Variationist Linguistics

Current theories assume that all ellipsis phenomena can be licensed by a feature occupying a preceding functional head (Lobeck 1995, Merchant 1999, 2004). In this paper, however, I show that feature-based treatments cannot account for licensing of verb phrase and noun phrase ellipsis (predicate ellipsis) in American English and African American English (AAE) through evidence that these functional heads must be phonologically overt. AAE is particularly important to establish this generalization due to the fact that production of auxiliary be and the possessive ’s morpheme is typically optional preceding a full predicate, yet experimental evidence from this paper confirms that this optionality disappears in elliptical contexts. The analysis proposed here entails that predicate ellipsis, inwhich overtness is required, and clausal ellipsis,wherein the head said to license ellipsis is necessarily silent, are subject to different licensing conditions.

This paper examines individual differences in constraints on linguistic variation in light of Labov's (2007) proposal that adult change (diffusion) disrupts systems of constraints and Tamminga, MacKenzie, and Embick's (2016) typology of constraints. It is shown that, in pooling data from multiple speakers, some of the complexity in structured community variation may be overlooked. Data on rhoticity from speakers of Bristol English are compared to 34 previous studies of rhoticity in varieties of English around the world. Constraints found to be consistent across varieties are also found to be consistent across speakers of Bristol English, whereas those that differ between varieties also differ between individuals, implying that only those which differ are truly part of the grammar, and that these are indeed disrupted by diffusion.

On the basis of a large-scale online survey carried out during Austria’s ‘first lockdown’ in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, this article discusses variation in pronunciation of the word Quarantäne (‘quarantine’) in standard Austrian German, focusing on the variants [k-] vs. [kv-] in the onset. Results show a clear societal preference for [k-], while also exhibiting a pattern of intergenerational variation whereby young speakers predominantly indicate their preference for [k-] and older speakers for [kv-]. Survey findings are contextualized with a content-based analysis ofsocietal discourses from an online forum discussion centering on the issue, which show considerable polarization as well as no awareness of the intergenerational pattern. The study outcome is related to issues of codification (notably pertaining to the Österreichisches Wörterbuch) as well as general variationist sociolinguistic theorizing, especially Labov’s indicatormarker-stereotype taxonomy and its implications.

Parents' assessment of children's development in the first and the second language is an essential part of their family language policy (FLP) and an important component of parent–child communication. This paper presents a pilot study focused on Russian-speaking immigrant parents' assessment of their children's language knowledge in Russian as a first language and Hebrew as the second language in the context of their FLP. The research questions were as follows: How is parents' assessment of their children's bilingual language development linked to their choice of bilingual versus monolingual preschool education? To what degree are parents' reports of their children's language knowledge similar or different to their children's actual language knowledge? Which domains of language knowledge do parents relate to or ignore when assessing their children's language development? The sample consisted of 27 children (14 from bilingual and 13 from monolingual kindergartens), and their parents. Two sets of measurements were used, one to obtain parents' reports on child's knowledge of Russian and Hebrew and the other to assess children. The finding points out parents' insensitiveness to the length of the children's utterances and their tendency to rationalise FLP by overestimating their children's general language knowledge.

This paper deals with grammatical aspects of code-switching between Italian and Italo-Romance dialects, and focuses on the case of negative constructions featuring a MICA-type particle (i.e. a particle deriving from the Latin MICA(M) " crumb ") in a corpus of Italian and bresciano speech data. The case at hand, which will be examined following the so-called comparative variationist method (cf. Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001 inter alia), will offer valuable insight into the conventionalization of mixing patterns and the interplay between code-switching and convergence in Italo-Romance.

