No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Dynamic typology and vernacular universals
Abstract
Vernacular universals arise in the context of sociolinguistic dialectology as generalizations about intralinguistic variation, and their universal status is emerging from analyses of putative crosslinguistic counterparts. The external factors that underlie them have distinctive social and functional aspects. I exemplify them by examining one of them, default singulars, a specific type of copula nonconcord. In English, default singulars occur as invariant was (as in They was too sick to travel). Socially, default singulars appear to develop naturally in the absence of contact models, as dramatically illustrated by Schreier's work (2002) on Tristan da Cunha. Functionally, they appear to result from stripping away inflectional redundancies, especially when they involve complex look-up mechanisms. Vernacular universals, unlike UG-based generalizations, are identified partly in terms of their social patterning, in so far as there are regularities in the way they are socially embedded, and this added dimension may provide a concrete basis for coming to grips with them.
... Additionally, many researchers have presented linguistic evidence showing that the use of was with these different types of subjects is not random but occurs in predictable rankings within communities (e.g. Feagin 1979; Chambers and Trudgill 1998; Chambers 2004; Adger and Smith 2005). In her work on the speech of Anniston, for instance, Feagin (1979) observed a linguistic constraint in which was occurred as the copula linking existential-there and plural noun phrases, and then, in decreasing frequency, with you, we, overtly plural noun phrases, and they. ...
... A scale of subject-types with existential there at one end and they at the other has been adopted by several variationists (e.g. Tagliamonte 1998; Chambers 2004), and evidence of this ordering has been found to operate in varieties of American English (Estes and Wolfram 1994: 285) and in such disparate places as Anniston, Alabama (Feagin 1979), and Buckie, Scotland (Tagliamonte and Smith 1998; Adger and Smith 2005), with several explanations having been offered to account for the order. Adopting the view that such an implicational scale imposes a relative orderliness on dialect variation by limiting the number of lects in a community, Chambers and Trudgill (1998) speculate that the reason for the most common order that has emerged in studies of different dialects is that there is not overtly marked for number, and thus it is the subject-type that occurs most frequently with was in plural contexts, you was is common due to the forces of analogy imposed by I was and it was, and the last three subject-types occur in the order they do because " the saliency of the plurality increases from we to NPpl to they " (133). ...
1. Introduction Although was/were variation is one of the most widely studied vernacular features in English (Adger and Smith 2005: 155), little attention has been paid to its presence in western varieties of American English, despite the insight such an investigation might provide to both the linguistic phenomenon and to regional varieties that have been generally overlooked in the sociolinguistic literature. In this study, therefore, I analyze was/were variation in the middle Rocky Mountain by applying corpus tools to a set of 70 interviews collected in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming toward the compilation of a Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) and compare findings from this analysis with those of studies on was/were variation in other varieties of English. In light of these findings, I will address some theoretical issues concerning was/were variation, particularly the popular notion that it adheres to an implicational scale and how well this scale applies to was/were variation in the LAMR collection.
... Chapter Five considers the theoretical implications of the findings earlier in the volume, and Schreier establishes seven principles on the basis of the results of his comparative analysis. The first reiterates CCR's position as a vernacular universal (Chambers 2000(Chambers , 2004 -every native speaker of English has CCR some of the time. Secondly, the similarity between stable British and US varieties, on the one hand, and koineised NZE, on the other, leads Schreier to claim that contact between varieties which share similar phonotactic systems does not lead to an increase in CCR, but the difference between these varieties and those with greater histories of contact suggests that CCR is more likely to be found, thirdly, in accents derived from contact between varieties with distinct phonotactics. ...
... Chapter Five considers the theoretical implications of the findings earlier in the volume, and Schreier establishes seven principles on the basis of the results of his comparative analysis. The first reiterates CCR's position as a vernacular universal (Chambers 2000(Chambers , 2004 -every native speaker of English has CCR some of the time. Secondly, the similarity between stable British and US varieties, on the one hand, and koineised NZE, on the other, leads Schreier to claim that contact between varieties which share similar phonotactic systems does not lead to an increase in CCR, but the difference between these varieties and those with greater histories of contact suggests that CCR is more likely to be found, thirdly, in accents derived from contact between varieties with distinct phonotactics. ...
... Poderiamos, assim, no âmbito da hipótese de universais em variação linguística, nomeadamente os de natureza vernacular ou popular, referida por vários autores (Chambers, 2004;Szmrecsanyi e Kortmann, 2009;Trudgill, 2009, entre outros), e atendendo aos aspetos sociais e estruturais em comum, encarar a possibilidade de considerar a construção ter existencial como uma tendência vernacular do português pós-colonial (a par de outras), isomórfica e com especificações locais (possibilidade de ter existencial pessoal no PB, por exemplo), consoante as configurações histórias dência ou não para a realização do argumento externo 14 , sobretudo nas variedades populares, e, num plano mais alargado, a articulação com as construções com estar na expressão da existência. ...
