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Variation Studies


Phonological Variation
Syntactic Variation
Semantic Variation

Phonological Variation Perception of sociolinguistic variables Kathryn Campbell-Kibler If linguistic variation does, in fact, carry social meaning, then the hearing and interpreting of such variation is equally as important as the use of it in speech. My dissertation explores the study of listener perceptions of a single sociolinguistic variable, in this case (ING) found in workin' vs. working. My findings all are that there are consistent patterns in the interpretation of (ING), but that many of the ways that the variable can influence the listeners perception of the speaker are dependent on other factors: other linguistic features, individual voice traits, the content of the message and variation in the background of the listener. Phonological Variation in Shanghai Mandarin R. L. Starr and Dan Jurafsky A corpus study of 100 speakers of Shanghai Mandarin, examining variation in the retroflex-alveolar distinction in relation to social variables age, gender, and education. Paper presented at NWAV 2004 Changing economics, changing markets: A sociolinguistic study of Chinese yuppies Qing Zhang This 2001 dissertation compared the use of a range of local variables in the speech of two groups of managers in Beijing Mandarin: Managers in foreign-based financial companies and managers in state-owned businesses. Managers in the foreign-owned businesses, commonly referred to as RChinese yuppiesS, were shown to be constructing a cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin, whereas the managers in state-owned businesses made greater use of local Beijing phonology. The work showed complex gender interactions, as a function of the kinds of personae women and men can successfully construct in the two work settings. This work also demonstrated that variation can be an integral part of social change. Vowel Shifting in Northern Arizona Towns and Ranchlands Lauren Hall-Lew My current primary research project is an English dialect survey of Northern Arizona, which includes the study of the general Western US vowel shifts, focusing on the fronted production of the vowels in words like boat and boot, and the raising of the vowel in ban. My data focuses on the residents of my hometown, Flagstaff, Arizona, and the ranchers who live in the surrounding areas. On the initial impression that these ranchers' speech patterns differ from the townies', my research goals have shifted from a basic dialect survey to an interest in people's connections to the land and to particular land-based lifestyles. Along with fellow graduate student Mary Rose, who conducted a year's worth of ethnographic research in rural Wisconsin, I'm looking at the way people talk in Arizona and what their way of speaking says about their real and imagined connections to the place and time in which they reside. Hall-Lew, Lauren. (To appear). One Shift, Two Groups: When fronting alone is not enough. University of Philadelphia Working Papers in Linguistics 10.2: Selected Papers from NWAVE 32. Rose, Mary and Lauren Hall-Lew. Linguistic Variation and the Rural Imaginary. NWAV33. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 2004. Hall-Lew, Lauren. May 2004. Arizona's Not So Standard English. LanguageMagazine. Hall-Lew, Lauren. Between Communities: Southwestern US English. American Dialect Society. Boston, Mass., January 2004. Hall-Lew, Lauren. One shift, two groups: When fronting along is not enough. NWAV 32. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, October 2003. Hall-Lew, Lauren and Malcah Yaeger-Dror. Totally California? The Occurrence of (ow)-fronting in Arizona English. NWAV 31. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, October 2002. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift Penelope Eckert Ethnographic study of variation among suburban Detroit adolescents, examining the use of variation in the construction of the adolescent social order. The Northern California Vowel Shift Penelope Eckert Ethnographic study of the relation between variation in Northern California Vowels and the emergence of a preadolescent social order. Phonological Variation and Change in Soulatan Gascon Penelope Eckert Based on several years of fieldwork in the commune of Soulan in the Pyrenees, this research examines phonological variation in contemporary Gascon, and in the historical changes from Latin. It also examines language ideology in the bilingual setting. See my Gascon webpage

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Syntactic Variation Syntactic Variation and Linguistic Competence Emily Bender (advisors: Penny Eckert, Tom Wasow, John Rickford, Arnold Zwicky, Ivan Sag) This study investigates the relationship of non-categorical constraints on sociolinguistic variation to competence grammar, based on a case study of copula absence in AAVE. The main thesis is that social and grammatical constraints on variation interact such that variants produced in a disfavoring environment express their social meaning more emphatically. A small-scale experiment provides suggestive evidence in support of this thesis. I argue that the experimental data (together with all of the community-study data on patterned syntactic variation) motivate a rethinking of the boundaries of competence grammar. In particular, we should reconsider whether social meanings, frequency information, and over-specified grammatical constructions should be included. Bender, Emily M. To appear. Variation and Formal Theories of Grammar: HPSG. In Brown, Keith (editor-in-chief). The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition. Oxford: Elsevier Publishers. Bender, Emily M. To appear. On the boundaries of linguistic competence: Matched-guise experiments as evidence of knowledge of grammar. In Borsley, Robert D., ed. Lingua: Special volume on data in syntax, semantics and pragmatics. 