Introduction

This article provides an overview of the Third Sociolinguistics Conference, which was held in Lunteren (The Netherlands) on 8 and 9 March 1999. In particular, attention is focussed on the topics and theories that turned out to play ah important role at this conference. The article begins with a comparison between the contents of the First and Second Sociolinguistics Conferences (1991; 1995) and those of the third conference (1999). The papers presented are classified according to the topics they dealt with. The categories adopted in this overview are those used on earlier occasions by Muysken (1984) to assess developments in sociolinguistic research and by Van Hout, Huls & Verhallen (1992) and Cucchiarini & Huls (1995) in their presentation of the First and Second Sociolinguistics Conferences. Since any classification scheme is likely to be somewhat arbitrary, the same categorisation as in the above-mentioned three papers was used for the sake of comparability. When analysing the content of all the papers presented at the third conference, it appears that four main topics can be distinguished. Two of them are the same as four years ago: 'multilingualism and language contact' and 'pragmatics, interaction and conversation analysis'. Two of them are new: language acquisition and socialisation' and language variation and language change'. The growing interest in the process of language acquisition by members of language minorities in the Netherlands and Flanders, appears to be structural. In 1999, almost half of the contributions are related to this subject. More so than four years ago, the research presented at the conference is embedded in theories or conceptual frameworks. However, they are so diverse that they do not lead to thematic unity. We may perhaps conclude that it is this diversification that gives sociolinguistics its force and vitality

GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748615155); Sociolinguistic Variation and Change is a selection of Peter Trudgill's major works since 1990, appearing here in updated and revised form. The book deals with a number of different but related topics: The role of English in the world, and the nature of Standard English or Englishes Language as a human issue and how sociolinguistic research might solve educational and other real-world problems The problematic and interconnected relationships between nation and language and dialect, and the linguistic characteristics of the varieties concerned Sociohistorical linguistics, in particular the relationship between colonial and motherland varieties of English; dialect contact and language contact; and the sociolinguistically informed dialectology of linguistic change. The major overall unifying theme of the book is linguistic variation and, as the diachronic outcome of linguistic variation, linguistic change. "

This article provides an overview of the Second Sociolinguistic Conference, which was held in Lunteren (The Netherlands) from 18 to 19 May 1995. In particular, attention is focused on the topics and theories that turned out to play an important role at this conference. The article begins with a comparison between the contents of the First Sociolinguistic Conference (1991) and those of the Second Sociolinguistic Conference (1995). The papers presented are classified according to the topics they dealt with. The categories adopted in this overview are those used on earlier occasions by Muysken (1984) to assess developments in socio-linguistic research and by Van Hout, Huls & Verhallen (1991) in their presentation of the First Sociolinguistic Conference. Since any classification scheme is likely to be somewhat arbitrary, the same categorisation as in the above-mentioned two papers was used here for the sake of comparability. When the papers presented at the two Sociolinguistic Conferences are compared, it appears that 'bilingualism and language contact' and 'pragmatics, interaction, and conversation analysis' constitute the main topics in both cases. The most conspicuous change from 1991 to 1995 is a growing interest in the process of language acquisition by members of language minorities in the Netherlands and Flanders. An analysis of the papers presented at the 1995 conference, would seem to suggest that a considerable amount of sociolinguistic research is conducted without reference to a specific theory or conceptual framework. The consequences that this might have for the future of sociolinguistic research in the Netherlands and Flanders are briefly considered. Finally, a number of young sociolinguists were invited to reply to the rather provocative conclusion drawn in this article.

