. A...............................................................................................................73
Álvarez, E............................................................................................................................207
Á l v a r e z , R . . .......................................................................................................................75
Amora, M. G........................................................................................................................206
Anderson, R........................................................................................................................207
Armostis, S..........................................................................................................................209
Armostis, S. (2)....................................................................................................................211
Armstrong, N.......................................................................................................................104
Asahi, Y...............................................................................................................................213
Avanzi, M. ..........................................................................................................................215
Auer, P...............................................................................................................................24
Auer, P. (2)...........................................................................................................................26
Auer, P. (3)...........................................................................................................................38
Aurrekoetxea, G..................................................................................................................160
Avanzi, M..............................................................................................................................40
Avanzi, M. (2)........................................................................................................................46
Avanzi, M. (3).......................................................................................................................190
Avanzi, M. (4).....................................................................................................................215
Ayres-Bennett, W................................................................................................................188
Barbiers, S...........................................................................................................................172
Bade, S...........................................................................................................................217
Baiwir, E..........................................................................................................................194
Ballarè, S.............................................................................................................................219
Beaman, K. V........................................................................................................................51
Bella, S............................................................................................................................211
Bello, I..................................................................................................................................221
Bergeron-Maguyre, M...........................................................................................................196
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Berthele, R............................................................................................................................35
Blaxter, T............................................................................................................................223
Bohmann, A........................................................................................................................145
Boldyrev, N. N....................................................................................................................225
Bour, A. R............................................................................................................................227
Bouzouita, M..........................................................................................................................70
Bouzouita, M. (2)...................................................................................................................81
Bouzouita, M. (3).................................................................................................................229
Bozinovic, N........................................................................................................................230
B r a u n , A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........................................................................................................232
Breitbarth, A.........................................................................................................................229
Breuer, L. M...........................................................................................................................83
Breuer, L. M. (2).................................................................................................................86
B r e u e r , L . M . ( 3 ) .............................................................................................................169
Brissos, F.............................................................................................................................233
Britain, D..............................................................................................................................223
Britain, D. (2)........................................................................................................................433
Brown, J..............................................................................................................................235
Buchstaller, I..........................................................................................................................60
Bugge, E.............................................................................................................................207
Bugge, E. (2).......................................................................................................................236
Bülow, L.................................................................................................................................83
Bülow, L. (2).........................................................................................................................86
Bürkle , D.............................................................................................................................238
Calvo Cortés, N...................................................................................................................239
Carrilho, E............................................................................................................................101
Casanova, V..........................................................................................................................78
Cerruti, M..............................................................................................................................98
Cerruti, M. (2)......................................................................................................................241
Cestero Mancera, A. M.......................................................................................................110
Civitello, A. D.......................................................................................................................437
Constantinescu, M. V..........................................................................................................248
Cornips, L..............................................................................................................................33
Cornips, L. (2)....................................................................................................................122
Cornips, L. (3).....................................................................................................................126
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Cornips, L. (4).....................................................................................................................322
C r o c c o , C .......................................................................................................................106
Cruz Ortiz, R......................................................................................................................486
Chariatte, N........................................................................................................................243
Chesire, J...........................................................................................................................174
Chevrot, J. P......................................................................................................................244
Christensen, T. K...............................................................................................................246
Christodoulou, C...............................................................................................................209
Christodulelis, E................................................................................................................437
Daelemans, W...................................................................................................................156
Daems, J...........................................................................................................................131
Daems, J. (2)...................................................................................................................147
D a g n a c , A . . . . . . . ...............................................................................................................49
Daniel, M..... ......................................................................................................................250
De Benito Moreno, C...........................................................................................................81
De Hertog, D.....................................................................................................................397
De Paiva, M. C.....................................................................................................................66
de Pascale, S....................................................................................................................201
de Pascale, S. (2)..............................................................................................................255
De Sutter, G......................................................................................................................124
De Sutter, G. (2)..............................................................................................................399
De Vogelaer, G.................................................................................................................124
De Vos, L..........................................................................................................................124
del Valle, J.........................................................................................................................186
Delarue, S.........................................................................................................................254
Denis, D..............................................................................................................................62
