This book foregrounds the use of different methods for the study of migration, language and ident... more This book foregrounds the use of different methods for the study of migration, language and identity. It brings together studies from fields such as ethnology, linguistics, literature and religious studies. The scenarios investigated range from Czech-German language contact in nineteenth-century Vienna to Eritreans living in the present-day America, and also include studies of migrants in the Ruhr Valley in Germany, far-right discourse in Italy, Yugoslavian and Tunisian migrants in Switzerland, racializing discourses in Brexit Britain and identity assignation of Palestinian dancers. The volume thus displays a wide array of scenarios linked to language, migration and identity as well as a variety of predominantly qualitative methods that have been applied from different disciplinary perspectives.
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Due to their pictographic nature, emojis come with baked-in, grounded semantics. Although this ma... more Due to their pictographic nature, emojis come with baked-in, grounded semantics. Although this makes emojis promising candidates for new forms of more accessible communication, it is still unknown to what degree humans agree on the inherent meaning of emojis when encountering them outside of concrete textual contexts. To bridge this gap, we collected a crowdsourced dataset (made publicly available) of one-word descriptions for 1,289 emojis presented to participants with no surrounding text. The emojis and their interpretations were then examined for ambiguity. We find that, with 30 annotations per emoji, 16 emojis (1.2%) are completely unambiguous, whereas 55 emojis (4.3%) are so ambiguous that the variation in their descriptions is as high as that in randomly chosen descriptions. Most emojis lie between these two extremes. Furthermore, investigating the ambiguity of different types of emojis, we find that emojis representing symbols from established, yet not cross-culturally famili...
Dans le contexte de la collaboration croissante entre la recherche universitaire et la société en... more Dans le contexte de la collaboration croissante entre la recherche universitaire et la société en général, notamment, dans le cadre des activités de sensibilisation, le présent article décrit deux manières par lesquelles les linguistes peuvent intéresser la jeune génération, des enfants entre neuf et dix-neuf ans environ, aux similitudes structurelles et aux différences entre les langues. Ces activités, notamment le jeu des langues et l’olympiade linguistique, valorisent le répertoire linguistique des enfants et des adolescents et les mettent au défi de détecter les structures linguistiques. De plus, elles sensibilisent la jeune génération à l’existence de la linguistique en tant que domaine d’étude et de recherches
This chapter takes a historical sociolinguistic perspective on supralocalisation processes in the... more This chapter takes a historical sociolinguistic perspective on supralocalisation processes in the development of written Standard English by focusing on urban literacies in selected regional centres during the period 1560–1760. More precisely, a case study based on An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions (Kyto et al., Testifying to language and life in Early Modern England. Including a CD-ROM containing an electronic text edition of depositions 1560–1760 (ETED). John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011) traces the development of the present indicative third-person singular variable in depositions from the cities of Durham and Lancaster (north), Norwich (East Anglia) and London (south). This allows us to shed light on the occurrence and development of the –s variant (and its competitors) in written English over a period of 200 years.
1. Setting the scene, letters, standards and historical sociolinguistics Richard J. Watts 2. Asse... more 1. Setting the scene, letters, standards and historical sociolinguistics Richard J. Watts 2. Assessing variability and change in early English letters Juan Manuel Hernandez-Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre 3. Private letters as a source for an alternative history of Middle New High German Stephan Elspass 4. Language in print and handwriting Tony Fairman 5. Heterogeneity vs homogeneity Marianne Hundt 6. Emerging standards in the colonies, variation and the Canadian letter writer Stefan Dollinger 7. Linguistic fingerprints of authors and scribes Alexander Bergs 8. Stylistic variation Anita Auer 9. English aristocratic letters Susan Fitzmaurice 10. Early nineteenth-century pauper letters Mikko Laitinen 11. A non-standard standard? Exploring the evidence from nineteenth-century vernacular letters and diaries Barbara Allen 12. Archaism and dialect in Irish emigrant letters Lukas Pietsch 13. Assessing heterogeneity Lucia Siebers 14. Hypercorrection and the persistence of local dialect features in writing Daniel Schreier 15. Epilogue: where next? Anita Auer, Daniel Schreier and Richard J. Watts References Index.
This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supraloc... more This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period 1500–1700, this study provides new insight into the gradual emergence of supralocal forms. More precisely, the linguistic variables under investigation are third person indicative present tense markers (singular and plural). The findings of this study reveal that each urban centre shows a unique distribution pattern in the adoption of supralocal -(V)s singular and plural zero. Furthermore, verb type as well as text type appear to be important language internal and external factors respectively.