Language acquisition occupies a central place in the study of human cognition, and research on how we learn language can be found across many disciplines, from developmental psychology and linguistics to education, philosophy, and neuroscience. It is a very challenging topic to investigate given that the learning target in first and second language acquisition is highly complex, and part of the challenge consists in identifying how different domains of language are acquired to form a fully functioning system of usage (Ellis, 2017). Correspondingly, the evidence about language use and language learning is generally shaped by many factors, including the characteristics of the task in which the language is produced (Alexopoulou, Michel, Murakami, & Meurers, 2017). The challenge is further complicated by the fact that language acquisition is affected by individual learner characteristics. Individual differences are particularly well studied for second language acquisition, where it is clear that factors such as native language, type of instruction, and motivation affect learning rate and ultimate attainment (Ushioda & Dörnyei, 2012; Williams, 2012). But recent research indicates that there is also considerable individual variation in child language development (see Rowland, 2013). To develop an understanding of language acquisition, we need to take into account these individual differences (MacWhinney, 2017). Despite these and other challenges, the past decades have witnessed significant progress in our understanding of how children and adults learn languages. The conceptual and empirical progress arguably is fueled by an increasing range of methods and approaches that are being used to study language acquisition (see Hoff, 2011; Mackey & Gass, 2012). For example, experimental approaches using artificial or natural languages have made it possible to investigate how changes across exposure conditions such as input frequency, instruction type, or prior knowledge affect learning in rigorously controlled environments. Learner corpora are growing in size and task types covered, with increasingly rich annotation supporting detailed analyses employing sophisticated statistical methods. Digital learning environments integrating computational methods hold the promise of supporting the systematic exploration of learning mechanisms in authentic teaching and learning, providing new sources of evidence on the roles played by the linguistic environment, interaction, and feedback in learning. The investigation of a complex phenomenon like language acquisition can significantly benefit from insights, tools, and methods from many disciplines, yet it is still relatively rare to find studies that combine multiple approaches. The research described in Monaghan and Mattock (2012), Ellis, Römer, and O'Donnell (2016), and Christiansen and Chater (2016) transparently illustrates the potential of multimethod approaches to language. For example, Monaghan and Mattock's (2012) investigation of word learning is an excellent illustration of how corpus research can connect with experimental research. Monaghan and Mattock first conducted corpus analyses of child-directed speech. They then used the information derived from these analyses to construct an artificial language that is based on natural language statistics. On this basis, they investigated the acquisition of nouns and verbs by adult learners in an artificial language experiment. While artificial language research is occasionally criticized for its limited ecological validity, the use of distributional information from natural language corpora in the artificial language construction mitigates some of this criticism (see also Monaghan & Rowland, 2017). Another impressive example of multimethod research is Ellis et al. (2016), who investigate the acquisition, processing, and use of verb-argument constructions (VACs), and their monograph contains a series of behavioral experiments, large-scale corpus analyses supported by natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and several computational simulations (connectionist and agent based). The result of this systematic multimethod exploration is a significant, in-depth understanding of how we learn, process, and use VACs—and a research model for others to follow suit. Finally, Christiansen and Chater's (2016) theoretical framework for understanding language acquisition, evolution, and processing is the direct result of multimethod research and would not be possible without the insights the authors gained from working at the intersection of experimental, computational, and corpus-based approaches for more than two decades. The question of how to promote multidisciplinary research across methodological boundaries has been central to the work of the three editors of this volume. A series of review articles aiming to connect research areas and introduce methodologies exemplify this (e.g., Meurers, 2012, 2015; Meurers & Dickinson, 2017; Rebuschat, 2013). One of the editors, Tony McEnery, directs the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS, http://cass.lancs.ac.uk) at Lancaster University, whose primary objective is to enable colleagues in other, nonlinguistic disciplines to utilize the corpus approach. The two other editors are part of Tübingen's unique LEAD Graduate School & Research Network, which brings together over 130 scientists from education, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, informatics, sociology, and economics to investigate learning and educational achievement.1 The LEAD initiative includes an interdisciplinary research and training program for doctoral students and postdocs, which is funded by Germany's Excellence Initiative. In the same