If we are to understand global linguistic diversity, we must first understand the mechanisms which engender and maintain it. This is what the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity project (Australian National University, 2014-2019) aims to examine by studying variation in small communities of the Australasia-Pacific region. Within the framework of the Wellsprings project, this thesis investigates the existence and spread of linguistic variation in the speech community of Raga, on the island of Pentecost, in linguistically diverse Vanuatu. It is primarily a field study, firmly grounded in the survey of social and linguistic data collected in 2015-2017 in north Pentecost, from 58 men and women representing three generations of speakers. This thesis examines variables in three different linguistic domains: use of possessive classifiers (morpho-syntactic); frequency of borrowing from Bislama and nativisation strategies (lexical); and deletion of the phonemic velar fricative (phonological). Quantitative analysis has confirmed intergenerational and intergender variation for the lexical and phonological variables. In a corpus demonstrating an overall low rate of borrowing (1.6%), the findings show that women and younger speakers borrow more frequently from Bislama than the other speakers. Young men are more prone to deleting the velar fricative, perhaps modelling their speech on consonant-dropping prestigious older men. Raga presents no regional diversity and little innovation from the reconstructed proto forms. These features set the language apart within the Vanuatu high-diversity context, and this study also investigates the mechanisms of uniformisation that inhibit the spread of innovative variants in this community of 6,500 speakers. Several factors combine to favour the linguistic conservatism exhibited by Raga. Endogamous marriage practices, maintenance of strong ties with relatives over long distances and generations, reliance on customary mutual obligations, high socio-historical status of the Raga society, and practice of a single religion all impact on the homogeneity of avoana ata raga 'the language of Raga'. With the notable exception of Meyerhoff's studies of Nkep (Meyerhoff 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b), there has been little attempt at probing linguistic variability in the recorded natural speech of diverse speakers of a language of Vanuatu. This thesis adds to the body of research that addresses this gap. The thesis also highlights the value of investigating languages in their social context, and in close collaboration with native speakers. This bottom-up approach is essential in identifying and untangling the factors at play in the complex history of Vanuatu's linguistic diversity.

This article applies the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007) and the Extra-and Intra-territorial Forces (EIF) Model (Buschfeld & Kautzsch 2017; Buschfeld et al. 2018) to Standard English in Trinidad based on the findings of a large-scale attitude study. The results suggest that, in the educational domain in Trinidad, a multidimensional norm orientation with coexisting standards that incorporates exo-and endonormative tendencies is prevalent. The Dynamic Model is not fully able to explain the findings, but the EIF Model can account for this norm complexity. However, the assumption underlying both models that postcolonial Englishes prototypically achieve (full) endonormativity unless their development is stalled at an earlier stage or even reversed is unlikely to fully capture the norm developmental processes in Trinidad and other complex postcolonial speech communities. We therefore propose an extension of the EIF Model that, depending on the constellation, directionality, and continuity of different sets of forces, allows for multinormative stabilization as an alternative development. We also introduce translocality as an alternative theoretical framework for the conceptualization of forces and argue for a more comprehensive understanding of intra-varietal heterogeneity. An extended and modified version of the EIF Model that takes these further complexities into account can help explain the norm developments in highly complex postcolonial speech communities.

In his study the author examines variation in yes/no questions by providing an analysis of 1,259 interrogative structures extracted from about 4,600 text messages of the Swiss SMS French Corpus. Recent studies carried out on corpora of spoken European French have all revealed the massive use by speakers of the variant preserving the subject-verb order (SV 'Tu as des cours ?'), the relatively rare use of the 'est-ce que' variant (ESV 'Est-ce que tu as des cours ?') and the virtual absence of the variant formed by subject clitic inversion (V-Scl 'As-tu des cours ?'). However, like any other type of computer-mediated communication, texting is generally characterised by a set of parameters associated with both oral and written genres: the author shows that in the SMS data V-Scl is preferred to ESV and may even be used in the same text message with SV. Convinced that variation phenomena should be framed within a multidimensional approach (i.e. in terms of interplay between various linguistic and extralinguistic factors), the author focuses here on the role of morphosyntactic parameters which can affect the choice of yes/no interrogative variants. Based on the analysis of the collected data, it is possible, according to the author, to distinguish two types of linguistic environment: low-variability vs. high-variability environments. While the first one includes all syntactic contexts favouring the massive use of SV, the second type covers contexts which are relatively neutral in the selection of variants, as is the case for constructions with modal verbs or non-clitic arguments.

This paper discusses some of the the actual uses, based on oral corpus, of Spanish copula verbs with adjectives in Mexican variety. I argue that copula 'estar' marks an element of subjectivity rather than simple transience as is often claimed. Forthermore, there are some signs of incipient neutralization of the commonly acknowledged semantic opposition between the two copulas, where another kind of opposition is created.

