Cover not available
Part of
Language Variation - European Perspectives VI: Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 8), Leipzig, May 2015
Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Beat Siebenhaar
[Studies in Language Variation 19] 2017
► pp. 23–46

A case for clustering speakers and linguistic variables

Big issues with smaller samples in language variation

 | Victoria University of Wellington
 | University of Aukland
We undertake a detailed analysis of a sample of over 10,000 utterances from 18 speakers in a corpus of Bequia English and apply constrained cluster analysis to discern patterns that identify the linguistic signatures for different villages and to see how individuals pattern in relation to the rest of their village. The analysis of multiple variables provides a richer picture of both group and individual than any one variable does and holds promise for better understanding the mysterious mechanisms by which variation between individuals scales up to variation between groups.
Keywords: Bequia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, creole, group and individual, multiple variables, cluster analysis, scaling up, historical linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Going big from small (samples)
  • 3.Language variation in context
  • 4.Addressing a big problem for variationist sociolinguistics
  • 5.The missing link – a sociolinguistic Higgs-Boson particle?
  • 6.Individuals and groups in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)
  • 7.Linguistic features in the Bequia corpus
  • 8.Clustering speakers with respect to multiple linguistic features
  • 9.Where this takes us and where it leaves us
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.19.02mey
References (39)
References
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bromham, Lindell, Xia Hua, Thomas G. Fitzpatrick, and Simon J. Greenhill. 2015. “Rate of Language Evolution Is Affected by Population Size.” PNAS. 112(7): 2097–2102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2014. Quotatives: New Trends and Sociolinguistic Implications. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cedergren, Henritta and David Sankoff. 1974. “Variable Rules: Performance as a Statistical Reflection of Competence.” Language 50(2): 333–355. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 2013. “Grammaticalisation in Social Context: The Emergence of a New English Pronoun.” Journal of Sociolinguistics. 17(5): 608–633. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Daleszynska, Agata. 2011. Variation in Past Tense Marking in Bequia Creole: Apparent Time Change and Dialect Levelling. PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
. 2013. “The Local, Global, and the Authentic: Language Change and Authenticity in Bequia.” Zeitschrift fur Anglistik and Amerikanistik (Special issue on Authenticity in Creole Languages). 60(3): 275–94.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 1996. “Vowels and Nail Polish: The Emergence of Linguistic Style in the Preadolescent Heterosexual Marketplace.” In Natasha Warner et al. (eds.), Gender and Belief Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference, 183–90. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group.Google Scholar
. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford/Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gray, Russell D., Simon J. Greenhill and Quentin D. Atkinson. 2013. “Phylogenetic Models of Language Change: Three New Questions.” In Peter J. Richerson and Morten H. Christiansen (eds.). Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, 285–300. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 12, J. Lupp, series editor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. 1980. “Variation in the Group and in the Individual.” In W. Labov (ed.), Locating Language in Time and Space, 1–36. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
2013. “The Cognitive Coherence of Sociolects: How Do Speakers Handle Multiple Sociolinguistic Variables?” Journal of Pragmatics 52: 63–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014. “Bricks and Bricolage: The Question of Sociolinguistic Coherence.” Plenary address at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 43. Chicago.Google Scholar
Hazenberg, Evan. 2015. “Gendering Vowels: Sociophonetics and Community Affiliation.” Paper presented at the New Zealand Linguistic Society. University of Otago.
Hinsken, Frans, and Gregory R. Guy (eds.) 2016. “Coherence, Covariation and Bricolage. Various Approaches to the Systematicity of Language Variation.” Special issue of Lingua 172–173.Google Scholar
