Karen V Beaman

• PhD, Sociolinguistics
• Guest Lecturer at University of Tübingen

This study examines variation and change in adjective intensifiers in two Swabian German speech communities: a mid‑sized, semi‑rural environment (Schwäbisch Gmünd) and a large urban metropolis (Stuttgart). Using sociolinguistic interview data from speakers recorded twice across a 35‑year lifespan, the study shows how social factors influence inten...

The city as a complex socio-cultural structure plays a central role, economically, administratively as well as culturally. Factors such as higher population density, a more expansive infrastructure, and larger social and cultural diversity compared to rural areas have a substantial impact on urban society and urban communication. Focusing on the la...

This chapter reports on the first large-scale panel study in the field of linguistics, which was started in 1967 in Eskilstuna, Sweden. The unique design of this project relied on a real-time trend study in conjunction with a smaller panel component, tracing both individual and generational change over a period of almost 30 years. Labov (2001: 447)...

Fifty years ago, Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968:188) observed that “idiolects do not provide the basis for self-contained or internally consistent grammars;” rather, regularity and coherence, constrained by social factors, is found in the composite grammar of the speech community. Recently, increasing focus has been placed on the role of the in...

The dialectical changes seen across the course of individual lives are typically thought to reflect the attritional influence of standard languages on native dialects. However, the distributional properties of natural languages, which guarantee that lexical knowledge continuously increases across the lifespan, suggest these changes might simply ref...

In a thought-provoking article, Guy (2013:63) claims that “lectal coherence ... [implies] that variables are correlated; if they are not, the cognitive and social reality of the ‘sociolect’ is problematic.” Considerable linguistic research has established that, for structural reasons, variables are correlated; however, structural correlation does n...

This chapter explores the extent to which phonetic environment, lexical frequency, and social factors interact and incite or impede sound change over the lifespan of the individual. The corpus consists of sociolinguistic interviews with 20 panel speakers of Swabian, an Alemannic dialect spoken in southwestern Germany, from two different communities...

The concepts of identity, time and place have long pitted dialectology and sociolinguistics at opposite ends of the methodological spectrum. Traditional dialectologists have concentrated on homogeneous groups of speakers – typically elderly, rural men, who have spent their entire lives in a single location – as the ‘true dialect speakers’. Sociolin...

The sweeping trends in human affairs collectively known as globalization entail accelerating rates of international and intercultural contact. As international travel, global economic expansion, and multicultural communicative integration via technological advances like the Internet all increase, more and more individuals are brought into extensive...

It has generally been accepted that syntactic complexity in language is related to the number, type, and depth of embedding in a text. Syntactically simple authors use short, single clause sentences and rely more heavily on coordinated structures to provide cohesion and show relationships. Syntactically complex authors, on the other hand, use longe...

In the age of increased global mobility, falling trade barriers, and explosive growth in international business, global expansion is on the agenda of most large enterprises. The question on every global company's mind is (or should be) how can they best organize themselves for international operations. Can you do business around the world the same...

Globalization entails a variety of international/intercultural experiences for individuals and consequently different kinds of linguistic contact with speakers of other language varieties. How do speakers' attitudes and orientation towards the intercultural experience relate to their linguistic accommodation and cultural assimilation? The degree of...

Managing across Borders: the Transnational Solution, by Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, has been called one of the 50 most influential business books of the 20th century. The 1989 book, recently reissued in an updated edition, has shaped the way many HR professionals think about global management. Of course, Bartlett's work ranges fur...