This study investigates how age, gender, social class and dialect influence how frequently speakers of British English use intensifiers (e.g. 'very') in private conversations and whether this has changed over the last two decades. With data drawn from over 600 speakers and 4 M. words included in the British National Corpus 1994 and 2014, it is the most comprehensive study of intensifier usage to date, taking into account 111 intensifier variants. Results show that, in most age groups and social classes, men use intensifiers less frequently than women, and gender differences have diminished to a very limited extent, notably for the middle class. Moreover, intensification rate has increased across the board over time. This could be due to a shift towards a stereotypically more feminine communicative style as the perception of gender roles has changed, a process by which the middle class might have been particularly affected.

Cet article a pour but d’analyser le rôle de la subjectivité dans les processus d’accommodation phonétique des sujets parlants en contexte migratoire et postcolonial, à partir de l’étude du cas d’un jeune adulte migrant d’origine camerounaise, militant dans une association panafricaine à Paris. La subjectivité, processus de construction du sujet, est toujours marquée par le « paradoxe de l’assujettissement » (Butler 2002), soit une tension entre assujettissement et émancipation. À partir de l’analyse de la variabilité phonostylistique dans des interactions publiques à visée politique, il s’agit de montrer dans quelle mesure l’accent fonctionne comme un lieu du désir central dans la subjectivation du sujet racisé, et manifeste une tension entre son désir d’identification à l’autre et son désir de singularisation, résultant en partie des rapports de pouvoir postcoloniaux qui contraignent sa puissance d’agir.

We’ve all been there: you discover some wildly interesting phenomenon in your favorite language of study and you want to examine it as soon as you can. However, before you can get to the interesting bit, you have to plow through tons and tons interview transcripts and withstand a tedious data annotation process that is even more boring than your average English Literature class. This tutorial is intended to encourage you to do it differently, using text mining techniques.

La contribución se ocupa de la historiografía del concepto de «español atlántico» y de la evaluación de la bipartición diatópica en «español atlántico» y «español continental» desde el punto de vista metodológico. La primera parte se dedica a la génesis del concepto en las obras de Diego Catalán y su evolución en la dialectología española (Rafael Lapesa, Alonso Zamora, Germán de Granda, Manuel Alvar) e hispanoamericana (María Beatriz Fontanella de Weinberg, José Joaquín Montes Giraldo), así como a las reacciones críticas (Gregorio Salvador, Juan C. Zamora Munné/Jorge M. Guitart) y a la utilización del concepto en investigaciones más recientes. En la segunda parte, se analizan las dimensiones sincrónica y diacrónica de la bipartición trasatlántica y las condiciones para su validez.

Sociolinguistic variation in Austria and the German-speaking part of Switzerland has traditionally
been described in very different terms. In Austria, the linguistic range between the
standard language and the local dialects has been referred to as a ‘standard-dialectcontinuum’,
whereas the German-speaking part of Switzerland has often been cited as the
typical example of a ‘diglossic’ language community. The sociolinguistic situation in the
Austrian state of Vorarlberg, which is part of a primarily Bavarian-speaking country but
also of the Alemannic dialect region, has not been thoroughly examined in any studies up
to date.
In this paper, we present results from an online-survey in Austria and Switzerland on
the everyday use of dialect and the standard language. According to our informants’ estimates,
the sociolinguistic situation in both Austria and German-speaking Switzerland is
characterised by a significant percentage of dialect use. Still, the standard language is regarded
quite differently in the two countries. A considerable proportion of the Swiss informants
perceive the standard language as a ‘foreign language’. However, this does not
seem to be a common attitude among the Austrian informants. The main difference between
the two countries lies in the observation that Austrians feel they use an intermediate
form between dialect and the standard language, a so-called ‘Umgangssprache’, in many
situations, whereas the Swiss indicate that they speak their local dialect or the standard
language under specific communicative circumstances. However, the German-speaking
Swiss population, as well as the informants from Vorarlberg, do not seem to use an intermediate
form. The situation in Vorarlberg is particularly interesting. On the one hand, as
far as the status of dialect and the dichotomy of dialect and standard are concerned,
Vorarlberg patterns similarly to the German-speaking part of Switzerland. On the other
hand, people from Vorarlberg have to adapt to their Bavarian-speaking fellow countrymen
and women and switch to standard German in intra-national communication (e.g. at the
workplace or on national help lines).