This book foregrounds the use of different methods for the study of migration, language and ident... more This book foregrounds the use of different methods for the study of migration, language and identity. It brings together studies from fields such as ethnology, linguistics, literature and religious studies. The scenarios investigated range from Czech-German language contact in nineteenth-century Vienna to Eritreans living in the present-day America, and also include studies of migrants in the Ruhr Valley in Germany, far-right discourse in Italy, Yugoslavian and Tunisian migrants in Switzerland, racializing discourses in Brexit Britain and identity assignation of Palestinian dancers. The volume thus displays a wide array of scenarios linked to language, migration and identity as well as a variety of predominantly qualitative methods that have been applied from different disciplinary perspectives.
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Due to their pictographic nature, emojis come with baked-in, grounded semantics. Although this ma... more Due to their pictographic nature, emojis come with baked-in, grounded semantics. Although this makes emojis promising candidates for new forms of more accessible communication, it is still unknown to what degree humans agree on the inherent meaning of emojis when encountering them outside of concrete textual contexts. To bridge this gap, we collected a crowdsourced dataset (made publicly available) of one-word descriptions for 1,289 emojis presented to participants with no surrounding text. The emojis and their interpretations were then examined for ambiguity. We find that, with 30 annotations per emoji, 16 emojis (1.2%) are completely unambiguous, whereas 55 emojis (4.3%) are so ambiguous that the variation in their descriptions is as high as that in randomly chosen descriptions. Most emojis lie between these two extremes. Furthermore, investigating the ambiguity of different types of emojis, we find that emojis representing symbols from established, yet not cross-culturally famili...
Dans le contexte de la collaboration croissante entre la recherche universitaire et la société en... more Dans le contexte de la collaboration croissante entre la recherche universitaire et la société en général, notamment, dans le cadre des activités de sensibilisation, le présent article décrit deux manières par lesquelles les linguistes peuvent intéresser la jeune génération, des enfants entre neuf et dix-neuf ans environ, aux similitudes structurelles et aux différences entre les langues. Ces activités, notamment le jeu des langues et l’olympiade linguistique, valorisent le répertoire linguistique des enfants et des adolescents et les mettent au défi de détecter les structures linguistiques. De plus, elles sensibilisent la jeune génération à l’existence de la linguistique en tant que domaine d’étude et de recherches
This chapter takes a historical sociolinguistic perspective on supralocalisation processes in the... more This chapter takes a historical sociolinguistic perspective on supralocalisation processes in the development of written Standard English by focusing on urban literacies in selected regional centres during the period 1560–1760. More precisely, a case study based on An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions (Kyto et al., Testifying to language and life in Early Modern England. Including a CD-ROM containing an electronic text edition of depositions 1560–1760 (ETED). John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011) traces the development of the present indicative third-person singular variable in depositions from the cities of Durham and Lancaster (north), Norwich (East Anglia) and London (south). This allows us to shed light on the occurrence and development of the –s variant (and its competitors) in written English over a period of 200 years.
1. Setting the scene, letters, standards and historical sociolinguistics Richard J. Watts 2. Asse... more 1. Setting the scene, letters, standards and historical sociolinguistics Richard J. Watts 2. Assessing variability and change in early English letters Juan Manuel Hernandez-Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre 3. Private letters as a source for an alternative history of Middle New High German Stephan Elspass 4. Language in print and handwriting Tony Fairman 5. Heterogeneity vs homogeneity Marianne Hundt 6. Emerging standards in the colonies, variation and the Canadian letter writer Stefan Dollinger 7. Linguistic fingerprints of authors and scribes Alexander Bergs 8. Stylistic variation Anita Auer 9. English aristocratic letters Susan Fitzmaurice 10. Early nineteenth-century pauper letters Mikko Laitinen 11. A non-standard standard? Exploring the evidence from nineteenth-century vernacular letters and diaries Barbara Allen 12. Archaism and dialect in Irish emigrant letters Lukas Pietsch 13. Assessing heterogeneity Lucia Siebers 14. Hypercorrection and the persistence of local dialect features in writing Daniel Schreier 15. Epilogue: where next? Anita Auer, Daniel Schreier and Richard J. Watts References Index.
This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supraloc... more This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period 1500–1700, this study provides new insight into the gradual emergence of supralocal forms. More precisely, the linguistic variables under investigation are third person indicative present tense markers (singular and plural). The findings of this study reveal that each urban centre shows a unique distribution pattern in the adoption of supralocal -(V)s singular and plural zero. Furthermore, verb type as well as text type appear to be important language internal and external factors respectively.