spirit, we have enjoyed organizing numerous symposia, workshops, summer schools, and conferences, and we have edited several books and special journal issues with the specific aim of bringing together leading researchers from different disciplines whose paths would normally not cross (e.g., Andringa & Rebuschat, 2015; Meurers, 2009; Rebuschat, 2015; Rebuschat, Rohrmeier, Hawkins, & Cross, 2012; Rebuschat & Williams, 2012). This special issue is part of this ongoing effort. This special issue was inspired by a symposium on “Connecting Data and Theory: Corpora and Second Language Research,” which was organized by the editors and took place in Lancaster, UK, on July 19, 2015. The symposium was jointly funded by the Language Learning Roundtable Grant Program and by CASS. The objective was to establish a dialogue between experts on second language acquisition, corpora, and computational analysis methods. This dialogue can significantly enrich the empirical basis of second language research but, to date, collaborations across these fields are still rare. The symposium aimed at directly addressing this shortcoming. There were three sessions, each approaching the symposium topic from a distinct research area. Nick Ellis and Brian MacWhinney provided the view from cognitive psychology, Detmar Meurers and Markus Dickinson the view from computational linguistics, and Anke Lüdeling and Sylviane Granger the view from corpus linguistics. The symposium concluded with a general discussion. The discussion and feedback were both very positive and lively, and when the opportunity arose to produce a special issue on “Currents in Language Learning,” we readily agreed to do so. Five presentations of the symposium provided the basis for four expanded and updated articles (Ellis; Lüdeling et al.; MacWhinney; Meurers & Dickinson). Additional chapters were written by colleagues who attended the symposium and made thoughtful contributions (Alexopoulou et al.; Gablasova et al; Monaghan & Rowland; Ziegler et al.). Based on the symposium discussions, we decided to expand the scope for the special issue in two areas. We solicited an article that would contribute a language testing angle (Wisniewski) and broadened the topic to language learning in general, given the long and fruitful tradition of using corpora, NLP tools, and computational modeling in child language research. As a result, the third issue of the “Currents in Language Learning” series brings together leading researchers in cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, developmental psychology, and linguistics. Our contributors were asked to (i) discuss recent work and trends, (ii) outline opportunities and challenges of combining multiple approaches, and (iii) propose directions for future research at the intersection of experimental, computational, and corpus-based approaches to language learning. Each submission was peer reviewed by several anonymous reviewers and by the editors. In the first article, Padraic Monaghan and Caroline Rowland describe the challenges of combining experimental, computational, and corpus approaches to research in child language acquisition. Their article clearly articulates the benefits of multidisciplinary approaches by providing three examples for a successful combination of methods (grammatical category acquisition, morphological development, and the acquisition of sentence structure). On this basis, they conclude with a discussion of future directions. In the second article, Nick Ellis approaches the topic from the perspective of usage-based linguistics. Ellis clearly illustrates the essential contributions made by experimental, computational, and corpus-based research to the establishment of usage-based theories of language (see also Ellis, Römer, & O'Donnell, 2016). In the next article, Detmar Meurers and Markus Dickinson provide a comprehensive review of how computational linguistics and NLP techniques can contribute to our understanding of second language learning. They focus on two contributions: First, computational linguistics can enrich the options for obtaining substantial amounts of data for language learning research, including data obtained via intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) interfaces (see also Ziegler et al., 2017). Second, NLP techniques can support the identification and interpretation of data of relevance to second language research via automatic linguistic annotation of large-scale corpora—which they argue requires more cross-disciplinary discussion to operationalize relevant learner language distinctions and develop annotation schemes that are adequate to support second language research. The next three articles focus on essential methodological considerations arising from corpus-based language learning research. Anke Lüdeling, Hagen Hirschmann, and Anna Shadrova illustrate how learner corpus data can be used to investigate acquisition patterns by concentrating on second language morphological productivity as a test case. They raise methodological points regarding linguistic modeling, the formation of target hypotheses, and error annotation. Dana Gablasova, Vaclav Brezina, and Tony McEnery focus on collocations in language learning research. The interest in formulaic language has been growing in both first and second language research, and there is now a considerable number of experimental and corpus-based studies in this area (e.g., Christiansen & Arnon, in press). Gablasova et al. critically review measures of association that are frequently used to identify collocations (t score, MI score, Log Dice) and discuss how a better understanding of these measures greatly facilitates the interpretation of trends in language production data. In