A sintaxe do português, tal como outros domínios do seu sistema, mudou ao longo do tempo. No entanto, algumas variedades do português europeu (PE), sobretudo insulares, exibem traços sintáticos não-padrão mais conservadores (Carrilho e Pereira, 2011; Segura, 2013; Martins, 2016), que resistiram à mudança ocor-rida em variedades continentais, de que é exemplo o uso de ter em construções existenciais (onde eu trabalho tem muita gente de idade). O estudo que propomos, realizado no âmbito da Sociolinguística Variacionista (Weinreich, Labov e Herzog, 1968; Labov, 1972), visa analisar as ocorrências de ter e de haver neste tipo de construções em amostras do PE falado no Funchal (PEI-Funchal), selecionadas a partir do Corpus Concor-dância (Bazenga, 2014). Os resultados apontam para valores significativos do uso da variante ter não-padrão-embora não tão expressivos quanto os observados em variedades do Português do Brasil (PB) (Mattos e Silva, 2002a, 2002b; Avelar, 2006a, 2006b)-como também para a influência de variáveis linguísticas (mor-fologia do verbo e traço semântico do N que integra o SN à sua direita) e sociais (género e nível de escolari-dade dos falantes), em conformidade com o observado em trabalhos similares, realizados no âmbito das vari-edades do PB). Palavras-chave: variação ter/haver em construções existenciais, sociolinguística variacionista, variedade do PE falado no Funchal, ilha da Madeira. 1. Introdução A construção existencial canónica em Português Europeu (PE) contemporâneo pode ser representada pela configuração Ø haver y, no qual y é um constituinte interpretado co-mo argumento interno (objeto direto). Por não selecionar um argumento externo ou su-jeito, o verbo realiza-se invariavelmente na 3.ª pessoa do singular, sendo a construção analisada também como impessoal: (1) Há muitos apartamentos para alugar no Funchal/este ano. No entanto, nas variedades faladas do português do Brasil (PB), os falantes recorrem maioritariamente ao verbo ter realizado numa estrutura deste tipo, considerada a cons-trução existencial padrão. O uso do verbo haver, com valor existencial, é não só pouco frequente, como está também submetido a um maior número de restrições.
... This high rate of non-agreement is striking given the relative infrequency of non-agreement elsewhere in English (Chambers 2004 , Cheshire and Fox 2009, Meechan and Foley 1994). It also raises the issue of whether or not it makes sense to treat agreement patterns like those in (2) ...
When using existential constructions to introduce plural NPs (e.g., there are dishes in the sink), speakers have the option of using a plural or singular form of the verb. In other words, speakers can use agreeing (plural) or non-agreeing (singular) forms of the verb when the NP is plural. Previous research reveals that non-agreement under existential there is the norm, even in standard varieties of spoken English. Speakers use non-agreeing forms, such as there’s or there is, in roughly two-thirds of all tokens with plural NPs. This is striking, because other forms of non-agreement are relatively uncommon in standard varieties of spoken English. There is mounting evidence, though, that the two present tense non-agreeing forms there is + NPpl and there’s + NPpl are neither syntactically nor sociolinguistically equivalent. While the full verb non-agreeing form there is NPpl seems to be socially distributed like a stable, stigmatized variant, the cliticized non-agreeing form there’s + NPpl appears to be widespread and relatively free of social stigma. In this paper, I investigate whether there’s + NPpl and there is + NPpl constitute distinct sociolinguistic variants by testing how listeners socially evaluate the speakers who use them. The results of this perception study demonstrate that there’s + NPpl is much less socially stigmatized than there is + NPpl, and it is almost identical to the standard agreeing form there are + NPpl in how it influences social perceptions.
... Speakers of many varieties of English can variably establish agreement with a plural NP in the present and the past tense of existential clauses, such that examples like (1) and (2) can be found throughout the Anglophone world (Chambers, 2004;Kortmann & Lunkenheimer, 2013:172). ...
The core activity of variationist sociolinguistics has been to describe and compare, for particular linguistic variables or changes in progress, the linguistic, social, and other types of predictors that influence the variation, usually measuring these predictors quantitatively by applying multiple regression to one or more data sets. In some cases, variationists have been able to explain certain findings with appeals to linguistic theory, usually drawn from the generative tradition. This paper argues that the principles of Cognitive Linguistics, in particular the spreading-activation model of linguistic production, lead naturally to three powerful predictor types: markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. Only the last of these has received significant attention in previous variationist work. We demonstrate that these three principles are very successful at predicting the direction and size of the constraints on variation in verb agreement in plural existential clauses, both in English (using data from the spoken section of the British National Corpus) and in Spanish (using data from sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Puerto Rico). In some cases, the same larger principle accurately predicts effects in opposite directions in the two languages. We encourage variationists to test these types of predictors on other morphosyntactic alternations as well as other variables. Cognitive Linguistics offers the possibility of modeling variation in a way that is explanatory as well as descriptive.
... It is against the background of such observations that hotly debated notions such as " vernacular universals " (Chambers 2004) and " angloversals " (Mair 2003) need to be seen and evaluated. Intuitively, it appears to make a lot of sense to invoke some sort of universalist explanation for common properties of disconnected linguistic systems that fail to be motivated by the ingredients that fed these systems. ...
This contribution presents and discusses a number of different, mutually complementary perspectives and approaches to the comparative study of the grammar of English varieties. As a recurrent theme of all these approaches, we address the question of how analyses of recurrent cross-dialectal grammatical patterns can contribute to the understanding of the underlying causes of variation, focusing on hypotheses involving language contact, language-internal dialect contact and multilingualism as causative factors. Case studies exemplifying the different approaches are taken from the study of pronominal systems, tense/aspect use in learner Englishes and contact varieties of English, and the syntax of embedded questions in world-wide varieties of English, among others. We argue that a mere comparison of surface forms may entail severe problems since identical or similar surface forms may hide differences in terms of function, distribution and historical development.
