Jennifer Thorburn

With the move towards the sharing of linguistic data, sociolinguists are now considering, more than ever, methods for creating corpora that maintain req-uisite ethical principles while still allowing for data to be used by researchers from around the globe. This paper examines the ...

This dissertation is a case study of the English spoken in Nain, Nunatsiavut (Labrador), an Inuit community in northern Canada. Conducted within a variationist sociolinguistic framework, it offers a quantitative analysis of a majority language as spoken in an Aboriginal community, an understudied area of research. Nain is an ideal location for this type of study because Labrador Inuit are experiencing rapid language shift as the population becomes predominantly English speaking, with few people learning Inuttitut as their native language, creating an opportunity to examine an emerging variety of English. In this dissertation, I contrast Nain Inuit English with the variety spoken in Newfoundland, the English-speaking region with which residents have historically had contact. I survey three sociolinguistic variables that typify Indigenous English and/or Newfoundland English—one phonological (the realization of interdental fricatives, e.g., this thing pronounced as dis ting), one morph...

Investigating local linguistic norms to discover larger patterns of language behaviour has been standard practice in sociolinguistic study. Looking closely at socially salient variables reveals patterns that problematize accepted trajectories of variation as traditional and newly emerging sociolinguistic identities interact. This paper integrates findings from multiple complementary projects to describe the forces influencing the stopping of interdental fricatives (dis ting for this thing), a highly salient marker of Newfoundland English, in and around St. John’s, the province’s major city. In urbanizing communities multivariate analysis reveals variation patterns typical of dialect erosion: older men maintain traditional norms while younger women move toward the standard, especially in linguistically salient contexts. In the same communities, a timingbased approach finds that young women seem to be agentively inserting stopped forms, suggesting that they have adopted a system with ...

The Innu community of Sheshatshiu, Labrador, is one of an increasingly few groups in which children learn an Aboriginal language at home and enter school speaking little or no English; however, little sociolinguistic research has been conducted on its linguistic situation. Research on language attitudes and use in other Aboriginal communities shows that most of Canada's Aboriginal languages are in decline. Given this precedent, it seems likely that the language of Sheshatshiu would also be endangered and that English would be regarded as the prestige language. -- To determine if this is the case, a questionnaire was administered by inside interviewers to a random stratified sample of 129 men and women, looking at a variety of topics, including prestige, language change and loss, language of instruction in school and patterns of language usage. Data were analysed statistically to determine whether any of the four variables considered (age, education, gender and occupation) had an...

Volume 16 Issue 2 Selected Papers from NWAV 38 ... Becky Childs Coastal Carolina University, rchilds@coastal.edu ... This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol16/iss2/5 For more information, please contact ...

The first researchers to study a linguistic variable develop approaches and methodologies that are often replicated and reified by subsequent scholars. However, reconsidering established approaches can nuance our analyses and provide added insight into the communities and varieties under investigation, e.g. Walker and Meyerhoff’s (2006) reinterpretation of the “following grammatical category” constraint for copula deletion.

We propose a similar reinterpretation, this time of the variable context, for the intensification of adjectives. Specifically, we demonstrate the consequences of variable definitions of intensification: the formal definition proposed by Ito and Tagliamonte (2003)’s foundational paper considers “all AdjPs”, including unintensified zero tokens, while a functional definition (Barnfield and Buchstaller 2010, Rickford et al 2007) considers all intensified adjectives. Based on comparisons of analyses of two data sets (spoken Labrador Inuit English and written data from online forums), we argue that deciding to intensify is a different discourse/pragmatic process than choosing among intensifiers. Consequently, studies that investigate speakers’ intensifier choice should take only intensified tokens as their variable context.