2001 Syntactic Variation and Linguistic Competence: The Case of AAVE Copula Absence.Phd Thesis. Stanford University. http://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/dissertation/ Bender, Emily. 2000. Non-categorical constraints in perception. In Minnick Fox, Michelle, Alexander Williams, and Elsi Kaiser, eds. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 7(1). pp.~15--26. Bender, Emily. 1999. Constituting context: Null objects in English recipes revisited.In Alexander, Jim, Na-Rae Han, and Michelle Minnick Fox, eds. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 6(1). pp.~53--68. Side effects to prescriptive efforts to change language usage Emily Bender This study asks whether deliberate prescriptive efforts to change one aspect of language use can have effects beyond the intended one. The prescriptive drive in question is that against so-called gender-neutral `he' (starting in the 1970s). The data studied are multiple editions of a sociology textbook and a corpus of ERIC abstracts. In these data, gender-neutral `he' disppears over time, and the use of singular definite NPs with generic referents also reduce. Bender, Emily M. 1998. Are there any side effects to that prescription? Paper presented at NWAV(E) 27, Athens, Georgia. Small Studies in Syntactic Variation Arnold Zwicky Since 1998, I've been investigating -- by the collection of fortuitous examples, by the systematic elicitation of judgments, and by corpus searches -- a large number of variable phenomena in English syntax, looking at their syntactic, semantic, morphological, prosodic, phonological, and lexical details, as well as their association with discourse functions, (con)textual types (styles, registers, genres), and dimensions of social identity and organization. The list of topics (now numbering about 40) is constantly being added to, with four or five getting the most attention at any given time. Some represent very long-standing interests of mine: Auxiliary Reduction, stranded TO, quasi-serial verbs, count/mass classification, vocatives and other isolated NPs. Some have already resulted in publications of mine: subject omission, exceptional degree modifiers, Wh+THAT. Some have been pursued in projects by Stanford students: GoToGo, THEMSELF, initially reduced questions. Adventures in the Advice Trade Arnold Zwicky Since 2002, I've been teaching and writing about the advice literature on English grammar, usage, and effective writing -- what's usually called the prescriptivist tradition, though the motive propelling this literature is proscription rather than prescription, and there are several very different strains rather than a single tradition. One prong of the project exposes the ideologies and attitudes about language that serve as the underpinning for the advice literature. Another confronts this advice with facts about elite practice, the usage of highly regarded writers of established formal standard English (roughly, the language described in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language). Still another critiques the usefulness of the advice for its intended audiences (who range from small children speaking non-standard varieties to adults hoping to improve their writing for business purposes). The gulf between the advice literature and the facts of elite practice has long been observed, though its depth might actually have been underestimated. In any case, I argue that the gulf reflects the huge disparity between folk understandings of the principles governing language structure and use (on the one hand) and the conceptualizations of linguists (on the other). The project begins with case studies dealing with famous bits of English syntax: possessive antecedents for pronouns, dangling modifiers, split infinitives, stranded vs. fronted prepositions. It then moves to subtler phenomena, like verb-form government in coordination and the absorption of prepositions. The GoToGo project Laura Staum (advised by Arnold Zwicky) Corpus- and experimentally-based investigation of the GoToGo construction among speakers of American English. Significant variation appears to exist regarding what types of examples are produced and/or accepted by different individuals; the data seem to support some version of Zwicky's seed hypothesis (Zwicky 2002). Basic examples of the construction appear below: I'm going to San Francisco and give a talk on firewalls. I'm going home and get a towel. 