... Many vernacular universals of non-standard features can also be found in almost every variety of English (e.g., the use of plural and other common grammatical features). The commonalities of many non-standard features across different varieties of English suggest that variables other than those coming from the speakers' L1 exist (Chambers, 2004). These universals may be derived from both contact-induced language changes (e.g., cultural and linguistic influence of L1 or other languages) and universal tendencies of different linguistic features (Thomason, 2009). ...
As a result of growing globalization, the learning experience of second/foreign (L2/FL) language learners has been inextricably linked to complex social structures and networks. Through a sociolinguistic lens, this paper provides a critical review of L2/FL learning, identity negotiation, and community of practice in the face of incremental changes in linguistic systems and norms concomitant with gradual transformations in politics, society, and economics. In different social structures, identity emerges and is formed in complex social, cultural, and interactional phenomena. Due to the complicity of identity work, methods employed in identity and language learning entail both qualitative and quantitative approaches, including micro and macro analysis of language use, and ethnographic study on social and cultural practices. It is examined in this paper how identity has been conceptualized in sociocultural theories of language learning. Moreover, I probe into the context in which language learning takes place and discuss to what extent L2 and FL communities overlap and exchange. I argue for a perspective on the "circumstantiality" of language learning and communities of practice. At the end of this paper, reflections on identity work are offered and implications for language learning are discussed in the hope of relevant issues to be further explored.
... Zürrer 1999, Nübling 2005) could be interpreted as follows: Isolation with regard to the Germanic/Alemannic dialect continuum alone is a sufficient condition for the emergence of complex, intransparent structures, despite the fact that the dialect of Issime is in close contact with other, Romance languages/varieties (Italian, French, Franco-Provençal, Piemontese). The second line of investigation in sociolinguistic typology runs under the heading of vernacular universals (Chambers 2004). Chambers argues that there is a universally reoccurring set of typological features that is found in vernaculars wherever they are spoken. ...
Much theorizing in language change research is made without taking into account dialect data. The present volume shows that the study of dialect variation has the potential to play a central role in the process of finding answers to the fundamental questions of theoretical historical linguistics. As compared to most cross-linguistic and diachronic data, dialect data are unusually high in resolution. As Moulton (1962: 25) puts it, dialect comparison can be seen as a thought experiment, as a laboratory, because genetically closely related varieties demonstrate the effects language change may have under subtly varying conditions: What happens when a particular innovation is adopted in several dialects where it meets similar but slightly different linguistic environments? In addition, dialects seem to be superior data to build a theory of linguistic change on, since dialects are relatively free of standardization and therefore more tolerant of variant competition in grammar. Furthermore, variants gradually spread not only on the temporal, but also on the spatial dimension. By a careful study of subtle dialect differences in space we might therefore expect to uncover the minimal differences of implementational steps that have taken place in the course of linguistic history.
Аннотация
В статье рассматривается оформление количественной конструкции в разновидностях русской речи, относящихся к пост-пиджинному континууму, а именно в речи старшего поколения двуязычных носителей южно-тунгусских языков (нанайского и ульчского). Наряду со стандартными употреблениями с генитивом типа два дома, пять братьев в их речи встречаются отсутствующие в литературном русском номинативные конструкции типа два дом, пять братья. Структурно они похожи на тунгусские количественные конструкции, однако можно предполагать и другие источники: наследование синтаксиса количественной конструкции из пиджина, из диалектной речи монолингвов или результат недоусвоения русской системы. Свидетельства в пользу того, что мы имеем дело именно с копированием тунгусской синтаксической модели, дает количественный анализ вариативности на корпусном материале. Частотное распределение между генитивной и номинативной моделями регулируется семантикой существительного и числительного: сочетания с существительными времени и меры, а также конструкции с большими числами склонны к стандартному генитивному оформлению. Все это контексты, более характерные для общения на русском языке, чем на южно-тунгусских, т.е. такие, в которых естественно ожидать меньшего контактного влияния. За распределение между двумя конкурирующими моделями с номинативом (два брат vs. два братья) отвечают те же факторы, что и в южно-тунгусских языках. Рассмотренные данные интересны в контексте более общего вопроса о контактных явлениях в грамматике. Полученные данные подтверждают предположение о том, что заимствованию легче подвергаются те грамматические черты языка-донора, которые соответствуют общим типологическими тенденциями и функционально мотивированы.
This article documents the historical development and synchronic variation of so-called “/h/ insertion” (/h/ before vowel-initial words such as apple , under , etc.). It argues that the maintenance of /h/ insertion in post-colonial English varieties around the world provides an ideal opportunity for research on language change under dialect contact scenarios involving British donors and other dialects. After an assessment of regional distribution patterns in current World Englishes, I present some first findings from a large-scale quantitative analysis of Tristan da Cunha English, where /h/ insertion, firmly attested yet nearing obsolescence in British English, has survived into the 21st century. The quantitative analysis provides important insights into donor attribution and competition-selection processes that accompany dialect contact and koinéization, with special reference to theoretical concepts such as colonial lag, feature pool formation and founder effects. A holistic application of the concept of colonial lag to post-colonial English varieties needs to be refined and critically assessed. I argue that entire linguistic systems (in the form of koinés) are not conservative as such but that arrested language (and dialect) change operates on a feature-specific level instead.
