This paper discusses the consequences of some major recent developments in syntactic variation research: (i) the shift from a macro-comparative to a micro-comparative approach; (ii) the use of dialectological, sociolinguistic and theoretical methods to collect dialect syntax data; (iii) the rapidly increasing on-line availability of large amounts of data on large amounts of dialects; (iv) the hypothesis in minimalist generative grammar that there is no cross-linguistic variation in the syntactic module of the mental grammar and that all syntactic variation is reducible to other linguistic and non-linguistic levels. A brief overview is provided of the micro-comparative syntactic research infrastructure that has been built up in recent years. To demonstrate the usability of the available data and the minimalist hypothesis, the paper concentrates on the highly pervasive but little studied phenomenon of syntactic doubling. It is argued that syntactic doubling is necessary to express semantic relations and that there is much hidden doubling because locally recoverable doubles can and in certain cases must be left silent at the level of phonological spell out. In this way, syntactic doubling is an important source of syntactic variation. Using a model of linguistic variation that includes syntax, other levels of the mental grammar (phonology, semantics, pragmatics), cognition (e.g. memory, thinking), body (e.g. oral tract) and society, the paper then shows which piece of syntactic variation can be reduced to which level of linguistic variation model, thus answering the question of the title.
Typological research has been mainly based on standard written varieties. Only in recent years has there been a growing interest in studying cross-linguistic variation in regional and social non-standard varieties (e.g. Kortmann 2004). While morphology and syntax have been the focus of these cross-linguistic studies, phonological aspects have not been fully explored, partly because previous approaches to phonological typology have concentrated primarily on phoneme inventories (e.g. Maddieson 1984). The aim of this paper is to show how phonological variation in closely-related standard and non-standard varieties may be explained in terms of typological features. For that purpose, the typology of syllable and word languages will be applied to Catalan and Alemannic dialects. The focus will lie on how traditional dialect classifications can be accounted for on the basis of this typology.
In the early 1990s, linguistic anthropological work seeking to integrate speakers’ perceptions and understandings of their linguistic and social contexts into analyses of language use coalesced around the theoretical paradigm of language ideology. This perspective includes both micro-interactional elements of language use as well as large-scale sociohistorical processes that shape and are shaped by language. This article first describes language ideology as a field, and describes some of its key works. Next it shifts to discuss language ideology through an analysis of the language situation in Bergamo, Italy, where ongoing language shift, socioeconomic transformation, and the politicization of language have resulted in a complex linguistic situation and a range of attitudes towards language. Based on ongoing cultural and linguistic ethnographic research in Bergamo since 1999, this paper illustrates how analyses of speaker attitudes from a language ideology perspective can produce a rich, multiplex understanding of how speakers themselves use and understand language.
Aacquisition of the grammatical gender of the Dutch definite common determiner de and neuter het is a long-lasting process since monolingual children do not acquire a target grammar with respect to the use of het until the age of six. Before that age, they overuse de. Bilingual child acquirers from ethnic minority communities show an overuse of de to a much higher extent than their monolingual controls. We will explore the relation between language acquisition and language variation. It is argued that when the acquisition process of a grammatical phenomenon takes too long, it will become vulnerable in the sense that language external and internal factors start to interfere with this process and the emerging variation will remain for some acquirers. The hypothesis is put forward that in that case a grammatical phenomenon is very eligible to be used in identity construction.
The study of dialects and of closely-related systems can be very interesting under the perspective of language typology since they give insights into different forms of linguistic patterning, setting off from very similar linguistic substance. The topic of this paper is gender agreement on cardinal numbers, a good example in which dialects exhibit a higher degree of complexity than their nearest standard languages, in this case German and Italian, as well as most European standard languages. Cardinal numerals are a special kind of linguistic object. From the point of view of agreement, lower numerals may share adjective-like properties and agree (usually in gender) with their head nouns, whereas higher numerals tend to have more noun-like properties and behave more as agreement controllers than as targets. Focusing on the Romance-Germanic contact area encompassing the alpine space, patterns of variation on numerals will be considered. On the basis of linguistic atlases, local grammars and dictionaries, and field-work research a typology of diffusion and evolution of the phenomenon of gender agreement on lower numerals both in Romance varieties (Gallo-Romance, Italo-Romance, Ladin) and German (Upper German dialects) can be outlined.
