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Part of
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 143–168

Chapter 7
The importance of motivated comparisons in variationist studies

| The University of Texas at San Antonio

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.

Keywords: Model construction, treatment of data, motivated comparisons, dependent variable, Nicaraguan Spanish, variationist sociolinguistics
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
  • References
Published online: 14 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.08cha
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