It is well documented that the study of differences in grammaticality contrasts across the world's languages has implications for the synchronic study of preferential/frequency contrasts within a single language. Our paper extends this observation, arguing that the cross-linguistic study of both grammaticality and frequency contrasts can be crucial to the proper characterization of patterns of diachronic change. As an illustration of this proposal, we investigate patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation in the use of postverbal negative quantifiers (e.g., nothing, nobody, no book, etc., as in, I know nothing ) versus negative polarity items under negation (e.g., not … anything, not … anybody, not … any book , etc., as in, I do n't know anything ) in English. We show how a detailed comparison with similar patterns found elsewhere in closely related languages can give us a better understanding of which linguistic factors condition the use of these different kinds of indefinites in Modern Spoken English and a new perspective on a well-studied proposed change in progress in the English quantificational system.
Although number nonagreement is typically stigmatized and relatively uncommon in English, it is the norm in existential there constructions. Specifically, the nonagreeing form there's + NPpl enjoys widespread use and acceptance – most speakers use there's more frequently than even plural forms (e.g. there are) to introduce plural nouns. Moreover, it has been argued that there's + NPpl is becoming more frequent and socially accepted over time. This study uses social perception experiments to analyze whether there's + NPpl is becoming the unmarked form for introducing plural nouns in the present tense. The results of these experiments demonstrate that (1) there's + NPpl is sociolinguistically distinct from other singular, nonagreeing forms (e.g. there is), (2) the use of there's + NPpl appears to lack any social stigma, even among listeners who describe themselves as very bothered by nonstandard language use, and (3) the prescriptively correct present tense plural agreeing form there are is perceived as somewhat hyperstandard.
In this chapter I first consider how complex it is to define a variety of English in multilingual settings such as the Philippines and then how complex it is to define a native speaker in such settings. This will include a discussion on the ownership of English in contexts where English is used by multilinguals for whom English is an additional language. I then present examples of how English is being adapted by multilinguals in the region, focussing on the Philippines, and also discuss how it is being used as a lingua franca in the region, using data drawn from the Asian Corpus of English (ACE). Examples include a study on the use or non-use of tense markings by first-language speakers of Malay. The findings raise interesting issues about the role of the speakers’ first language on their English. I conclude with some considerations for the teaching of English in the multilingual Philippines.
The increasing diversification of English qua World Englishes contributes to cross-linguistic variation. Still, we tend to consider and model varieties of English from a language-internal perspective. Taking Mair’s (2013) World System of Englishes as a starting point, I here explore how to model World Englishes from a cross-linguistic typological perspective, commenting on the tension between normative pressure and cross-linguistic tendencies and generalizations. Variation studies and language typology investigate micro and macro variation, respectively, though the empirical domains in focus and the methodologies employed show considerable overlap. Moreover, the traditional distinction between language and variety becomes increasingly difficult to draw in today’s multilingual and highly interconnected world. I examine the commonalities and differences of the two approaches to language variation that have largely been working independently of one another focusing on language universals and the ways that grammatical phenomena from World Englishes match up against them. Varieties of English attest a good deal of typological variation, though they also offer curious features rarely found in other languages.
When addressing family members or friends, letter writers enter a common ground of some sort, where, as research has shown, the rules of everyday interaction apply (Nurmi and Palander-Colin 2008). In different historical periods, familiar correspondence is thus very much about maintaining existing bonds and about phatic communion. The situation is likely to be very different in the case of institutional recipients, in particular if somebody addresses a given institution for the first time. The data selected for the study, the 1819 applications to the British Colonial Office for the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme (TNA 48/41–6), include many letters written by “first timers” (i.e., the encoders1 who have not addressed the institution before). These letters may provide some insights into the specific participation framework of the first-time writers in their interaction with the institution.
In the paper, I propose that contact initiation may be related to the literacy levels of letter-writers, focusing on what I refer to as “technical literacy”. Based on some parameters thereof, I distinguish between two broad groups of informants, reflecting what may be described as standard and non-standard literacies, respectively. The two groups, I assume, do not operate within the same participation framework and, therefore, display pragmatic and linguistic differences in constructing the initial encounters. Moreover, the analysis of these initiations offers a new perspective on the routinisation of institutional correspondence.
The language of letters, especially from lower social strata, may provide some of the best data available for pre-twentieth-century language history from below, because it may accurately represent features of spoken language. To illustrate how much variation – and examples of ‘non-standard’/vernacular usage – may be extracted from letters, this study reports on a survey of citations in an early historical study of Irish emigration based on letters. The survey of citations from a study by a historian reveals numerous features of potential interest to linguists working on earlier Irish English and its influence on other Englishes, thus indicating the wealth of vernacular features that may be found in collections and corpora of personal letters.
Archival oral histories provide sociolinguists with invaluable empirical insight, particularly with respect to studying vernaculars of the past. Because the goal of the oral history methodology is to capture authentic, first-person accounts, the recordings are comparable to sociolinguistic interviews. In this audio feature, the Farm Work and Farm Life Since 1890 Oral History project, which contains interviews with elderly farmers in Ontario, Canada, born between 1890 and 1920, is used to exemplify the utility of oral histories, particularly for variationist sociolinguists. The audio feature first demonstrates the parallels between sociolinguistic interviews and oral histories: both exhibit Labovian "casual speech" and high-emotive topics, both diminish the role of the interviewer, and, perhaps most importantly for variationist sociolinguists, both contain sociolinguistic variation. The remainder of the audio feature highlights some of this variation, including negative concord, was/were variation, and discourse like, and closes with a discussion of two revelations about the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic nature of the speech communities examined.