‘Standard language’ is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers.This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed ‘standard usage’. It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers’ linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project “Variation in Spoken German”, Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of ‘standard usage’ in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German is an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of ‘standard usage’ inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.
In this study, we analyse conversations recorded during ethnographic research in the Greek/Turkish bilingual community of Rhodes within a Conversation Analysis (CA) framework. Our data comprise recordings of everyday talk-in-interaction during bilingual family gatherings. We examine aspects of the overall and sequential organization of talk as well as issues of identity based on the code alternation choices speakers of different ages and social groups make during interaction.
This article focuses on word order in subordinate clauses in the history of Swedish, mainly Old Swedish (c. 1225–1526) and Early Modern Swedish (1526–1732). In Old Swedish, subordinate clauses could have the same word order as main clauses with respect to the internal order between the finite verb and a sentence adverbial. This marks a clear contrast to Modern Swedish with its particular subordinate clause word order marked by the pre-finite placement of the sentence adverbial. By using variationist methods this article takes a sociolinguistic approach to syntactic change, arguing that the word order variation in subordinate clauses in the history of Swedish has to be explained in two different ways. During 1225–1450 the modern word order is restricted to subordinate clauses with pronominal subjects, and as long as the modern word order is restricted to clauses with pronominal subjects it is argued that the variation between old and modern subordinate clause word order can be described as a micro-variation in a system with obligatory verb movement and different subject positions. In Late Old Swedish, however, the modern subordinate clause word order started to occur also with non-pronominal subjects. The possibility of using the modern subordinate clause word order pattern independently of the subject type cannot be accounted for within one system with obligatory verb movement but instead reflects a macro-variation between two coexisting systems (with or without verb movement). During Early Modern Swedish one of these systems became predominant, and it is argued that this change is dependent on the sociolinguistic situation in 17th-century Sweden.
This paper – part of a larger study on the acquisition of variation in a Moselle-Franconian village (Wittlich/Eifel) – deals with data from children’s natural peer-group interactions during salesperson–buyer role-play. While analyzing this data, a large amount of intracontextual variation was observed. This variation is explained by the fact that the children, who are between the ages of 3;11 and 6;10, have acquired specific registers, i.e. a role-play register and a peer-directed register.
This paper examines the emergence of innovative Present Perfect structures in the Cypriot Greek koiné through a quantitative study supplemented by naturalistically sampled data. The results of the study indicate that innovative Present Perfect structures are emergent in contemporary Cypriot Greek, at least among its younger, more educated speakers. Although such innovation on the morphosyntactic level may well be a result of language contact with Standard Greek, it does not entail perfect acquisition or transfer of the full range of associated semantic features of Standard Greek Present Perfect. Conversely, it seems that transfer of the exclusively resultative semantics of extant, non-innovative Cypriot Greek Present Perfect structures onto the innovative Present Perfect is not operative either.
In this contribution, two consecutive sound changes, the Viennese monophthongisation and the E-merger, are investigated. Both sound changes originated in the city dialect of Vienna and spread to other Austrian dialects, including the city dialect of Salzburg. Whereas in the city dialect of Vienna the monophthongisation was completed around 1940 leading to two new vowels in the vowel inventory, this process is still in progress in Salzburg. Consequently, the vowel inventories of the two dialects differ with respect to the number of vowels. Traditionally, it has been assumed that the Viennese monophthongisation caused the confusion and subsequent merger of the E-vowels. However, a comparison of the two city dialects reveals that the two changes must have occurred independently of each other.
This paper addresses microvariation within verb cluster constructions in varieties of German, focusing on Verb Raising and Verb Projection Raising in Alemannic. It is argued that the difference in the syntax of verb clusters arises because of differences in the prosodic systems of the dialects (stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages). The paper includes an overview of the empirical properties of the Alemannic phonological phrase and an analysis of the syntax of verb clusters based on PF-requirements.
