An interview on linguistic variation with...

An interview on linguistic variation with..

The Impact of Labov's Contribution to general Linguistic Theory

The paper first discusses the influence of Labov on certain recent Chomskyan developments, starting from an identification of two radically different readings of the relationship between Labovian variationist sociolinguistics and the dominant theoretical paradigm of the latter half of the 20th century which is Chomskyan theoretical linguistics, i.e. as either a supplement or an alternative. Variation at the level of closely related languages, at the level of the language community, and at the level of the individual, have all been treated by Chomskyans under various headings, thus giving evidence that empirical results stemming from variationist sociolinguistics cannot be ignored. However, the treatment has not led to an integration of variation into Chomskyan theory, nor could it. In the final section we outline what a Labovian materialist alternative to Chomskyan idealism could be. We argue that this calls for a broader definition of sociolinguistics than just variationism and poses demands for both internal integration, viz. of linguistic disciplines, and external integration of the language sciences with evolutionary psychology, anthropology and social history

Audience and the Use of Minority Languages on Twitter

On Twitter, many users tweet in more than one language. In this study, we examine the use of two Dutch minority languages. Users can engage with different audiences and by analyzing different types of tweets, we find that characteristics of the audience influence whether a minority language is used. Furthermore, while most tweets are written in Dutch, in conversations users often switch to the minority language

Het belang van taalkeuze voor het sociaal kapitaal in Nederland

This article focuses on how language choice and how the language (variety) spoken at home contributes to social capital in the Netherlands. Social capital is measured using 17 participation and trust indicators, based on a representative Dutch national survey on social cohesion and well-being among more than 7,500 people aged 15 years or older in 2019. Our study shows that if a dialect or the regional language Low Saxon is most often spoken at home, individuals’ trust level is lower, while participation is higher compared to the group that most often uses Dutch at home. Limburgish and Frisian are not related to trust and/or participation. Crucially, this study reveals that the social capital index overall is not related to language but the two parts of it: trust and participation

The relationship between first language acquisition and dialect variation:Linking resources from distinct disciplines in a CLARIN-NL project

AbstractIt is remarkable that first language acquisition and historical dialectology should have remained strange bedfellows for so long considering the common assumption in historical linguistics that language change is due to the process of non-target transmission of linguistic features, forms and structures between generations, and thus between parents or adults and children. Both disciplines have remained isolated from each other due to, among other things, different research questions, methods of data-collection and types of empirical resources. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the common assumption in historical linguistics mentioned above can be examined with the help of Digital Humanities projects like CLARIN. CLARIN infrastructure makes it possible to carry out e-Humanities type research by combining datasets from distinct disciplines through tools for data processing. The outcome of the CLARIN-NL COAVA-project (acronym of: Cognition, Acquisition and Variation tool) allows researchers to access two datasets from two different sub disciplines simultaneously, namely Dutch first child language acquisition files located in Childes (MacWhinney, 2000) and historical Dutch Dialect Dictionaries through the development of a tool for easy exploration of nouns

Audience and the Use of Minority Languages on Twitter

On Twitter, many users tweet in more than one language. In this study, we examine the use of two Dutch minority languages. Users can engage with different audiences and by analyzing different types of tweets, we find that characteristics of the audience influence whether a minority language is used. Furthermore, while most tweets are written in Dutch, in conversations users often switch to the minority language

Globalization in the margins

http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/39a4b586-f3ba-467a-a976-48e6eaf453f9_TPCS_73_Wang-etal.pd

Syntactic microvariation and methodology: problems and perspectives

Variation in empirical data has been a perseverant problem for theoretical linguistics, especially syntax. Data inconsistencies among authors allegedly analyzing the same phenomenon are ubiquitous in the syntactic literature (e.g., literature on focus-raising in Hungarian; É. Kiss 1987 vs. Lipták 1998), and partly result from the highly informal methodology of data collection. However, even if adequate controls are used to exclude potential biases, variation might remain. The general practice in syntactic research has been to ignore these „microvariations”-mainly in the lack of any systematic empirical method to detect them. The present paper shows that this practice leads to serious theoretical problems and proposes a new empirical method, cluster analysis, to discover, explore and systematize these variations. It also illustrates how this richer empirical basis gives rise to a more fine-grained theoretical analysis