the sixth article, the same authors focus on the role of corpus-based frequency information for advancing our understanding of how languages are learned. They illustrate the issues involved in the interpretation and comparison of corpus frequencies by contrasting several first and second language corpora. The next two articles provide concrete examples of the benefits of working at the intersection of experimental, computational, and corpus-based approaches to language learning. Dora Alexopoulou, Marije Michel, Akira Murakami, and Detmar Meurers test hypotheses derived from instructed second language acquisition research and task-based language teaching by applying techniques from computational linguistics to a very large learner corpus. They analyze the texts in the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (https://corpus.mml.cam.ac.uk/efcamdat), a learner corpus that contains over 70,000,000 words collected through an online language learning platform. Their article demonstrates how large corpora and NLP techniques can contribute to contemporary language learning research by complementing experimental evidence. Nicole Ziegler, Detmar Meurers, Patrick Rebuschat, Simón Ruiz, José L. Moreno-Vega, Maria Chinkina, Wenjing Li, and Sarah Grey combine theoretical and methodological insights from second language acquisition, NLP, and ICALL research to investigate the effectiveness of input enhancement in promoting second language development. Their study is experimental, but data are collected via a Web-based ICALL system (WERTi, http://purl.org/icall/werti) that provides computerized pedagogical treatment of learner-selected texts and automatically tracks and collects learners’ action and engagement with the input. This results in a particularly rich data set, beyond what is typically available via traditional experimental approaches. In the next article, Katrin Wisniewski provides a conceptual review of how learner corpora can contribute to language testing research, emphasizing the importance of empirical scale validity. Wisniewski focuses on the Common European Framework of Reference, the most common European reference tool to describe levels of foreign language proficiency, and explicitly works out the opportunities and challenges of working across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. The issue concludes with an important call for the construction of a shared platform to study second language acquisition. Brian MacWhinney argues that further advancement of second language acquisition theory and practice requires a combination of experimental data, a better understanding of how individual differences impact learning, and corpus data that permit the investigation of acquisition patterns. The proposed platform would facilitate this by enabling the collection of substantial amounts of learner data online and by establishing a common protocol on how to share the data—in line with the Child Language Data Exchange System, the central repository for child language data that contributed greatly to our understanding of how children learn language (see Monaghan & Rowland, 2017). The success of such an approach rests on researchers across the world sharing data and agreeing on common protocols for adding and retrieving data. The special issue, and the symposium on which it was based, would not have been possible without the essential support and contributions of many colleagues. We are grateful to our symposium presenters and delegates for making it such a successful event, and we thank our authors for submitting excellent manuscripts for this special issue. We are indebted to the anonymous peer reviewers, who thoroughly assessed the texts and provided very valuable feedback, especially on how to make the contributions accessible and relevant across disciplines. At Language Learning, we are particularly grateful to Nick Ellis (General Editor) and Pavel Trofimovich (Journal Editor) for their sustained support throughout this project, and to Izzat Ibrahim for his friendly assistance in the production of this special issue. At Lancaster and Tübingen, we are very grateful to Lisa Becker and Abi Hawtin for their help in copyediting the volume and to Katarina Pardula for her support in organizing the symposium. Finally, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science and Language Learning's Roundtable Grant Program, without which neither the symposium nor the special issue would have been possible.

The paper surveys overlap between corpus linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics. Corpus linguistics is customarily defined as a methodology that bases claims about language on usage patterns in collections of naturalistic, authentic speech or text. Because this is what is typically done in variationist sociolinguistics work, I argue that variationist sociolinguists are by definition corpus linguists, though of course the reverse is not true: the variationist method entails more than merely analyzing usage data, and not all corpus analysts are interested in variation. But that being said, a considerable and arguably increasing number of corpus linguists not formally trained in variationist sociolinguistics are explicitly concerned with variation and engage in what I callcorpus-based variationist linguistics(CVL). I first discuss what unites or divides work in CVL and in variationist sociolinguistics. In a plea to cross subdisciplinary boundaries, I subsequently identify three research areas where variationist sociolinguists may draw inspiration from work in CVL: conducting multi-variable research, paying more attention to probabilistic grammars, and taking more seriously the register-sensitivity of variation patterns.