2004 A Descriptive Study of the GoToGo Construction Unpublished ms. 2005 Using gradient acceptability judgments to investigate a syntactic construction. Paper to be presented at LSA 2005 (with Florian Jaeger) Complementizer that project Laura Staum Ongoing corpus-based investigation of the internal and social factors conditioning the alternation of the that complementizer with the null complementizer in examples like (1) below: (1) I told him (that) I was coming. The literature on this topic has suggested that at least some stylistic factors may participate in the conditioning, but no comprehensive study in the variationist tradition has been attempted. Syntactic Variation and Change in As Far As Constructions John R. Rickford, Tom Wasow, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Juli Espinoza. In an attempt to contribute to the study of syntactic change in progress, we focused on ongoing change in the deletion of the verbal coda ( BE concerned or go ) in topic-delimiting As far as phrases, e.g. in this quotation from Clint Eastwood: People think I'm constantly in motion, as far as making films (is concerned). Our data base consisted of over 1,000 examples--some overheard in everyday usage, others extracted from electronic corpus searches, including historical examples from British and American writers (Jane Austen, Herman Melville). The results of our variable rule analysis revealed that syntactic complexity of the NP constituent in the As Far As phrase was the primary internal constraint, and that Gender, Age and Mode (speech vs. emai vs. writing) were also significant external constraints. The deletion of the verbal coda in these constructions began in the 19th century in the environment that remains the most favored one (sentential NPs), and has been steadily increasing in frequency throughout the 20th century. Syntactic Variation and Change in Progress: Loss of the Verbal Coda in Topic-Restricting As far As Constructions. Language 71.1:102-131. We also presented pre-publication versions of the paper in several places, including NWAV-XXI (U Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1992), UC Berkeley, and Stanford. Negative Inversion in African American Vernacular English. Peter Sells, John R. Rickford, Tom Wasow This research involved a detailed investigation of negative inversion in African American Vernacular English [AAVE], in examples like Don't nobody move and Ain't nothing happenin. Drawing on examples collected from real life, from literature, and from the intuitive judgements of native speakers, we proposed a new optimality theory analysis of this construction, one of the central features of AAVE. Negative Inversion in African American Vernacular English in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14.3:591-627. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. 1993.

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Semantic Variation Tongzhi, Ideologies, and Semantic Change Andrew Wong Based on archival research, participant-observation and face-to-face interviews, this dissertation is a sociolinguistic and ethnographic study of the role of ideology in semantic change. Focusing on the on-going change in meaning of the Chinese word tongzhi from 'comrade' to 'sexual minorities' in Hong Kong, it investigates: (1) the actuation of this semantic change; (2) the extent to which this semantic change has spread from gay rights activists to other social groups (e.g. other lesbians and gay men, mainstream newspapers); and (3) how tongzhi is used differently from similar labels such as gay and tongxinglian zhe 'homosexual.' A popular address term in Communist China, tongzhi was appropriated by the gay rights activists in Hong Kong as a term of reference for sexual minorities in the late 1980s. While historical linguists have explored the conditions for and the causes of semantic change, sociolinguists have developed theories to account for the pejoration of social category labels. Since they study changes that took place in the past, they are unable to capture the social contexts and the discourse conditions in which changes occurred. To resolve this issue, my dissertation examines a semantic change in progress and adopts an approach that emphasizes meanings emergent in discourse rather than decontextualized meanings. Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) The re-appropriation of tongzhi. Language in Society. 34 (5). Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) New directions in the study of language and sexuality (Review Article). Journal of Sociolinguistics. 9 (1) Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) Language, cultural authenticity, and the tongzhi movement. Proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium about Society and Language - Austin. Austin, TX: Department of Linguistics. Clark, Eve and Andrew Wong. (2002) Pragmatic directions about language use: Words and word meanings. Language in Society. 31(2): 181-212. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds.). (2002) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew. (2002) The semantic derogation of tongzhi: A synchronic perspective. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew Wong (eds.). Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. 161-174. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew, Sarah Roberts and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. (2002) Speaking of sex. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds.). Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. 1-21. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew and Qing Zhang. (2000) The linguistic construction of the tongzhi community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 10(2): 248-278. Wong, Andrew. (2000) Explicit introductions in lexical acquisition: A case study. Issues in Applied Linguistics. 11(2): 149-174.