Horvath, Barbara, and David Sankoff. 1987. “Delimiting the Sydney Speech Community.” Language in Society 16: 179–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (ed.) 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2009. “Getting Off the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for Mixed-Effects Variable Rule Analysis.” Language and Linguistics Compass. 3(1): 359–383, DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 2006[1966]. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, Wiliam. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Vol. 1 Internal factors. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Vol. 2 External factors. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, Wiliam. 2010. Principles of Linguistic Change: Vol 3 Cognitive factors. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Legendre, Pierre and Louis Legendre. 2012. Numerical Ecology. Amsterdam: Elsevier 3rd ed.Google Scholar
Levon, Erez and Sophie Holmes-Elliott. 2013. “East End Boys and West End Girls: /s/-Fronting in Southeast England.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected papers from NWAV 41. 19(2): article 13. [URL]
Meyerhoff, Miriam. 1999. “Sorry in the Pacific: Defining Communities, Defining Practices.” Language in Society 28(2): 225–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam and James A. Walker. 2007. “The Persistence of Variation in Individual Grammars: Copula Absence in ‘Urban Sojourners’ and Their Stay-at-Home Peers, Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines).” Journal of Sociolinguistics. 11, 3. 346–366. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013a. Bequia Talk: St Vincent and the Grenadines. Westminster: Battlebridge Publishing.Google Scholar
. 2013b. “An Existential Problem: The Sociolinguistic Monitor and Variation in Existential Constructions on Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines).” Language and Society 42 (4): 407–428. doiDOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moineddin, Rahim, Flora I. Matheson and Richard H. Glazier. 2007. “A Simulation Study of Sample Size for Multilevel Logistic Regression Models.” BMC Medical Research Methodology 7(34) DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oksanen, Jari, F. Guillaume Blanchet, Roeland Kindt, Pierre Legendre, Peter R. Minchin, R. B. O’Hara, Gavin L. Simpson, Peter Solymos, M. Henry H. Stevens and Helene Wagner (2016). vegan: Community Ecology Package. R package version 2.3–4. [URL]
Oushiro, Livia. 2016. “Social and Structural Constraints in Lectal Cohesion.” Lingua 172–173: 116–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oushiro, Livia and Gregory R. Guy. 2014. “The Effect of Salience on Co-variation in Brazilian Portuguese.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected papers from NWAV 43. 21(2): paper 18. [URL]
Roy, Joseph and Stephen Levey. 2014. “Mixed Effects Models and Unbalanced Sociolinguistic Data: The Need for Caution.” Paper presented at New Ways of Analying Variation 43. Chicago.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1993. “Reflections on Quantification in the Study of Conversation.” Research on Language and Social Interaction. 26(1): 99–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ter Braak, Cajo J. F. 1986. “Canonical Correspondence Analysis: A New Eigenvector Technique for Multivariate Direct Gradient Analysis.” Ecology 67(5): 1167–1179. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2004. “Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian Migrations and Phoneme Inventories.” Linguistic Typology. 8(3): 305–320. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Walker, James A. and Miriam Meyerhoff. 2013. “Studies of the Community and the Individual.” In Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron and Ceil Lucas (eds). Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 175–194.Google Scholar
Wilson, Marc Stewart, Joseph Bulbulia and Chris G. Sibley. 2013. “Differences and Similarities in Religious and Paranormal Beliefs: A Typology of Distinct Faith Signatures.” Religion, Brain and Behavior. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Villena-Ponsoda, Juan-Andrés & Matilde Vida-Castro
2020. Variation, identity and indexicality in southern Spanish. In Intermediate language varieties [Studies in Language Variation, 24], ► pp. 149 ff. DOI logo
Daleszynska-Slater, Agata, Miriam Meyerhoff & James A. Walker
2019. Order in the creole speech community. Language Ecology 3:1 ► pp. 58 ff. DOI logo
Buson, Laurence, Aurélie Nardy, Dominique Muller & Jean‐Pierre Chevrot
2018. The Sociolinguistic Repetition Task: A New Paradigm for Exploring the Cognitive Coherence of Language Varieties. Topics in Cognitive Science 10:4 ► pp. 803 ff. DOI logo
Khanina, Olesya & Miriam Meyerhoff
2018. A case-study in historical sociolinguistics beyond Europe: Reconstructing patterns of multilingualism in a linguistic community in Siberia. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 4:2 ► pp. 221 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.