Linguistics has drawn on the large quantities of authentic data contained in language corpora for several decades now. While debates continue regarding the nature and interpretation of such data, it is generally accepted that corpus methodologies offer a valuable perspective on language, one that complements the introspective and elicited data used in different sub-fields of linguistics. Increasingly, language corpora can be searched or downloaded over the Internet, and are now therefore very readily accessible. Many also include demographic or textual metadata that make them invaluable as data for sociolinguistics. While existing corpora may have some drawbacks (e.g. where the corpus design is not ideally suited to the study in hand, or available corpora do not have appropriate mark-up), they offer great savings in time and effort compared to creating a new corpus. Moreover, especially given the increasing availability of spoken texts in corpora, they constitute excellent resources for students of different levels, for teachers looking for a quick way to demonstrate a feature of language, and for researchers testing linguistic hypotheses.

Reviewed by: The bilingual child: Early development and language contact Jordana F. Garbati Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthew. 2007. The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. xxiii + 295. US $29.99 (softcover). Yip and Matthews' book outlines in great detail their systematic, longitudinal study of the development of Cantonese-English childhood bilingualism. This is one of the first accounts of bilingual development in young children (i.e., ages zero–three) involving a non-European language. The authors' investigation of the linguistic development of bilingual children includes a close examination of the language acquisition of their own three children. In this volume, Yip and Matthews present the theoretical underpinnings of their research, describe the contribution of their study to the field of bilingualism, discuss the methodological issues of their study, and report a range of findings. This book constitutes a new attempt at understanding the complexities of bilingualism. In their introductory chapter, Yip and Matthews highlight their personal involvement with this field of research and this specific study as well as their connection with the principal child learners discussed. They indentify their biases for conducting the study and situate it within the larger context of bilingualism research. In addition, the authors discuss grammaticalization, forms of cross-linguistic influence in monolingual and bilingual development, and the extent to which social context determines language input and outcome. The authors define key terms and clarify ambiguities in definitions (e.g., dominance versus proficiency, transfer versus influence), drawing on current research in the field. This introduction clearly lays out the aim of the book for the reader. The summaries at the end of this and every chapter review key points and terms, direct the reader's focus, and review the goals of the research. In Chapter 1, the authors identify the research questions of the study: (i) How does bilingual development differ from acquisition of the same two languages by monolingual children? (ii) Do the two languages develop independently or rather interact systematically? Is there evidence for transfer or cross-linguistic influence? What factors determine the direction of transfer? (iii) What do the linguistic features of bilingual children's development reveal about [End Page 567] general processes in language acquisition and language contact? (p. 6). The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages associated with studying one's own children, as they do themselves in this volume. Yip and Matthews also review issues related to the language community, code-switching, second language acquisition strategies, and first language acquisition, topics of interest to educators and researchers interested in this field. They end this chapter with a discussion of language dominance, language contact phenomena, and language transfer. Chapter 2 is devoted to presenting the theoretical framework which informs the authors' research. In their detailed exploration of the literature, the authors draw on recent research to discuss problems of bilingual acquisition, to explore the interaction between grammatical systems in childhood bilingualism and to review theories on cross-linguistic influence, language dominance, and language contact. This theoretical overview is well thought out and the authors provide a clear connection between these theories and their research objectives. In Chapter 3, the authors describe their methodology in detail. After reviewing common methods in bilingualism research—case studies versus cross sectional experimental studies—they evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the methods used in their study. This includes discussion of how they implemented diary studies as one aspect of their data collection strategies and the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating this type of data. The authors highlight the rigorous methodological design of their study in which they used both longitudinal data from the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus and the case studies of their own three children. Yip and Matthews clearly describe the main child participants, the language background of the children, and their linguistic experiences. In addition, they outline the children's language contact and developmental patterns over a two-and-a-half-year period and justify the coding. Once again, Yip and Matthews take the opportunity to acknowledge their possible methodological biases. In Chapters 4 through 8, the authors report the findings of their study. Here, they focus on the linguistic themes that arose...