In this paper three different approaches in studying variation in language are discussed; in doing so we focus our attention on how these approaches differ from each other; how they define speech community as a unit of study; how they regard people’s identity; what kind of speech style they analyze and by the end the question of whether there is or not a best method is discussed. The three approaches we take into account are Labovian Speech Community applied in William Labov’s study in New York City (1966a); Social Networks developed by James Milroy and Lesley Milroy in their Belfast study (1978) (Milroy, 1980, 1987); and Community of Practice introduced in sociolinguistics by Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet (1992) in their study on language and gender; this model was applied in Belten High, Detroit by Eckert (2000). Let us start by offering a short summary about the three models and the researches where they are applied.

Postcolonial varieties of English, used in countries such as Nigeria, India and Singapore, are subject to both local ("endonormative") and external ("exonormative") forces, the latter often in the form of British/American English. This gives rise to a stylistic continuum, where informal speech is more endonormatively oriented than formal/educated speech, which, nevertheless, is clearly distinguishable from British/American English. The formal end of the continuum is often regarded as the incipient local standard. Nigerian English (NigE) is the most widely spoken African variety of English, but empirical/quantitative descriptions are rare. In this pilot study, we present an acoustic analysis of eight phonological diphthongs produced in formal contexts by nine educated speakers of NigE with L1 Yoruba and drawn from the ICE Nigeria corpus. Results show that the NigE speakers produced more monophthongal realisations of English phonological diphthongs than speakers of British English (BrE) do, as measured by trajectory length in F1-F2 space. Phonetically, most of these vowels can be considered monophthongs. The results can be explained through two factors at work during the foundation phase of NigE: (1) historical L1 influence and (2) the native English input present in the country, which involved more monophthongal realisations of some phonological diphthongs than in present-day BrE.

Lexical variation counts to-date as one of the largely neglected system levels of modern variationist linguistic research on German. In particular, vertical-social variation on the dialect/standard axis have only sparingly been investigated in previous lexical studies and projects, something that is rather surprising given that investigations on lexical phenomena ('special words') have been a prominent focus in traditional dialectology and also count as one of the most interesting system levels from the speakers' perspective. In this paper we present an investigation on lexical phenomena conducted by means of a nationwide questionnaire, taking into account intra-individual variation. The main aim of the questionnaire survey was to collect data on the lexical variation of the German language in Austria, which firstly enables statements to be made about the areal-horizontal and vertical-social dimension of lexical variation.

Philippine English is one of the few postcolonial varieties of English mainly influenced by American (and not British) English from its inception. Previous research on recent diachronic change indicates that this influence continues. Philippine English followed some of the recent syntactic change going on in American English, although some variables also indicate an emergence of properly Philippine norms (i.e. endonormativity). The present study extends this research by analysing change in lexis and spelling in two parallel corpora from the 1960s and 1990s. Results indicate that, despite the early American influence on Philippine English, it still followed British norms in a substantial minority of cases in the 1960s. By the 1990s, these remnants of British influence have almost wholly been replaced by an adherence to American norms. The results can be accounted for by the retreat of British influence in the world and an increase in American influence during this period. Finally, and more broadly, the article discusses the notion of Americanisation and how it can be traced and accounted for. In particular, it argues that spelling is particularly useful as a variable to measure degrees of Americanisation.

