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Making Waves tells the human story of an academic field based on one-to-one interviews with 43 of the most famous scholars in Variationist Sociolinguistics. Explanations of concepts, ideas, good practice and sage advice come directly from the progenitors of the discipline. An authentic, inside story about the origins of Sociolinguistics as Language Variation and Change, recording the context and spirit of sociolinguistics Gives students access to the views on language variation of major sociolinguists such as Bill Labov and Peter Trudgill Offers a human story of an academic field, and is written in the style of a novel, offering complete accessibility with minimal in-group terminology Provides a timely audio archive of the reminiscences of the major Sociolinguists, including Labov, Fasold, Milroy, Trudgill, and Wolfram, with a companion website featuring 400 audio clips from the interviews. Visit the site at www.wiley.com/go/tagliamonte/makingwaves
The aim of this book is to investigate and attain new insights on how and to what extent the wider sociolinguistic context of language use and contact impinges on formal grammatical structures. The papers contained in the book approach this important problem from various points of view by focusing on language evolution and change, on multilingualism, language mixing and dialect variation, on spoken language, and on creole languages. Given the theoretical perspectives, methodological focus, and analyses, the book will be of interest to theoretical linguists as well as sociolinguists, from undergraduate students to researchers.
The relationship between the individual and the community is at the core of sociolinguistic theorizing. To date, most longitudinal research has been conducted on the basis of trend studies, such as replications of cross-sectional studies, or comparisons between present-day cross-sectional data and ‘legacy’ data. While the past few years have seen an increasing interest in panel research, much of this work has been published in a variety of formats and languages and is thus not easily accessible. This edited volume brings together the major researchers in the field of panel research, highlighting connections and convergences across and between chapters, methods and findings with the aim of initiating a dialogue about best practices and ways forward in sociolinguistic panel studies. By providing, for the first time, a platform for key research on panel data in one coherent edition, this volume aims to shape the agenda in this increasingly vibrant field of research.
Linguistic Variation: Confronting Fact and Theory honors Shana Poplack in bringing together contributions from leading scholars in language variation and change. The book demonstrates how variationist methodology can be applied to the study of linguistic structures and processes. It introduces readers to variation theory, while also providing an overview of current debates on the linguistic, cognitive and sociocultural factors involved in linguistic patterning. With its coverage of a diverse range of language varieties and linguistic problems, this book offers new quantitative analyses of actual language production and processing from both top experts and emerging scholars, and presents students and practitioners with theoretical frameworks to meaningfully engage in accountable research practice.
Textual Parameters in Older Languages takes a contemporary approach to the inherent limitations of using older texts as data for linguistic analysis, drawing on methods of text analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics to supplement traditional historical and philological methods. The focus of the book is on the importance of controlling for textual parameters-defined by the editors as dimensions of variation associated with texts and their production, including text type, degree of poeticality, orality, and dialect-in the analysis of older language data. Failure to do so can result in invalid generalizations; recognizing the influence of textual parameters, conversely, raises a myriad of is...
This volume covers key topics in the field from a variety of leading researchers. In one volume, readers gain exposure to several perspectives in the areas of corpus annotation and analysis, dialogue system construction, theoretical perspectives on communicative intention, context-based generation, and modeling of discourse structure. Based on the 2nd SIGdial workshop on Discourse and Dialogue held in conjunction with Eurospeech 2001, it is of interest to researchers and practitioners in dialogue and discourse processing.
The status of English in Europe is changing, and this book offers a series of studies of attitudes to English today. Until recently English was often seen as an opportunity for Europeans to take part in the global market, but increasingly English is viewed as a threat to the national languages of Europe, and the idea that Europeans are equally at home in English is being challenged. This book will appeal to anyone interested in global English.
The original (1985) edition of this work attempted to cover the main lines of development of phonological theory from the end of the 19th century through the early 1980s. Much work of importance, both theoretical and historiographic, has appeared in subsequent years, and the present edition tries to bring the story up to the end of the 20th century, as the title promised. This has involved an overall editing of the text, in the process correcting some errors of fact and interpretation, as well as the addition of new material and many new references.
This book offers an introduction to the many facets of multilingualism in a changing world. It begins with an overview of the multiplicity of human languages and their geographic distribution, before moving on to the key question of what multilingualism actually is and what is understood by terms such as 'mother tongue', 'native speaker', and 'speech community'. In the chapters that follow, Florian Coulmas systematically explores multilingualism with respect to the individual, institutions, cities, nations, and cyberspace. In each of these domains, the dynamics of language choice are undergoing changes as a result of economic, political, and cultural forces. Against this background, two chap...
This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in the study of bilingualism. It also reflects the enormous increase in different language combinations (including dialects) being investigated, and the use of new methodologies. Moreover, the volume illustrates the growing interdisciplinarity of cross-linguistic influence research, considering extra-linguistic cognitive and social factors besides linguistics. It demonstrates that the time is ripe for a more integrated approach from different disciplines such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to obtain a better understanding of bilingual child acquisition. As such, it is of interest to (psycho/socio)linguists, psychologists and education specialists who study or want to learn about (child) bilingualism.