A recent and expanding body of sociolinguistic research has focused on so-called ‘heritage langua... more A recent and expanding body of sociolinguistic research has focused on so-called ‘heritage language’ communities – that is to say, communities maintaining a language spoken by children of immigrants ‘which is not a dominant language of the larger (national) society’ (Rothman 2009: 159). In particular, this research area has called into question how heritage language speakers view their linguistic practices, as couched in the context of language maintenance and shift (e.g. Shin 2005), where attitudes and prestige remain an important predictor of change (cf. Lynch 2014). For example, in exploring the motivations for maintaining the endangered variety in a dominant language context, Haynes (2013) has identified that learners with positive attitudes towards Native American varieties did not tend to adopt the same perspective vis-à-vis English. Further, parental attitudes towards younger learners of heritage languages have been identified as a significant predictor of increased performance in structured elicitation tests (Polinsky & Kagan 2007). What remains underexplored to this date, however, is a cross-linguistic dimension to research on attitude and prestige in the heritage language context: ‘[...] a major shortcoming of traditional work on heritage languages is that work on a given community has been done all too often in isolation from related work on other languages [...]’ (Johannessen and Salmons 2015: 3).
The aim of this colloquium is to shed light on the complex factors that contribute to language maintenance and shift in the heritage language context. In particular, we adopt a cross-linguistic perspective, given the above observation. In this respect, a main objective of the colloquium will be to tie together strands of research that relate to attitudes and prestige, in a diverse range of languages, in the hopes of establishing common patterns, and developing established methods for future research.
We wish to address the following questions: What cross-linguistic parallels emerge from the attitudes and prestige theme? Does variation in methodology design contribute as an artefact in the variability of findings? Do different patterns emerge in endangered variety contexts by comparison with ‘healthier’ contexts?
To address the above questions, we have assembled a panel of researchers working in the area of heritage language linguistics, or with strong interests in bridging their current research with scholars already in this area.
This book foregrounds the use of different methods for the study of migration, language and ident... more This book foregrounds the use of different methods for the study of migration, language and identity. It brings together studies from fields such as ethnology, linguistics, literature and religious studies. The scenarios investigated range from Czech-German language contact in nineteenth-century Vienna to Eritreans living in the present-day America, and also include studies of migrants in the Ruhr Valley in Germany, far-right discourse in Italy, Yugoslavian and Tunisian migrants in Switzerland, racializing discourses in Brexit Britain and identity assignation of Palestinian dancers. The volume thus displays a wide array of scenarios linked to language, migration and identity as well as a variety of predominantly qualitative methods that have been applied from different disciplinary perspectives.
Letter Writing and Language Change outlines the historical sociolinguistic value of letter ... more Letter Writing and Language Change outlines the historical sociolinguistic value of letter analysis, both in theory and practice. The chapters in this volume make use of insights from all three 'Waves of Variation Studies', and many of them, either implicitly or explicitly, look at specific aspects of the language of the letter writers in an effort to discover how those writers position themselves and how they attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to construct social identities. The letters are largely from people in the lower strata of social structure, either to addressees of the same social status or of a higher status. In this sense the question of the use of 'standard' and/or 'nonstandard' varieties of English is in the forefront of the contributors' interest. Ultimately, the studies challenge the assumption that there is only one 'legitimate' and homogenous form of English or of any other language.
Linguistics and Literary History
In honour of Sylvia Adamson
Edited by Anita Auer, Victorina Gonz... more Linguistics and Literary History In honour of Sylvia Adamson Edited by Anita Auer, Victorina González-Díaz, Jane Hodson and Violeta Sotirova University of Lausanne / University of Liverpool / University of Sheffield / University of Nottingham Hardbound – Available ISBN 9789027234148 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00
e-Book – Buy from our e-platform [Buy from our e-platform] ISBN 9789027266682 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00
[Also available on Google Play] Linguistics and Literary History systematically explores the advantages of an inter-disciplinary approach within the broad area of English studies. It brings together stylistics, literary theory and diachronic linguistics in order to explore their interaction at various methodological, descriptive and interpretative levels. This unique combination makes this volume on historical stylistics an important work for international scholars and postgraduate students working on the interface between literary history and language change, both from corpus-based and qualitative perspectives. The chapters written by leading scholars in these various fields are an appropriate reference work for teaching and research purposes in the areas of stylistics, historical linguistics, English language and literature, corpus linguistics and literary history.