»Vom Tun nicht lassen können«, davon könnten einige in Wien seit rund zehn Jahren ein Lied singen. Der vorliegende Band versteht sich als Festgabe für Alexandra N. Lenz zu einem runden Geburtstag – darüber hinaus ist festlich aber auch eine weitere runde Zäsur zu markieren und zwar das zehnjährige Tun der Jubilarin an der Universität Wien.
Das Nichtlassenkönnen von Alexandra N. Lenz zeichnet ein deutliches Bild in der germanistischen, aber auch der linguistischen Forschungslandschaft nicht nur in Wien, sondern eben auch in ganz Österreich – und »across borders« darüber hinaus. Vielfalt ist nicht nur als Maxime des Untersuchungsgegenstands »Sprachgebrauch in Österreich« an der germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft in den Fokus gerückt, sondern beschreibt auch prinzipiell die Forschungsansätze, empirischen Methoden und Arbeiten, die Alexandra N. Lenz schon vor, aber auch ganz besonders in den letzten zehn Jahren geprägt hat. Angefangen bei der digitalen Forschungsplattform des Projekts »Syntax Hessischer Dialekte« bald darauf gefolgt von der Neuauflage des Variantenwörterbuchs – für den österreichischen Teil auf korpuslinguistisch einmaliger Grundlage des Austrian Media Corpus – über die Gründung eines sprachwissenschaftlichen Doktorand_innennetzwerks der Germanistik und ihrer Freund_innen (»and friends«), eines Netzwerks zur Erforschung des Bairischen über die politischen Grenzen (»across borders«) hinaus, bis hin zur Schaffung des Spezialforschungsbereichs »Deutsch in Österreich: Variation – Kontakt – Perzeption«, der nicht nur der Germanistik, sondern auch der Slawistik sowie dem Zentrum für Translationswissenschaft der Universität Wien, sondern darüber hinaus auch der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und den Universitäten Graz und Salzburg und ihren Nachwuchsforscher_innen zu neuen, interdisziplinären, eben vielfältigen Forschungsmöglichkeiten verholfen hat – Alexandra N. Lenz hat sich nicht nur deutlich in die Wahrnehmung der wissenschaftlichen Landschaft in Österreich gearbeitet, sondern eben auch ihre Forschung in den öffentlichen Diskurs.

En este trabajo analizamos las inconsistencias y contradicciones en que se sustenta la traducción ¿andaluza? de Le petit prince. Discutimos la idea de normalización lingüística subyacente a su propuesta y demostramos cómo, desde una perspectiva teórica, el traductor ignora consciente o inconscientemente el espacio variacional en que se inscriben la lengua española y sus variedades (no sólo geográficas), y de qué modo, en la práctica, el autor produce una hipertrofia en su texto de los fenómenos de interferencia lingüística consustanciales a todo proceso de traducción, buscando de forma premeditada y constante la divergencia respecto de la traducción española.
This paper aims to shed light on the inconsistencies and contradictions to be found in an Andalusian? translation of Le petit prince. We discuss the idea of linguistic normalization that underlies this study. From a theoretical perspective, we demonstrate that the translator consciously or unconsciously ignores the variations (which are not only geographical) that conform the Spanish language. Furthermore, we argue that this translation produces a hypertrophied text, characterized by a constant and deliberate effort to break away from the standard Spanish version.

Considerazioni sulla prospettiva funzionale e valenziale nell'approccio alla grammatica nella linguistica applicata contemporanea.

Considerations about functional and valential perspectives in contemporary applied linguistics' approach to grammar.

Detey, S. (2020). Que signifie « corriger la prononciation du français » aujourd’hui ? De 80 ans de crible phonologique aux problématiques contemporaines (glottophobie, COVID-19 et intelligence artificielle). Le langage et l’homme 55(2), numéro spécial « Didactique de la phonétique du français : et maintenant ? » (J. Sauvage, éd.), 15-42.

Résumé:
Le champ de la didactique de la prononciation en langue étrangère (L2), notamment du français, a bénéficié, au cours des vingt dernières années, d’un regain d’intérêt de la part de chercheurs dans plusieurs sous-domaines des sciences du langage (des phonéticiens s’intéressant à l’acquisition d’une L2 aux spécialistes de l’évaluation de la parole par exemple, Isaacs et Trofimovich 2017), si bien que le champ de la prononciation en L2, après plusieurs décennies moribondes, s’est reconstitué en sous-domaine à part entière avec revues (Journal of Second Language Pronunciation chez John Benjamins depuis 2015) et ouvrages de référence (Colantoni, Steele et Escudero 2015 ; Derwing et Munro 2015). Les notions et savoir-faire fondamentaux sont ainsi accessibles à tous (Lauret 2007 ; Detey 2016) et les évolutions du champ trouvent déjà un écho dans les textes de référence institutionnels (par exemple le cas de l’ « intelligibilité » dans les nouveaux descripteurs du Cadre Européen Commun de Référence pour les Langues (2018) ; Didelot, Racine, Zay et Prikhodkine 2019). Dans le même temps, certaines problématiques à orientation sociale (Candea, Planchenault et Trimaille 2019) ou épistémologique (Sauvage et Billières 2019) sont discutées dans la communauté des enseignants-chercheurs. Toutefois, en dépit de parutions régulières revisitant des problématiques anciennes (Abou Haidar et Llorca 2016) et offrant de nouvelles palettes d’exercices, la didactique de la prononciation en français langue étrangère semble encore, dans les pratiques de formation, souffrir de minoration, alors que l’oral occupe une place grandissante dans les préoccupations des formateurs, en partie grâce à la croissance des corpus de français parlé et de leurs exploitations didactiques au cours des quinze dernières années (Detey 2010a,b), mettant en lumière l’importance de la sélection de l’input offert aux apprenants d’une part, et celle du traitement de la variation inhérente à la parole d’autre part (Detey 2017). Dès lors, 80 ans après la parution de la métaphore du « crible phonologique » de Troubetskoï (1939), et en regard des changements majeurs auxquels nos sociétés sont confrontées - de la poursuite des luttes contre les discriminations linguistiques à la gestion des contraintes didactiques et communicatives engendrées par les pandémies modernes – la conception de la « correction de la prononciation du français » doit elle aussi évoluer, non seulement en tenant compte de son histoire disciplinaire, conceptuelle et praxéologique, mais aussi des perspectives ouvertes par les développements technologiques, d’une époque à une autre (Léon 1962 ; Detey, Fontan et Pellegrini 2016). C’est ce tableau que souhaite dresser, de manière concise et sobre, le présent article.