Derungs, C........................................................................................................................257
Dickson, V.........................................................................................................................488
Dijkstra, J...........................................................................................................................484
Dobrushina, N...................................................................................................................255
Dobrushina, N. (2)..............................................................................................................260
Droste, P............................................................................................................................262
Duarte, M. E. L....................................................................................................................66
Dubrovskaya, O. G............................................................................................................225
Duval, M..............................................................................................................................44
Edler, S...............................................................................................................................92
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Eide, K. M..........................................................................................................................264
Ekberg, L.............................................................................................................................27
Elspaß, S...........................................................................................................................184
Engsterhold, R...................................................................................................................265
Esteba Ramos, D...............................................................................................................490
Etchebest, X.......................................................................................................................267
Fedorova, K.......................................................................................................................268
Fedriani, C.........................................................................................................................270
Felder, S............................................................................................................................272
Felder, S. (2).....................................................................................................................272
Fernández de Molina Ortés, E..................................................................................491
Fernández-Ordóñez, I.........................................................................................................76
Ferrero, C..........................................................................................................................493
Fischer, H..........................................................................................................................273
Fleury, E............................................................................................................................244
Flores Treviño, M. E..........................................................................................................113
Franco, K...........................................................................................................................131
Franco, K. (2).....................................................................................................................147
French, P...........................................................................................................................193
Fuchs, E..............................................................................................................................94
Gallego, J. C......................................................................................................................274
García-Vidal, T.....................................................................................................................64
Garnett, V..........................................................................................................................276
Geeraerts, D......................................................................................................................411
Gerasimenko, E.................................................................................................................496
Ghyselen, A. S...................................................................................................................139
Glück, A.............................................................................................................................369
Gnevsheva, K....................................................................................................................238
Goldman, J. P....................................................................................................................429
Gómez Molina, J. R. .........................................................................................................115
González Salinas, A..........................................................................................................113
Gooskens, C.....................................................................................................................306
Goria, E............................................................................................................................219
Gregersen, F.......................................................................................................................55
Gregersen, F. (2)...............................................................................................................122
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Gregersen, F. (3)...............................................................................................................126
Greub, Y............................................................................................................................193
Grieve, J............................................................................................................................155
Grieve, J. (2).....................................................................................................................277
G r o n d e l a e r s , S . ..........................................................................................................280
Grondelaers, S. (2)............................................................................................................282
Gross, J.............................................................................................................................284
Grossenbacher, S.............................................................................................................257
Grossenbacher, T.............................................................................................................433
Guerini, F.....................................................................................................................34
Guerrero, S.......................................................................................................................117
Gutiérrez, S.......................................................................................................................204
Guy, G. R.............................................................................................................................51
Guy, G. R. (2).....................................................................................................................68
Gylfadottir, D.....................................................................................................................286
Häcker, M..........................................................................................................................288
Hahn, M............................................................................................................................298
Hall, C. P...........................................................................................................................289
Hall, C. P. (2)....................................................................................................................294
Hansen, G. F....................................................................................................................298
Hedegard, H. J. B..............................................................................................................301
Herbert, K............................................................................................................................92
Hernández Cabrera, C. E..................................................................................................121
Hernández Campoy, J. M....................................................................................................64
Herrero de Haro, A............................................................................................................302
Hess, D..............................................................................................................................304
Hickey, R...........................................................................................................................180
Hilte, L...............................................................................................................................156
Hilton, N. H........................................................................................................................306
Hinskens, F..................................................................................................4, 51, 54 and 100
Hoekstra, M.......................................................................................................................129
Hoff, M...............................................................................................................................308
Holmes-Elliot, S.................................................................................................................310
Holmes-Elliot, S. (2)..........................................................................................................445
Howley, G..........................................................................................................................311
Ignatenko, D......................................................................................................................250
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Igoa, J. M...........................................................................................................................204
Ilbury, C.............................................................................................................................313
Ioannidou, E......................................................................................................................209
Jaime Jiménez, E..............................................................................................................315
Jannedy, S........................................................................................................................316
Jansen, S..........................................................................................................................318
Jansen, S. (2)...................................................................................................................318
Jensen, T. J................................................................................................