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The Handbook of Dialectology provides an authoritative, up-to-date and unusually broad account of the study of dialect, in one volume. Each chapter reviews essential research, and offers a critical discussion of the past, present and future development of the area. The volume is based on state-of-the-art research in dialectology around the world, providing the most current work available with an unusually broad scope of topics Provides a practical guide to the many methodological and statistical issues surrounding the collection and analysis of dialect data Offers summaries of dialect variation in the world's most widely spoken and commonly studied languages, including several non-European languages that have traditionally received less attention in general discussions of dialectology Reviews the intellectual development of the field, including its main theoretical schools of thought and research traditions, both academic and applied The editors are well known and highly respected, with a deep knowledge of this vast field of inquiry
The renewed focus on the evidential base of linguistics in general, but particularly on syntax, is in to a large degree dependent on technological developments: computers, electronic storage and transmission. These factors have enabled a revolution in the accessibility of digitally stored language, both in sampled and organized corpora and in its raw unsampled form on the internet. But this technology has also allowed a step-change in experimental methods readily available to linguists. The new arrival of such enormous quantities of data in greatly increased detail has made information accessible which could previously not even have been dreamed of. This volume is a selection of research reports from linguists who are making use of this new information and trying to integrate the new insights into their analyses and theoretical assumptions.
The dimensions of time and space fundamentally cause and shape the variability of all human language. To reduce investigation of this insight to manageable proportions, researchers have traditionally concentrated on the “deepest” dialects. But it is increasingly apparent that, although most people still speak with a distinct regional coloring, the new mobility of speakers in recently industrialized and postindustrial societies and the efflorescence of communication technologies cannot be ignored. This has given rise to a reconsideration of the relationship between geographical place and cultural space, and the fundamental link between language and a spatially bounded territory. Language ...
An outgrowth of the Language Variety in the South III symposium, New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches comprises forty-five original essays on a range of topics regarding the languages and dialects of the American South. Book jacket.
In variational linguistics, the concept of space has always been a central issue. However, different research traditions considering space coexisted for a long time separately. Traditional dialectology focused primarily on the diatopic dimension of linguistic variation, whereas in sociolinguistic studies diastratic and diaphasic dimensions were considered. For a long time only very few linguistic investigations tried to combine both research traditions in a two-dimensional design – a desideratum which is meant to be compensated by the contributions of this volume. The articles present findings from empirical studies which take on these different concepts and examine how they relate to one ...
This book makes the case for the value of a combined panel and trend study approach in studying real- and apparent-time language change to reconcile conspicuous disparities between the individual and the community. Through an examination of the Swabian dialect in southwestern Germany in two speech communities over four decades, this volume resolves critical methodological challenges in investigating lifespan and community change. This work affirms the importance of the speech community in shaping change and demonstrating how speakers’ notions of local identity and community belonging inform their choice of linguistic variants. Drawing on a comprehensive, integrated methodology, this resear...
Contemporary data analytics involves extracting insights from data and translating them into action. With its turn towards empirical methods and convergent data sources, cognitive linguistics is a fertile context for data analytics. There are key differences between data analytics and statistical analysis as typically conceived. Though the former requires the latter, it emphasizes the role of domain-specific knowledge. Statistical analysis also tends to be associated with preconceived hypotheses and controlled data. Data analytics, on the other hand, can help explore unstructured datasets and inspire emergent questions. This volume addresses two key aspects in data analytics for cognitive li...
Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the intricacies of thinking about the complexity of languages and language varieties (here: of English) in three major contact-related fields of (and schools in) linguistics: creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies (i.e. in the realm of English linguistics, the “World Englishes” community), and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: How can we adequately assess linguistic complexity? Should we be interested in absolute complexity or rather relative complexity? What is the extent to which language contact and/or (adult) language learning might lead t...
Analysing Variation in English brings together a range of perspectives on the collection, analysis and broader relevance of variable language data. In the first half of the book, the focus is firmly on the description and comparison of methods for collecting and analysing examples of variation in language. Novel quantitative and computational methods are introduced and exemplified alongside more traditional approaches. The innovative second half of the book establishes and tests the relevance of language variation to other aspects of linguistics such as language change, and to other disciplines such as law and education. Each chapter concludes with a 'Where next?' section, providing guidance on further reading, but also pointers to under-researched areas, designed to help identify good topics for projects and dissertations. Designed to be used by students as well as researchers, the book will be welcomed by those working in English language and linguistics, sociolinguistics or language change.
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).