This book addresses the question whether Educated Indian English is more syllable-timed than British English from two standpoints: production and perception. Many post-colonial varieties of English, which are mostly spoken as a second language in countries such as India, Nigeria and the Philippines, are thought to have a syllable-timed rhythm, whereas first language varieties such as British English are characterized as being stress-timed. While previous studies mostly relied on a single acoustic correlate of speech rhythm, usually duration, the author proposes a multidimensional approach to the production of speech rhythm that takes into account various acoustic correlates. The results reveal that the two varieties differ with regard to a number of dimensions, such as duration, sonority, intensity, loudness, pitch and glottal stop insertion. The second part of the study addresses the question whether the difference in speech rhythm between Indian and British English is perceptually relevant, based on intelligibility and dialect discrimination experiments. The results reveal that speakers generally find the rhythm of their own variety more intelligible and that listeners can identify which variety a speaker is using on the basis of differences in speech rhythm.

This research focuses on the analysis of an ongoing linguistic change related to the weakening and deletion of syllable-final / s/ in the innovative variety of Spanish spoken in Malaga town (Spain).
In this particular variety, deletion of syllable final / s/ is nearly accomplished (Vida Castro, 2004). However, when word-medial / s/ is followed by the voiceless dental plosive-phoneme /t/ (e.g. /ˈpasta/ ‘dough’), two different realizations involving the modification of the following context alternate: first, one that can be referred to as ‘postaspiration’ [th] and second a dental affricate variant [ts] ([ˈpatsa] ‘dough’ instead of the standard [´pasta]). This last realization can easily merge with the palatal affricate /ʧ/.
The acoustic features of the affricate realization [ts], as well as its relatively high frequency of occurrence among young speakers from Malaga town, suggest that the affricate variant is the result of an ongoing linguistic change consisting in resyllabification of word medial / s/. Evidence of this process has also been found in closely related areas of Andalusian Spanish (Moya Corral: 2007, Ruch: 2013 and Tejada Giráldez: 2015).
The principal aims of this paper are: (1) to describe the acoustic features of the different variants of word medial / s/ when followed by the voiceless dental plosive phoneme /t/, in order to confirm the resyllabification hypothesis; (2) to analyse the stylistic and social dimension of the process, based on data taken from a representative sample of speakers, stratified according to three social variables: age, sex and educational level; and, finally, (3) to compare the acoustic features of the syllable final / s/ affricate variant [ts] with those from the palatal affricate phoneme /ʧ/, in order to check if minimal lexical pairs containing these sounds could probably merge.

This dissertation analyzes the variable (s) in the speech of Ciudad Real in the region of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, from the viewpoint of variationist sociolinguistics. The data obtained in this research is contrasted with data on syllable-final s weakening in other Spanish dialects, and Ciudad Real is found to be among the dialects in the incipient stages of the change. The results of this study have shown that phonetic context, sex/gender, educational level and age are good predictors of the variability of the segment in question. It was also shown that distributional factors play a significantly smaller role than had previously been considered. Both real and apparent time data show the variable syllable-final s is stable on a general level, although two changes in progress (one from above and one from below) have also been detected. The variability of syllable-initial s was also analyzed, and it was found that, as regards this variable, Ciudad Real belongs among the vast majority of Spanish dialects with marginal levels of weakening in this context.