This paper investigates the acquisition of the sociolinguistic constraints of two variables, (ing) and (t), by non-native teenagers of Polish origin in both London and Edinburgh. First, the native sociolinguistic constraints on variation of (ing) and (t) are identified. These are then compared with the sociolinguistic constraints of two groups of non-native teenagers living in London and Edinburgh. Results of a multivariate analysis indicate that Polish adolescent immigrants do not acquire the exact same constraints on variation as their local peer group, and that the acquisition of variation varies from variable to variable, which may be due to the character of the variable and its constraint complexity. Learners seem to be using various strategies when acquiring variation in the realisation of these variables in the English of the speech community into which they have moved. While some variable constraints are replicated, there is also evidence of reallocation of the relative importance of variable input constraints in the output variation. Some constraints are altered, rejected and newly constructed, which seems more likely with some kinds of structured variation than others.
This paper inspects the variability of (r) in non-linking coda positions (e.g. in the words car, far, and art) in Scottish Standard English (SSE), accepting the three variants [ɾ], [ɹ], and Ø. Interviews with 27 middle-class speakers were conducted, eliciting three styles (careful speech, reading passage, and word list). Following a discussion of previous research on (r) in SSE and an explanation of the conditional hierarchical logistic regression model applied to the data, results are presented with a focus on social and stylistic factors. It appears that female speakers are more likely to vocalise /r/, and older speakers are more likely to use the more traditional tapped variant [ɾ]. Thus, quasi-phonological variation correlates with gender, and phonetic variation correlates with age. Moreover, contact with Southern Standard British English (SSBE) also increases the rates of (r)-vocalisation. In word list style, all speakers are less likely to vocalise (r), but there are significant differences between social groups in this respect: especially young men’s accents are almost categorically rhotic in word list style.
The concept of ‘stance,’ which is the means by which speakers position themselves in terms of the discourse and interlocutor(s), has gained attention in recent sociolinguistic literature. This paper demonstrates the value of using stance as an explicit analytic construct in examining rapid language alternation; in this case, the code-switching of first generation (50+ years) Gaelic-English bilinguals in an extended family on the Isles of Skye and Harris, Scotland. It uses a micro-interactional approach in looking at how code-switching occurs in concert with overt displays of epistemic and affective stance-taking and concludes that speakers use code-switching as a means to explicitly highlight certain stances. It further posits that facets of these interactions, such frequent occurrences of communicative trouble, necessitate the overt reification of particular stances and that to accomplish this task, these bilinguals draw on one of their most powerful communicative strategies: code-switching.
Speakers’ psycho-social orientation and social knowledge have often been identified as having an important role in linguistic change. We know, for example, that speakers’ adoption of linguistic features from a neighbouring region often correlates with their positive social orientation towards that region (Llamas 2007), and that their social orientation can be discussed with reference to their interpretation of physical, political and social ‘boundaries’ (Llamas 2010). Southport, located 17 miles north of the large industrial city of Liverpool, is historically an independent borough but was absorbed into Merseyside in 1974. Southport and Liverpool are well connected by frequent transport links and, given the high levels of contact between people, it has been predicted that phonetic features of the Liverpool accent will diffuse into the traditional Lancashire accent of Southport (Grey & Richardson 2007). However, a complicating factor is Liverpool’s negative stereotype (Montgomery 2007), which may be predicted to act as a barrier to the diffusion of Liverpool features. This paper aims to analyse the diffusion of two local Liverpool features – the lenition of intervocalic and word-final /t/ and /k/ – in speech from a corpus of 39 speakers stratified by age, gender and socio-economic status. I show that despite the links between the two locations, the features of Liverpool are not diffusing into Southport speech as rapidly as originally hypothesised. The second aim is to investigate whether there is a correlation between speakers’ language use and their spatial mobility patterns by mapping their external (contact) and extra-linguistic (attitudinal) behaviour onto their linguistic production. I show that varying patterns of contact could provide an explanation for the reduced level of diffusion of Liverpool features. In conclusion, I argue that understanding speakers’ psycho-social orientations and social awareness, in conjunction with correlative patterns of speech production is crucial for explaining language change.
