Chapter 7
The importance of motivated comparisons in variationist studies
As the state of the field advances empirically, sociolinguists are increasingly expected to utilize statistics in their data analysis. Some researchers have limited formal statistical training, and even for the more experienced researcher, the focus of model construction is often on the independent variables, e.g. interactions or multicollinearity issues. However, dependent variables with three or more variants require careful consideration. Building on Paolillo (2002), I show that identical binomial logistic regression models yield disparate results given differential treatment of a complex dependent variable. I conclude by offering concrete, hands-on advice for linguists working with their data in R with the goal of promoting judicious analyses among Hispanic sociolinguists.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The treatment of linguistic variants in previous work
- 3.Previous work on coda /s/ lenition in Spanish
- 4.Methodology: The variable and dataset
- 5.The case in Nicaragua
- 6.Models fitted to aspiration
- 7.Models fitted to deletion
- 8.Recommendation for treatment of the dependent variable
- 9.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
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Cited by (2)
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Fernández-Mallat, Víctor & David Barrero
2023.
Changes and continuities in second person address pronoun usage in Bogotá Spanish.
Open Linguistics 9:1
Mohamed, Sherez & Antje Muntendam
2020.
The Use of the Glottal Stop as a Variant of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish.
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13:2
► pp. 391 ff.
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