This contribution focuses on processes of language feature convergence which gradually lead to linguistic stabilization over time, whereby specific attention will be given to the process of Englishization in the South-Asian area. The chapter outlines some basic concepts pertaining language universals, contact, and change, as well as descriptive approaches to world varieties of English by referring to the feature classification proposed by Meshtrie and Bhatt. Then, as an explanatory case, it presents the results of a study of verb-particle constructions in a well-established variety of English (i.e., Indian English) obtained by sampling data from sources varying in time, genre, and register with a special focus on the methodological procedures and the analysis tools adopted to extract specific information from the data. Finally, the implications of those findings for future research on the process of language standardization in new varieties of English will be further explored.
In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features.
This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard language ideology, the retention of features from Italo-Romance dialects, the standardization of patterns borrowed from English, and the developmental tendencies of standard Italian in Switzerland. The contributions investigate phonetic/phonological, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena, addressed by several empirical methodologies and theoretical vantage points.
This work is of interest to scholars and students working on language variation and change, especially those focusing on standard languages and standardization dynamics.
This paper addresses the contribution that corpus-based studies of syntactic variation can make to the construction, elaboration and testing of formal syntactic theories, with a particular focus on the testing dimension. In particular, I present a new empirical study of obligatory and optional asymmetric negative concord phenomena, and I show how an influential analysis for obligatory concord patterns (de Swart, 2010) can be tested using variation data through looking at the predictions that its natural probabilistic extension makes for the forms, interpretations and frequency distributions of expressions in languages in which asymmetric concord is optional. In obligatory negative concord languages like Spanish, negative indefinites, such as nadie ‘no one’, appear bare in preverbal position (i.e. in an expression like Nadie ha venido ‘No one came’), but they co-occur with the negative marker no in postverbal negative concord structures such as No he visto a nadie ‘I did not see anyone.’ (lit. ‘I did not see no one.’). Furthermore, in this language, co-occurrence between a negative marker and an n-word is either prohibited ( * Nadie no ha venido ), or it is obligatory ( *He visto a nadie). Québec French shows a variable version of the Spanish pattern in which the negation marker optionally co-occurs with postverbal negative indefinites ( J’ai ( pas ) vu personne ‘I saw no one’) but is prohibited with preverbal negative indefinites * Personne est pas venu (Ok: Personne est venu. ‘No one came’). I show how the predictions for Montréal French of de Swart’s analysis of Spanish can be tested (and, in this case, mostly verified) using a quantitative study of the distribution of bare and concord structures in the Montréal 84 corpus of spoken Montréal French (Thibault & Vincent, 1990) through looking at its natural extension within Boersma (1998)’s stochastic generalization of the Optimality Theory framework, which is the framework in which de Swart’s proposal is set.
This chapter provides an overview of the main topics concerning the restandardization process of Italian. We will first discuss some general issues related to the Italian sociolinguistic situation, paying special attention to the status of Italo-Romance dialects and their relationship with Italian, the demotization process entailed by the twentieth century massive spread of the standard language, and the connection between neo-standard Italian and regional standards. The focus will then turn to neo-standard Italian: in particular, we will deal with some morphosyntactic features which were excluded from the standard literary norm (codified and established in the sixteenth century) but have survived over time in non-standard varieties. These features finally penetrated the standard usage, progressively giving rise to what is called neo-standard Italian. After a concise review of previous studies on neo-standard Italian, we will situate this variety within the current debate on the development of “new standards” in various European languages. In this respect, special consideration will be given to the notions of “destandardization”, “informalization” and “dehomogenization”. We conclude by presenting a brief outline of the chapters in this volume.
Non-standard features such as copula deletion have long been dismissed as learner errors or were interpreted as results of simplification processes in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and only recent publications tend to acknowledge the influence of language contact in ELF settings (cf. Schneider 2012). The present paper analyses tokens of copula deletion in the Asian Corpus of English (ACE 2014) with respect to speaker L1s, situational context and syntactic environment, with our results suggesting a correlation between copula usage patterns in the speakers’ L1s and constructions involving copula deletion found in ACE. Thus, opening up the field to ELF settings, our data confirm findings of previous studies such as Sharma (2009) that point to contact-induced copula usage in non-standard English(es).
L'italiano mostra un'ampia e complessa gamma di possibilità di costruzione di frasi relative, che si realizzano diversamente nelle sue varietà. Dopo una breve panoramica sulle costruzioni relative standard e non standard dell'italiano (§ 2.) e qualche considerazione di carattere più generale sulla diffusione di costruzioni consimili nelle varietà di altre lingue europee (§ 3.), ci si concentrerà sulle costruzioni relative presenti nel corpus a cui il presente volume è dedicato; si indagherà con quale frequenza compaiano i vari tipi di costruzione attestati, e con quale significatività statistica fattori linguistici diversi ne influenzino la realizzazione (§ 4.). L'analisi dei dati è basata su un modello statistico di analisi della regressione noto come "modello a effetti misti" (v. § § 4.1., 4.2., 4.3.).
We focuse on plural agreement within the Noun Phrase in urban varieties of Portuguese, in the light of Theory of Variation and Change assumptions (Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, 1968) and based on the speech of individuals with fundamental, medium and superior education level, distributed, yet, for three age groups and sex. We suggest that nominal agreement is a categorical rule in European Portuguese and a variable rule in Brazilian Portuguese and in São Tomé Portuguese, although these two varieties tend to adopt the canonical plural marking. The variable rule implementation is strongly determined by the linear and relative position of the constituent within the Noun Phrase and dependent on the action of external factors, among which education level, that seems congregate different aspects that characterize individuals from social point of view.