Due to the intensive and extensive contact of Belarusian and Russian, mixed Belarusian-Russian speech is a widespread phenomenon in the linguistic landscape of Belarus today. Along with features on other linguistic levels, phonetic-phonological features that differ between both languages appear as variants in such mixed speech. This paper reports an acoustical analysis of three sibilant variables (sj), (tj) and (ʧ j) in instances of mixed speech spoken by 27 speakers. For (sj) and (tj), Center of Gravity calculations suggest a more posterior place of articulation for older speakers and a less posterior one for younger speakers. This is interpreted as a shift towards a more Russian-like pronunciation of younger speakers, which can be explained by an earlier and more intensive exposure to Russian. While no such intergenerational difference is found for (ʧ j), there is a relation between the realization of the two affricates (tj) and (ʧ j), suggesting some general principle of keeping distances between sibilants large enough.
In recent years a new form has emerged in the paradigm of the indefinite article, the so-called “extended short form” nen (Vogel 2006) as in: Ich hab’ nen Mann gesehen. As little is known about the origin of this form (when was it used first, by whom, and in what contexts?), this paper will trace the history of nen using several corpora of colloquial German that cover language use in the 1960s, 1970s and 2000s (Pfeffer-Corpus, Freiburger-Corpus, Dialogstrukturen-Corpus, Emergency-Call-Corpus). Quantitative analyses reveal distinct patterns of variation, which indicate a language change that originated among young speakers in the 1990s. Furthermore, the findings show that the norms of colloquial German have clearly changed during the last 50 years. Explicit forms, which dominated language use in the 1960s and 1970s have been replaced by short forms (including the “extended short form” nen). It can be concluded that standard norm awareness was high in the 1960s, whereas today speakers exhibit low norm awareness and evaluate colloquial, supra-regional variants positively, even in formal contexts.
This paper discusses the consequences of some major recent developments in syntactic variation research: (i) the shift from a macro-comparative to a micro-comparative approach; (ii) the use of dialectological, sociolinguistic and theoretical methods to collect dialect syntax data; (iii) the rapidly increasing on-line availability of large amounts of data on large amounts of dialects; (iv) the hypothesis in minimalist generative grammar that there is no cross-linguistic variation in the syntactic module of the mental grammar and that all syntactic variation is reducible to other linguistic and non-linguistic levels. A brief overview is provided of the micro-comparative syntactic research infrastructure that has been built up in recent years. To demonstrate the usability of the available data and the minimalist hypothesis, the paper concentrates on the highly pervasive but little studied phenomenon of syntactic doubling. It is argued that syntactic doubling is necessary to express semantic relations and that there is much hidden doubling because locally recoverable doubles can and in certain cases must be left silent at the level of phonological spell out. In this way, syntactic doubling is an important source of syntactic variation. Using a model of linguistic variation that includes syntax, other levels of the mental grammar (phonology, semantics, pragmatics), cognition (e.g. memory, thinking), body (e.g. oral tract) and society, the paper then shows which piece of syntactic variation can be reduced to which level of linguistic variation model, thus answering the question of the title.
Typological research has been mainly based on standard written varieties. Only in recent years has there been a growing interest in studying cross-linguistic variation in regional and social non-standard varieties (e.g. Kortmann 2004). While morphology and syntax have been the focus of these cross-linguistic studies, phonological aspects have not been fully explored, partly because previous approaches to phonological typology have concentrated primarily on phoneme inventories (e.g. Maddieson 1984). The aim of this paper is to show how phonological variation in closely-related standard and non-standard varieties may be explained in terms of typological features. For that purpose, the typology of syllable and word languages will be applied to Catalan and Alemannic dialects. The focus will lie on how traditional dialect classifications can be accounted for on the basis of this typology.