This paper gives an overview of the linguistic variation in Morocco, which is characterized by complexity and diversity. The first section introduces a macro-perspective view of linguistic variation. It outlines all the languages used in Morocco and the relationship between them in terms of use and function. This section also concludes two outcomes of this multilingualism context, which are language maintenance and standardization. Second, we give a micro-perspective outlook of linguistic variation. That is, we highlight the phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic variation within the sub-dialects of Moroccan Arabic (see section 2). The section also mentions the gender variation in Morocco. The final section presents the linguistic variation in the social perspective (i.e., within social classes, speech communities, and social networks) in the Moroccan context.

El presente trabajo está dedicado a una forma de variación lingüística que, probablemente debido a su naturaleza variable y transitoria, parece haber sido ignorada en los estudios de traducción: el lenguaje alterado. He acuñado este término para referirme al lenguaje afectado por múltiples factores, como el consumo de drogas o alcohol, la falta de sueño, el estado psicológico del hablante, etc., durante un periodo de tiempo limitado. Creo que su estudio aplicado a la traducción en general y al campo audiovisual en particular puede ser revelador a nivel teórico y útil para los traductores profesionales que se enfrenten a textos marcados por la presencia de este tipo de lenguaje. Mi investigación se centra en el análisis detallado de los diálogos de la película “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, basada en la novela homónima de Hunter S. Thompson, y de su traducción para el doblaje y la subtitulación.

Cet article a pour but de discuter les notions de "français d’Afrique", de "variété" et d''accent", dans le prolongement des réflexions de C. de Féral (2010), en se focalisant sur la dimension phonétique et prosodique du français parlé en Afrique. À partir de l’analyse de la variation phonétique chez une journaliste camerounaise dans des interactions vidéos recueillies sur Youtube, il s’agira d’interroger l’utilité de la notion d’accent camerounais ou africain, défini comme une variété phonologique. Nous montrerons que, lorsqu’on cherche à décrire la variabilité de pratiques langagières socialement situées et nécessairement hétérogènes, la notion de style, conçu comme processus de construction du sens par le langage, convient davantage que les notions réifiantes de français camerounais, de variété et d’accent.

The utopian Eskayan language and script has been spoken for at least three generations by a small community on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Speakers, who use the language in special domains, attribute its creation to a legendary ancestor known as Pinay. In this paper I consider the origins of Eskayan vocabulary, showing how lexical models from Cebuano, Spanish and English account for a small proportion of Eskayan lexemes. The traces of these colonial languages lend important clues to the development of the lexicon as a whole, shedding light on the tumultuous historical context in which Eskayan came into being. Further, the patterning of Eskayan vocabulary reveals Pinay's folklinguistic conceptions about the nature of 'language' and linguistic variation.

Este apartado forma parte del capítulo §5 del libro Grupos léxicos paratácticos en la Edad Media romance: caracterización lingüística, influencia latinizante y tradicionalidad discursiva, que publicará la editorial Peter Lang a lo largo del año 2021. El libro se enmarca en el proyecto I+D “Tradicionalidad discursiva e idiomática, sintaxis del discurso, traducción y cambio lingüístico en la historia del español moderno: prosa (pre-)periodística/ensayística y literaria” (PGC2018-097823-B-I00), financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades del Gobierno de España y cuya investigadora principal es Araceli López Serena. A ella debo enorme gratitud por la lectura de los diferentes bocetos de este capítulo y por la ayuda prestada a la hora de reformular algunos aspectos teóricos volcados en este texto. También Rafael Cano Aguilar ha leído con atención el libro y hecho oportunas observaciones que han contribuido a mejorar la primera versión de la monografía. Afortunadamente, las reflexiones que expongo en este apartado llegan después de la celebración del Coloquio internacional Las tradiciones discursivas en tiempos de lingüística cuantitativa: ¿corrección epistemológica? ¿Deconstrucción metodológica?, celebrado de manera online durante los días 4 y 5 de febrero de 2021 y organizado desde la Universidad Católica de Lovaina por Bert Cornillie, Giulia Mazzola y Miriam Thegel, a quienes agradezco enormemente haberme invitado a participar en él y haberme dado la oportunidad de escuchar las comunicaciones y de debatir con queridos colegas sobre las cuestiones de las que trata este capítulo. Algunas de las ideas que se presentan aquí surgen de dichos debates, y en este sentido agradezco a Bert Cornillie, Mar Garachana, Daniel Jacob, Johannes Kabatek, Marta López Izquierdo, Daniel Sáez Rivera, Sol Sansiñena, Angela Schrott y, especialmente, Álvaro Octavio de Toledo sus comentarios acerca de los problemas que discuto en estas páginas.