This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than ever before, and to rethink standard assumptions about language history and the methods and approaches to its study. In 68 chapters from specialists whose fields range from statistical modeling to acoustic phonetics, this handbook presents the field in an innovative way, setting a new standard of cross-theoretical collaboration, and rethinking the evidence of language change in English over the centuries. It considers issues of the development of Englishes, including creole and pidgin varieties. It presents various approaches from language contact and typology and rethinks the categorization of language, including interfaces with information structure. The book highlights the recent and ongoing developments of Englishes in Africa, Asia, and Australia, and celebrates the vitality of language change over time, in various contexts, cultures, and societies, and through many different processes.
From a Labovian quantitative perspective of language variation, social dimensions of speakers may correlate with their linguistic uses, revealing whether a variant is a stereotype, or a marker, and showing systematic social stratification (Labov, 1994). The social meaning of variation is an emergent phenomenon and the evaluation of linguistic forms take place through interaction in different ways depending on who is using them and who is doing the interpretation. In addition to the systematic recording of spontaneous speech, other elicitation techniques such as written questionnaires and oral tasks are needed, in order to achieve a greater observational and explanatory force of linguistic variation. It is generally accepted that the acceptability of linguistic variables occurs on a continuum of grammatical judgment degrees made by the speakers, presented by the preference for prescriptive and/or a prestige variant on one side, and a stigmatized variant in the opposite scenario (Cornips, 2014)
This talk deals with syntactic or morphosyntactic variation in Portuguese, exploring their spatial and social dimensions (Johnstone, 2010; Brit Mæhlum, 2010), as part of an ongoing research project on the Sociolinguistic of Spoken European Portuguese in Madeira Island. This project intends to describe the social representations of a select group of syntactic variants of Spoken European Portuguese (SEP) in use in this insular region of Portugal. The presentation will provide evidence to support the hypothesis referred above, that, patterns of linguistic variation exist along a continuum which involves not only the social value of linguistic variants but the level at which they occur. According to previous data concerning SEP syntactic variation (Carrilho & Pereira, 2011; Bazenga, 2011, 2012), this work follows a survey applied, between April and December 2013, to 126 respondents, living in seven locations points on the island of Madeira (Andrade, 2014). For this presentation, three selected variable phenomena in European Portuguese (EP) are analyzed, taken from the questionnaire (section 4):
(a) the existential construction: by haver ‘there is’ - há várias calças no armário. (‘there is many pants in-the closet ’) vs. ter ‘to have’ - tem várias calças no armário. (‘has many pants in-the closet’);
(b) the aspectual construction: progressive periphrasis with estar ‘to be’+ a + V[Infinitive] – Maria está a cantar (‘Maria is.SL to sing’) vs. estar ‘to be’+ V[Gerund] – Maria está cantando (‘Maria is.SL singing’);
(c) the realization of the anaphoric direct object: by an accusative clitic - eu vi-o ontem (‘I saw him-CL yesterday’), vs. a nominative pronoun - eu vi ele ontem (‘I saw he-NOM yesterday’) vs. a dative pronoun - eu vi lhe ontem (‘I saw he-DAT yesterday’) vs. an empty category eu vi ∅ ontem (‘I saw ∅ yesterday’).
The analysis, following a variationist approach, by taking into account social variables, such as sex, age, school attendance, and using Likert scale for mesuring the acceptability jugdgement, allows the identification of different patterns of social stratification on the perception of community speech. Regarding social evaluation, the (a) and (b) phenomenon are located at the prestigious and dominant extreme of the linguistic variation continuum, in insular varieties. The phenomenon considered in (c) is typical of popular and non-dominant varieties and subject to very strong social stigma. This talk can provide new insights regarding possible directions of linguistic change in this insular Portuguese community, namely, in levelling of prestige variety’s (Kerswill, 2003), or, on the contrary, by strengthening its regional specificity, as an act of identity (Johnstone, 2010).
Keywords: Sociolinguistic Evaluation; Syntactic variation; Spoken European Portuguese Variety of Funchal (Madeira Island).
The volume explores the relationship between linguistic universals and language variation. Its contributions identify the recurrent patterns and principles behind the complex spectrum of observable variation. The volume bridges the gap between cross-linguistic variation, regional variation, diachronic variation, contact-induced variation as well as socially conditioned variation. Moreover, it addresses fundamental methodological and theoretical issues of variation research.
The volume brings together internationally renowned specialists of their fields while, at the same time, offering a platform for gifted and highly talented young researchers. The authors come from different theoretical backgrounds and through their work illustrate a rich array of scientific methods. All authors share a strong belief in empirically founded theoretical work.
The contributions span a high number of languages and dialects from many parts of the world. They are extremely broad in their empirical coverage addressing an impressive selection of grammatical domains.
In many rural English-speaking communities, linguistic processes such as paradigm leveling come into direct conflict with social processes of standardization. In the US region of Appalachia, an analysis of past be leveling illustrates the progression of the sociolinguistic clashes between these forces. A quantitative sociolinguistic examination of leveled was (e.g., We was there) for 67 native Appalachian speakers was conducted to assess the status of past be in light of economic and educational improvements over the 20th century. The results indicate that leveled was declined sharply, with the youngest speakers demonstrating more standardized patterns. Although the overall rate of was leveling declined across apparent time, the rate of was contraction (e.g., We's there last night) increased, offering native Appalachians a reduced variant to contest the social push toward a fully standardized system.