In the early 1990s, linguistic anthropological work seeking to integrate speakers’ perceptions and understandings of their linguistic and social contexts into analyses of language use coalesced around the theoretical paradigm of language ideology. This perspective includes both micro-interactional elements of language use as well as large-scale sociohistorical processes that shape and are shaped by language. This article first describes language ideology as a field, and describes some of its key works. Next it shifts to discuss language ideology through an analysis of the language situation in Bergamo, Italy, where ongoing language shift, socioeconomic transformation, and the politicization of language have resulted in a complex linguistic situation and a range of attitudes towards language. Based on ongoing cultural and linguistic ethnographic research in Bergamo since 1999, this paper illustrates how analyses of speaker attitudes from a language ideology perspective can produce a rich, multiplex understanding of how speakers themselves use and understand language.
Aacquisition of the grammatical gender of the Dutch definite common determiner de and neuter het is a long-lasting process since monolingual children do not acquire a target grammar with respect to the use of het until the age of six. Before that age, they overuse de. Bilingual child acquirers from ethnic minority communities show an overuse of de to a much higher extent than their monolingual controls. We will explore the relation between language acquisition and language variation. It is argued that when the acquisition process of a grammatical phenomenon takes too long, it will become vulnerable in the sense that language external and internal factors start to interfere with this process and the emerging variation will remain for some acquirers. The hypothesis is put forward that in that case a grammatical phenomenon is very eligible to be used in identity construction.
The study of dialects and of closely-related systems can be very interesting under the perspective of language typology since they give insights into different forms of linguistic patterning, setting off from very similar linguistic substance. The topic of this paper is gender agreement on cardinal numbers, a good example in which dialects exhibit a higher degree of complexity than their nearest standard languages, in this case German and Italian, as well as most European standard languages. Cardinal numerals are a special kind of linguistic object. From the point of view of agreement, lower numerals may share adjective-like properties and agree (usually in gender) with their head nouns, whereas higher numerals tend to have more noun-like properties and behave more as agreement controllers than as targets. Focusing on the Romance-Germanic contact area encompassing the alpine space, patterns of variation on numerals will be considered. On the basis of linguistic atlases, local grammars and dictionaries, and field-work research a typology of diffusion and evolution of the phenomenon of gender agreement on lower numerals both in Romance varieties (Gallo-Romance, Italo-Romance, Ladin) and German (Upper German dialects) can be outlined.
‘Standard language’ is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers.This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed ‘standard usage’. It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers’ linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project “Variation in Spoken German”, Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of ‘standard usage’ in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German is an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of ‘standard usage’ inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.
In this study, we analyse conversations recorded during ethnographic research in the Greek/Turkish bilingual community of Rhodes within a Conversation Analysis (CA) framework. Our data comprise recordings of everyday talk-in-interaction during bilingual family gatherings. We examine aspects of the overall and sequential organization of talk as well as issues of identity based on the code alternation choices speakers of different ages and social groups make during interaction.
This article focuses on word order in subordinate clauses in the history of Swedish, mainly Old Swedish (c. 1225–1526) and Early Modern Swedish (1526–1732). In Old Swedish, subordinate clauses could have the same word order as main clauses with respect to the internal order between the finite verb and a sentence adverbial. This marks a clear contrast to Modern Swedish with its particular subordinate clause word order marked by the pre-finite placement of the sentence adverbial. By using variationist methods this article takes a sociolinguistic approach to syntactic change, arguing that the word order variation in subordinate clauses in the history of Swedish has to be explained in two different ways. During 1225–1450 the modern word order is restricted to subordinate clauses with pronominal subjects, and as long as the modern word order is restricted to clauses with pronominal subjects it is argued that the variation between old and modern subordinate clause word order can be described as a micro-variation in a system with obligatory verb movement and different subject positions. In Late Old Swedish, however, the modern subordinate clause word order started to occur also with non-pronominal subjects. The possibility of using the modern subordinate clause word order pattern independently of the subject type cannot be accounted for within one system with obligatory verb movement but instead reflects a macro-variation between two coexisting systems (with or without verb movement). During Early Modern Swedish one of these systems became predominant, and it is argued that this change is dependent on the sociolinguistic situation in 17th-century Sweden.
