Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 253–278
Established models of the spatial diffusion of linguistic innovations vary in their relationship to population density. Differences in prediction between the gravity models (Trudgill 1974), in which probability of diffusion is sensitive to settlement size, and the traditional wave models can be challenging to test due to the difficulty of large-scale and finely-grained geographical sampling. This paper tests the suitability of data derived from Twitter in establishing diffusion patterns. Using two case studies from British English – variation in the realisation of ditransitives, and preposition drop with go – we propose that the correlation between (local) population density and linguistic similarity to geographical neighbours can be used as a measure of hierarchical patterning for an individual innovation.
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