SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY

Sociolinguistics and linguistic geography should be considered as complementary rather than mutually contradictory approaches to the phenomena of language variation. Linguistic geography is a branch of historical linguistics based on samples of the stable and traditional, and necessarily somewhat biased in the selection of small communities, older informants, and traditional cultures; however, it provides a framework for interpreting studies of varied populations-in both rural and urban communities. The authors review criticisms of both linguistic geography and of sociolinguistics applications of linguistic geography, and suggest directions in which the findings of linguistic geography may be useful to sociolinguists and others in matters of interdisciplinary cooperation.http://web.ku.edu/~starjrn

Preview: the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67220/2/10.1177_007542427901300103.pd

Understanding U.S. regional linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis

We analyze a Big Data set of geo-tagged tweets for a year (Oct. 2013–Oct. 2014) to understand the regional linguistic variation in the U.S. Prior work on regional linguistic variations usually took a long time to collect data and focused on either rural or urban areas. Geo-tagged Twitter data offers an unprecedented database with rich linguistic representation of fine spatiotemporal resolution and continuity. From the one-year Twitter corpus, we extract lexical characteristics for twitter users by summarizing the frequencies of a set of lexical alternations that each user has used. We spatially aggregate and smooth each lexical characteristic to derive county-based linguistic variables, from which orthogonal dimensions are extracted using the principal component analysis (PCA). Finally a regionalization method is used to discover hierarchical dialect regions using the PCA components. The regionalization results reveal interesting linguistic regional variations in the U.S. The discovered regions not only confirm past research findings in the literature but also provide new insights and a more detailed understanding of very recent linguistic patterns in the U.S

The admissibility of hearsay evidence

This case note concerns the guidance given by the Court of Appeal in R v Riat [2013] 1 Cr App R 2 concerning the admissibility of hearsay evidence in criminal proceedings under the hearsay provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003

Dissertation inaugural sur les causes et la pathologie des cholera

[32] leaves ; 27 cm

Hearsay statements made by witnesses too afraid to tell the truth

The authors consider whether the approach of the Court of Appeal in R v Saunders is consistent with earlier jurisprudence on s.114(1)(d) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003

Expert evidence reliability

Dr Michael Stockdale and Andrea O’Cain consider the recent amendments to the Criminal Procedure Rules and the new Criminal Practice Direction relating to the reliability of expert evidence in criminal proceedings

Geographic and sociopolitical influences on language ideology and attitudes toward language variation in post-unification Germany.

Theoretical work on language ideology has provided a great deal of insight into the nature of language ideology and how it affects and is affected by society. Empirical study of the components of language ideology, however, requires examination of non-linguists' attitudes toward language variation. This dissertation investigates the language attitudes of present-day Germans in the wake of unification, in an attempt to gain insight into the effects of this complex socio-political situation on these perceptions and beliefs. This study employs an adaptation of a perceptual dialectological methodology which was designed to gain access to geographically-based perceptions of language variation on a large scale. A verbal survey was administered to 218 Germans in forty-four different towns throughout the country during the summer of 1995. Informants were asked to rate the levels of 'correctness', 'pleasantness', and 'similarness' for varieties of German spoken in various regions of the country, and drew their perceptions of the German dialect boundaries on a blank map of the country. Then the same 218 informants conversed informally in small groups for half an hour about their attitudes toward language variation. Both the quantitative and the qualitative data are used as evidence supporting the study's hypotheses, and are intended to supplement each other. This data reveals important differences between westerners' and easterners' views on where 'standard' German is spoken, and several social factors are also found to play a role in these differences. Despite the differences, however, the findings also reveal a growing level of similarity in westerners' and easterners' language attitudes, as compared to a similar study undertaken only one year earlier. It is also found that westerners perceive more differences between western and eastern varieties with respect to 'correctness', 'pleasantness', and 'similarness' than easterners do, although westerners and easterners alike perceive differences in the map task. Reasons for and results of these findings are explored, with reference to previous work in language attitudes, language ideology, and in language and discrimination.Ph.D.European historyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLinguisticsPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130223/2/9721966.pd

The admissibility of convictions post Clift and Harrison

Considers the admissibility of convictions under s.18 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 in circumstances in which the victim subsequentkly dies and the person convicted under s.18 is charged with the victim's murder