This paper – part of a larger study on the acquisition of variation in a Moselle-Franconian village (Wittlich/Eifel) – deals with data from children’s natural peer-group interactions during salesperson–buyer role-play. While analyzing this data, a large amount of intracontextual variation was observed. This variation is explained by the fact that the children, who are between the ages of 3;11 and 6;10, have acquired specific registers, i.e. a role-play register and a peer-directed register.
This paper examines the emergence of innovative Present Perfect structures in the Cypriot Greek koiné through a quantitative study supplemented by naturalistically sampled data. The results of the study indicate that innovative Present Perfect structures are emergent in contemporary Cypriot Greek, at least among its younger, more educated speakers. Although such innovation on the morphosyntactic level may well be a result of language contact with Standard Greek, it does not entail perfect acquisition or transfer of the full range of associated semantic features of Standard Greek Present Perfect. Conversely, it seems that transfer of the exclusively resultative semantics of extant, non-innovative Cypriot Greek Present Perfect structures onto the innovative Present Perfect is not operative either.
In this contribution, two consecutive sound changes, the Viennese monophthongisation and the E-merger, are investigated. Both sound changes originated in the city dialect of Vienna and spread to other Austrian dialects, including the city dialect of Salzburg. Whereas in the city dialect of Vienna the monophthongisation was completed around 1940 leading to two new vowels in the vowel inventory, this process is still in progress in Salzburg. Consequently, the vowel inventories of the two dialects differ with respect to the number of vowels. Traditionally, it has been assumed that the Viennese monophthongisation caused the confusion and subsequent merger of the E-vowels. However, a comparison of the two city dialects reveals that the two changes must have occurred independently of each other.
This paper addresses microvariation within verb cluster constructions in varieties of German, focusing on Verb Raising and Verb Projection Raising in Alemannic. It is argued that the difference in the syntax of verb clusters arises because of differences in the prosodic systems of the dialects (stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages). The paper includes an overview of the empirical properties of the Alemannic phonological phrase and an analysis of the syntax of verb clusters based on PF-requirements.
This paper investigates the acquisition of the sociolinguistic constraints of two variables, (ing) and (t), by non-native teenagers of Polish origin in both London and Edinburgh. First, the native sociolinguistic constraints on variation of (ing) and (t) are identified. These are then compared with the sociolinguistic constraints of two groups of non-native teenagers living in London and Edinburgh. Results of a multivariate analysis indicate that Polish adolescent immigrants do not acquire the exact same constraints on variation as their local peer group, and that the acquisition of variation varies from variable to variable, which may be due to the character of the variable and its constraint complexity. Learners seem to be using various strategies when acquiring variation in the realisation of these variables in the English of the speech community into which they have moved. While some variable constraints are replicated, there is also evidence of reallocation of the relative importance of variable input constraints in the output variation. Some constraints are altered, rejected and newly constructed, which seems more likely with some kinds of structured variation than others.
This paper inspects the variability of (r) in non-linking coda positions (e.g. in the words car, far, and art) in Scottish Standard English (SSE), accepting the three variants [ɾ], [ɹ], and Ø. Interviews with 27 middle-class speakers were conducted, eliciting three styles (careful speech, reading passage, and word list). Following a discussion of previous research on (r) in SSE and an explanation of the conditional hierarchical logistic regression model applied to the data, results are presented with a focus on social and stylistic factors. It appears that female speakers are more likely to vocalise /r/, and older speakers are more likely to use the more traditional tapped variant [ɾ]. Thus, quasi-phonological variation correlates with gender, and phonetic variation correlates with age. Moreover, contact with Southern Standard British English (SSBE) also increases the rates of (r)-vocalisation. In word list style, all speakers are less likely to vocalise (r), but there are significant differences between social groups in this respect: especially young men’s accents are almost categorically rhotic in word list style.