The roles of English within and between the many of the countries which make up Southeast Asia are increasing, and English is constantly being used and negotiated as a mutual means of communication by Asian multilinguals for whom English is an additional language. It is timely, therefore, to consider ways in which these Englishes have been developing, along with the roles English is currently playing. Areas worthy of investigation include the influence of language contact and the motivations for the presence of non-standard forms in these new varieties of English. Given the recent research reviewed in this paper, the criteria by which the use of non-standard forms are classified as characteristic of the particular variety need to be revised. The paper will conclude by considering whether the role of English as a lingua franca in the region has reached its zenith and whether regional language education policy is likely allow the languages of Asia to thrive.
The paper discusses an application of a technique to tag a corpus containing the English of Finnish Australians automatically and to analyse the frequency vectors of part-of-speech (POS) trigrams using a permutation test. Our goal is to detect the linguistic sources of the syntactic variation between two groups, the 'Adults,' who had received their school education in Finland, and the 'Juveniles,' who were educated in Australia. The idea of the technique is to utilise frequency profiles of trigrams of POS categories as indicators of syntactic distance between the groups and then examine potential effects of language contact and language ('vernacular') universals in SLA. The results show that some features we describe as 'contaminating' the interlanguage of the Adults can be best attributed to Finnish substratum transfer. However, there are other features in our data that may also be ascribed to more "universal" primitives or universal properties of the language faculty. As we have no evidence of potential contamination at the early stages of the Juveniles' L2 acquisition, we cannot yet prove or refute our hypothesis about the strength of contact influence as opposed to that of the other factors.
This article explores the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation, using sociolinguistic priming experiments. Two experiments tested participants' perception of the connection between social status and variation in two English subject-verb agreement constructions: there's+NP and NP+don't. Experiment 1 tested sentence perception and found that exposure to non-standard agreement boosted the perception of non-standard agreement, but only for there's+NP. Social status cues had no effect on sentence perception. Experiment 2 tested speaker perception and found that participants were more likely to believe that non-standard agreement was produced by low-status than high-status speakers. Results suggest that, especially for heavily stigmatized variables, non-standard sentences strongly constrain the social judgments made by speakers, yet social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. The results suggest that the perceptual relationship between linguistic and social knowledge may be one of only limited bidirectionality. Implications for sociolinguistic perception and exemplar-theoretic accounts of sociolinguistic competence are discussed.
Despite the publication of Aceto & Williams (2003), the languages spoken in the Eastern Caribbean remain underdescribed. In this paper, we outline a project examining language use in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines), based on fieldwork between 2003 and 2005, comprising over 100 hours of sociolinguistic interviews conducted and recorded by community-member researchers. We present quantitative analysis of three aspects of the grammatical system that exhibit variation: absence of the verb BE, verbal negation, and tense-aspect marking. We focus on three communities characterized by different sociodemographic histories. This paper fills a gap in our knowledge of the Eastern Caribbean and provides a descriptive sociolinguistic analysis as a starting point for future work. The findings contribute more generally to our understanding of (post-)colonial and contact varieties of English.
This paper aims to provide a Labovian sociolinguistic description of 3rd person plural patterns of agreement in European (EP), Brazilian (BP) and São Tomé (STP) Portuguese based on very recent samples of speech stratified for age, sex/gender and education. Linguistic and social restrictions for the variation are investigated. Results from statistical analysis indicate that there are two patterns of agreement in Portuguese: a semi-categorical rule, typical of EP, and a variable rule, typical of BP and STP, restricted by specific linguistic and social factors. Additionally, the results indicate that general linguistic constraints – such as the position of the subject, semantic feature of the subject or even discursive parallelism – cannot say anything about historical origin of Portuguese varieties, since they can be concerned with any language. Therefore, besides the quantitative expression of non-agreement, the quality of the occurrences of non-plural marking may support the characterization of each variety.
In the dialect contact framework proposed by Trudgill (1986), relatively little research has investigated the consequences of the mixing of different grammatical systems of English. The apparent time survey of the Fenland dialect of eastern England reported here provides an example of a range of dialect contact processes reconfiguring variable patterns of past tense BE, resulting in a variety with analogical levelling to was in positive contexts –‘the farms was’– and to weren’t in negative clauses –‘the farm weren’t’. In focussing this was/weren’t pattern, a number of the processes typical of koine´isation can be observed –diffusion (the geographical and/or social spread of a linguistic form from another socio-geographical place), levelling (the eradication of marked or minority forms in situations of dialect competition, where the number of variants in the output is dramatically reduced from the number in the input), simplification (a relative diminution of grammatical irregularity and redundancy) and reallocation (where two (or more) ingredient variants of the dialect mix are refunctionalised to serve new social, stylistic, or, as here, grammatical roles).
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
In this article, I describe a new research project on York English (YrkE), a variety in northeast England. In addition to providing the first systematic linguistic documentation of YrkE, I conduct a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature which not only is well documented in the literature, but also recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide—was/were variation in the past tense paradigm. Two separate tendencies are observed, neither of which can be explained by any unidimensional notion of analogical leveling of the paradigm: (1) nonstandard was in existential constructions, and (2) nonstandard were in negative tags. Both trends can be tracked in apparent time in which the contrasting behavior of men and women reveals that women are leading both types of linguistic change. In other contexts, nonstandard was is a synchronic remnant which can be traced to earlier stages in the history of English.