This volume explores potential paths in historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on t... more This volume explores potential paths in historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on the inter-related areas of methodological innovations, hitherto un- or under-explored textual resources, and theoretical advancements and challenges. The individual chapters cover Dutch, Finnish and different varieties of English and are based on data spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day. Paying tribute to Terttu Nevalainen’s pioneering work, the book highlights the wide range and complexity of the field of historical sociolinguistics and presents achievements and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. The book is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics and digital humanities to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.
Migration brings people into situations where languages other than their native tongues are domin... more Migration brings people into situations where languages other than their native tongues are dominant. Their mother tongues often therewith become minority varieties, for young people and later generations what are now called ‘heritage languages’. This particular kind of multilingual setting appears to correlate with consistent (but variable) processes of change. In the last few years, heritage-language research has been developing rapidly across sub-disciplines as varied as heritage language education (Trifonas & Aravossitas 2015; Kagan et al. 2017), language attrition (Köpke et al. 2007; Schmid 2011), and structural linguistics (see notably Benmamoun et al., 2010; 2013). While these research areas provide broadly detailed and comprehensive overviews on grammatical knowledge and grammatical change in the heritage-language context, less attention has to date been dedicated to sociolinguistic approaches and the role that specific external-linguistic factors play. In this special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism, we foreground the role of external factors in heritage-language variation and change. More precisely, we are concerned with the questions of (a) what effect the prestige of related minority languages/language varieties has in the heritage-language context, and (b) how heritage-language speakers view and evaluate their own linguistic practices, notably also in relation to other languages/language varieties.
Authors: Tino Oudesluijs & Anita Auer.
In Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Kjetil Vikhamar Thengs... more Authors: Tino Oudesluijs & Anita Auer. In Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Kjetil Vikhamar Thengs & Oliver Martin Traxel (eds.), Current Explorations in Middle English. Selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Middle English (ICOME), University of Stavanger, Norway, 2017 (Peter Lang, 2019)
This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supraloc... more This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period 1500-1700, this study provides new insight into the gradual emergence of supralocal forms. More precisely, the linguistic variables under investigation are third person indicative present tense markers (singular and plural). The findings of this study reveal that each urban centre shows a unique distribution pattern in the adoption of supralocal-(V)s singular and plural zero form. Furthermore, verb type as well as text type appear to be important language internal and external factors respectively.
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Papers by Anita Auer
The aim of this colloquium is to shed light on the complex factors that contribute to language maintenance and shift in the heritage language context. In particular, we adopt a cross-linguistic perspective, given the above observation. In this respect, a main objective of the colloquium will be to tie together strands of research that relate to attitudes and prestige, in a diverse range of languages, in the hopes of establishing common patterns, and developing established methods for future research.
We wish to address the following questions:
What cross-linguistic parallels emerge from the attitudes and prestige theme?
Does variation in methodology design contribute as an artefact in the variability of findings?
Do different patterns emerge in endangered variety contexts by comparison with ‘healthier’ contexts?
To address the above questions, we have assembled a panel of researchers working in the area of heritage language linguistics, or with strong interests in bridging their current research with scholars already in this area.
For orders: http://unil.ch/clsl/home/menuinst/publications/pour-commander.html
In honour of Sylvia Adamson
Edited by Anita Auer, Victorina González-Díaz, Jane Hodson and Violeta Sotirova
University of Lausanne / University of Liverpool / University of Sheffield / University of Nottingham
Hardbound – Available
ISBN 9789027234148 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00
e-Book – Buy from our e-platform
[Buy from our e-platform]
ISBN 9789027266682 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00
[Also available on Google Play]
Linguistics and Literary History systematically explores the advantages of an inter-disciplinary approach within the broad area of English studies. It brings together stylistics, literary theory and diachronic linguistics in order to explore their interaction at various methodological, descriptive and interpretative levels. This unique combination makes this volume on historical stylistics an important work for international scholars and postgraduate students working on the interface between literary history and language change, both from corpus-based and qualitative perspectives. The chapters written by leading scholars in these various fields are an appropriate reference work for teaching and research purposes in the areas of stylistics, historical linguistics, English language and literature, corpus linguistics and literary history.
https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/lal.25/main
In Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Kjetil Vikhamar Thengs & Oliver Martin Traxel (eds.), Current Explorations in Middle English. Selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Middle English (ICOME), University of Stavanger, Norway, 2017 (Peter Lang, 2019)
In Anita Auer, Denis Renevey, Camille Marshall & Tino Oudesluijs (eds), Revisiting the Medieval North of England Interdisciplinary Approaches (2019), pp. 1-12.