The concept of ‘stance,’ which is the means by which speakers position themselves in terms of the discourse and interlocutor(s), has gained attention in recent sociolinguistic literature. This paper demonstrates the value of using stance as an explicit analytic construct in examining rapid language alternation; in this case, the code-switching of first generation (50+ years) Gaelic-English bilinguals in an extended family on the Isles of Skye and Harris, Scotland. It uses a micro-interactional approach in looking at how code-switching occurs in concert with overt displays of epistemic and affective stance-taking and concludes that speakers use code-switching as a means to explicitly highlight certain stances. It further posits that facets of these interactions, such frequent occurrences of communicative trouble, necessitate the overt reification of particular stances and that to accomplish this task, these bilinguals draw on one of their most powerful communicative strategies: code-switching.
Speakers’ psycho-social orientation and social knowledge have often been identified as having an important role in linguistic change. We know, for example, that speakers’ adoption of linguistic features from a neighbouring region often correlates with their positive social orientation towards that region (Llamas 2007), and that their social orientation can be discussed with reference to their interpretation of physical, political and social ‘boundaries’ (Llamas 2010). Southport, located 17 miles north of the large industrial city of Liverpool, is historically an independent borough but was absorbed into Merseyside in 1974. Southport and Liverpool are well connected by frequent transport links and, given the high levels of contact between people, it has been predicted that phonetic features of the Liverpool accent will diffuse into the traditional Lancashire accent of Southport (Grey & Richardson 2007). However, a complicating factor is Liverpool’s negative stereotype (Montgomery 2007), which may be predicted to act as a barrier to the diffusion of Liverpool features. This paper aims to analyse the diffusion of two local Liverpool features – the lenition of intervocalic and word-final /t/ and /k/ – in speech from a corpus of 39 speakers stratified by age, gender and socio-economic status. I show that despite the links between the two locations, the features of Liverpool are not diffusing into Southport speech as rapidly as originally hypothesised. The second aim is to investigate whether there is a correlation between speakers’ language use and their spatial mobility patterns by mapping their external (contact) and extra-linguistic (attitudinal) behaviour onto their linguistic production. I show that varying patterns of contact could provide an explanation for the reduced level of diffusion of Liverpool features. In conclusion, I argue that understanding speakers’ psycho-social orientations and social awareness, in conjunction with correlative patterns of speech production is crucial for explaining language change.
Due to the intensive and extensive contact of Belarusian and Russian, mixed Belarusian-Russian speech is a widespread phenomenon in the linguistic landscape of Belarus today. Along with features on other linguistic levels, phonetic-phonological features that differ between both languages appear as variants in such mixed speech. This paper reports an acoustical analysis of three sibilant variables (sj), (tj) and (ʧ j) in instances of mixed speech spoken by 27 speakers. For (sj) and (tj), Center of Gravity calculations suggest a more posterior place of articulation for older speakers and a less posterior one for younger speakers. This is interpreted as a shift towards a more Russian-like pronunciation of younger speakers, which can be explained by an earlier and more intensive exposure to Russian. While no such intergenerational difference is found for (ʧ j), there is a relation between the realization of the two affricates (tj) and (ʧ j), suggesting some general principle of keeping distances between sibilants large enough.
In recent years a new form has emerged in the paradigm of the indefinite article, the so-called “extended short form” nen (Vogel 2006) as in: Ich hab’ nen Mann gesehen. As little is known about the origin of this form (when was it used first, by whom, and in what contexts?), this paper will trace the history of nen using several corpora of colloquial German that cover language use in the 1960s, 1970s and 2000s (Pfeffer-Corpus, Freiburger-Corpus, Dialogstrukturen-Corpus, Emergency-Call-Corpus). Quantitative analyses reveal distinct patterns of variation, which indicate a language change that originated among young speakers in the 1990s. Furthermore, the findings show that the norms of colloquial German have clearly changed during the last 50 years. Explicit forms, which dominated language use in the 1960s and 1970s have been replaced by short forms (including the “extended short form” nen). It can be concluded that standard norm awareness was high in the 1960s, whereas today speakers exhibit low norm awareness and evaluate colloquial, supra-regional variants positively, even in formal contexts.