Over the past ten years the study of language in its social context has become a mature field with a substantial body of method and empirical results. As a result of this work we are arriving at new insights into such classical problems as the origin and diffusion of linguistic change, the nature of stylistic variation in language use, and the effect of class structure on linguistic variation within a speech community. Advances in sociolinguistics have been most evident in the study of co-variation between social context and the sound pattern of speech. The results reported in numerous monographs have laid the basis for substantial theoretical progress in our understanding of the factors that govern dialect variation in stratified communities, at least in its phonological aspect. The formulation of theories of the causes of phonological variation that go beyond guesswork and vague generalities appears at last to be possible. Therefore, we offer the following discussion, based on the material that is now available, as a contribution to the development of an explanatory theory of the mechanisms underlying social dialect variation. Although we shall state our views strongly, we know that they are far from definitive. We present them, not as positions to be defended at all costs, but as stimuli to further theoretical reflection in a field that has been, thus far, descriptively oriented.
In this paper, I propose an analysis of Greek negative concord (NC) in terms of quantifier scope. It is shown that there is no evidence that Greek NC n-words are indefinites or negative quantifiers. NC n-words are analysed as universal quantifiers, which are sensitive to negative polarity, and which must QR-raise above negation in order to be properly interpreted. If correct, the analysis proposed here will provide a strong argument for retaining QR as a necessary device at the syntax-semantics interface.
American Speech 20.1 (2002) 70-99
THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES linguistic regularization in a contact scenario that involves several transplanted varieties of English. It documents the extent and directionality of past be leveling in the colonial setting of the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. The aim is to show that a combination of language-external factors—such as new-colony formation, extreme geographic isolation, reduced in-migration after an initial founding period, dense social networks, and limited contact with a prestigious standard variety—may have an accelerating effect on linguistic regularization. I suggest that the special sociolinguistic scenario that gave rise to Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE) resulted in rapid homogenization of language-inherent changes and led to unprecedented regularization of past tense be with was as a pivot form. Increasing geographical mobility and off-island education, on the other hand, result in a significant increase of standard were forms.
The loss and reduction of marked or minority variants (so-called LEVELING or REGULARIZATION) has been subject to extensive scrutiny in contact scenarios (Trudgill 1986; Siegel 1987, 1997) and is one of the most widespread manifestations of language change which operate during new-dialect formation. Perhaps one of the most amply documented leveling processes in English involves the past tense morphemes of the verb be. The verbal paradigm of past tense be is notorious for its irregularity as, with the two distinct allomorphs was and were, it is the only English verb that has preserved person-number concord in the past tense paradigm. As Wolfram, Hazen, and Schilling-Estes (1999, 75) note, "The irregular status of be is without parallel in the current configuration of subject-verb concord." In English, this irregularity is explained by the historical development of the verb, which can be traced to no fewer than three separate Indo-European verbs (see discussion in Hazen 1994). In view of general regularization processes operating mostly in nonstandard dialects of English (Chambers 1995), be is a prime candidate for analogical change. Ample literature scrutinizes its evolution in varieties of English around the world, for instance in the British Isles (Cheshire 1982; Britain 1991, forthcoming; Tagliamonte 1998), the United States (Labov 1972; Wolfram and Christian 1976; Feagin 1979), Australia (Eisikovits 1991), Canada (Meechan and Foley 1994), and the Caribbean (Tagliamonte and Smith 2000).
A cross-dialectal comparison reveals that nonstandard dialects differ both quantitatively and qualitatively. Past be regularization has not advanced at the same rate in the varieties where it has been documented, and there is a significant degree of variability in its directionality. The qualitative differentiation is most plausibly explained by the competition between the different morphemes was and were (and weren't; see below), which may function as pivot forms in a more regular—or more precisely, in a less irregular—past tense paradigm. Indeed, past be regularization has a long-standing historical continuity in English, and Quirk and Wrenn (1960) speculate that some alternation among distinct patterns existed already in the Old English period. By the same token, leveling is well recorded in Middle English, and Visser (1970) and Curme (1977) show that from the fourteenth century on there was a marked tendency for was to occur in contexts of were. Visser (1970, 3: 72) cites the following example from the epic poem "Richard Coeur de Lion," written around 1300:
The historical literature suggests that, whereas was predominantly co-occurred with the first and third person singular and were with the plural persons, the second person singular was subject to considerable regional variation. Forsström (1948), for instance, finds a sharp division between the south of England, where were was predominantly used, and the northern varieties, which historically used was with the second person singular. He also points out that the paradigm has undergone extensive modifications inasmuch as "preterit indicative was (or wes) [was] frequently introduced into the plural in the North" (22). The increasing usage of was with plural persons is perhaps—but not necessarily!—indicative of leveling in Middle and early Modern English, and it is important to find that the historically documented alternation of the two...
Old was, new ecology: Viewing English through the sociolinguistic filter
- Sali Tagliamonte
- Jennifer Smith
Tagliamonte, Sali and Jennifer Smith
2000
Old was, new ecology: Viewing English through the sociolinguistic
filter. In: Shana Poplack (ed.), The English History of African
American Speech, 141-171. Oxford, UK/Malden, US: Blackwell.