Afrikaans rhotic variation and the social meanings of an emplaced sound in the South Cape This dissertation investigates the social meanings of Afrikaans rhotic variation in a town in the South Cape region of the Western Cape Province. The study combines approaches to 'place as location' (traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics) and 'place as meaning' (ethnography and linguistic anthropology) to explore the relationship between geographical place, local social meanings and linguistic variation. Theoretically, I make use of the concept of indexicality, following Silverstein's (2003) indexical orders and Eckert's (2008) indexical fields. To date, there is no previous study that explores Afrikaans variation from these perspectives. The study therefore contributes to the development of Afrikaans linguistics. The participants are residents of Houtiniquadorp, which was a mission station in South Africa's colonial era and declared a Coloured residential area during apartheid. In South Africa, place has been politicised due to colonialism and apartheid. I argue that the racialisation of places contributes to Houtiniquadorpers' sense of locality and belonging. The linguistic form I focus on is Afrikaans /r/. Afrikaans phonetics texts describe alveolar-r [r] as standard, and uvular-r ([ʀ] or [ʁ]; bry-r) as a non-standard, regional feature. In Houtiniquadorp, [ʀ] and [r] variants of the (r) variable are used. My data collection methods were semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. The linguistic variants were quantified from the interview data and description tasks. The qualitative data analysis focused on the participants' narratives about places, lived experiences, and meta-linguistic commentary. I discuss three different sets of results, all of which investigate how people in Houtiniquadorp use Afrikaans /r/ to index locality, belonging, and other forms of social meanings, particularly in the context of social and geographic mobility. I analyse metalinguistic comments, the frequency use of rhotic variants, and the use of variants in interaction. Uvular-r forms part of many Houtiniquadorpers' repertoires, and the participants show varying degrees of awareness of the sound as locally, and socially, meaningful. The results show that while uvular-r is an emplaced sound (i.e. a regional stereotype or dialect feature), the sound has various other non-place meanings that index macro-social categories such as residential status, gender and age. By looking at participants who use both variants, I argue that they use variation to index meaningful moments during the interview interactions. [LINK TO FULL THESIS http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22809]

Вопреки распространённому мнению о том, что белорусско-русская смешанная речь (БРСР), известная также под названием «трасянка», совершенно негомогенна (нерегулярна) или даже хаотична в отношении распределения белорусских или русских элементов, т.е. выражений и конструкций, на основе анализа корпуса, состоящего из разговоров, зафиксированных семейном кругу, описывается ряд тенденций к стабилизации предпочтений русских (в большинстве случаев) или же, напротив, белорусских вариантов (реже) на различных структурных уровнях. Также подчёркивается, что именно БРСР в последние десятилетия являлась для миллионов белорусов кодом первой языковой социализации, а усвоение русского и белорусского языков следует понимать как вторичный процесс в смысле изучения блокирования элементов из общего инвентаря, являющихся неприемлемыми в различных социальных контекстах, если требуется говорить по-русски или (реже) по-белорусски. При этом проводится параллель между белорусской ситуацией и языковой ситуацией в южной Германии, где в городах распространены смешанные идиомы, возникшие на основе местных диалектов и немецкого литературного языка.

This paper (excerpt only at this stage) explores two innovations from DCHP-2, The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Second Edition, that are deemed relevant to address the lexicographical & dialectological problem of regional labelling more generally. www.dchp.ca. Presented on 27 March at Ox-Lex 4, see http://www.pmb.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/library/Documents/Conferences/oxlex_programme_revised_draft_180315.pdf .

Currently under review with the International Journal of Lexicography.