This volume is dedicated to applied linguistic research on multilingualism. The term “applied linguistics” is used in a broad sense and describes several examples of the cooperation between linguists and public service institutions or commercial companies. Furthermore, renowned scholars in the field discuss how applied linguistics may enhance communication in the workplace, in schools and in public service institutions. The areas of application presented in this volume include intercultural communication, language acquisition, language contact, and sociolinguistic variation. The aim is to highlight the importance of applied linguistic research concerning the deployment of multilingualism, and, furthermore, to stimulate the debate about it. With multilingualism in different social settings being its focus, this volume will appeal to scholars in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Pragmatics.

Reviewed by: The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics ed. by Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, Ceil Lucas John Baugh The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics. Ed. by Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, and Ceil Lucas. (Oxford handbooks.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xxv, 884. ISBN 9780199744084. $150 (Hb). The editors of the Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics are mindful of other encyclopedias devoted to sociolinguistic inquiry. They describe four factors that distinguish this volume from [End Page 283] other comprehensive surveys of the field: new methodological developments, global inclusion of previously neglected speech communities, greater emphasis on bilingual and multilingual circumstances, and insights from innovative sign language research. Despite these new directions, the editors are keenly aware of classical studies in sociolinguistics, and their introduction begins with references to iconic research by William Labov, Dell Hymes, and John Gumperz, among others. The first section is titled ‘Disciplinary perspectives’, and it begins after a brief account of the organization of this handbook, chapter by chapter, under the heading ‘The study of language and society’. The editors outline the volume, which is substantial, consisting of nearly nine hundred pages, with laconic depictions of the entire text. These opening remarks are quite useful, and will allow the specialist to pinpoint alternative approaches to sociolinguistics—broadly defined—that may be of primary interest to different readers. ‘Variationist sociolinguistics’ is the first chapter of the book, and it provides an account that begins with Labov’s groundbreaking study on Martha’s Vineyard, and then moves on to describe an array of foundational sociolinguistic studies centered largely on research in the United States. The remaining sections of the chapter explore the case of null pronoun variation in Spanish, and the extension of the variationist paradigm within and beyond the United States. Readers who are familiar with the field will recognize references to some iconic sociolinguistic analyses, and the novice will be provided with a succinct depiction of some of the major global applications of variationist sociolinguistics that have helped to define the field. ‘Linguistic anthropology’ (Ch. 2) opens with a quotation from Michael Silverstein that affirms the intricate connections between language and culture. Indeed, the first sentence asks, ‘Can we ever understand language without understanding the culture?’ (31). As with the opening chapter, the authors describe major pioneering studies by Hymes and Gumperz before turning to ‘language beyond linguistic form’. The chapter then explores a variety of relevant research that builds toward consideration of how linguistic anthropology will be encompassed within the future of sociolinguistic research. Devoted to ways in which sociology is related to the study of language, Ch. 3, ‘Doers and makers: The interwoven stories of sociology and the study of language’, includes many references to classical sociological and philosophical figures, such as Jürgen Habermas, David Émile Durkheim, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill; I was struck, however, by the absence of any references to Joshua Fishman’s formulation of ‘the sociology of language’ or Erving Goffman’s influential analyses of ‘talk’. Readers who are unfamiliar with early connections between sociology and studies of language will nevertheless find this chapter to be highly informative. ‘Critical discourse analysis’ (Ch. 4) contains several useful diagrams showing interconnections with highly complex topics related to the entire sociolinguistic enterprise, while conversation analysis (CA) is described in Ch. 5, including references to foundational formulations by Harvey Sacks, as well as the procedures and methods that are distinctive to CA research. The remaining chapters in this section explore language socialization, psycholinguistics, and interdisciplinary approaches; each of these three concluding chapters accounts for ways in which sociolinguistic inquiries overlap and intersect by drawing upon insights, methods, and analyses from diverse research practices. Part 2, ‘Methodologies and approaches’, consists of Chs. 9–14, and the authors of each chapter devote concentrated attention to alternative sociolinguistic methods, including studies of communities and individuals in Ch. 9, and experimental methods to study the intelligibility of closely related language varieties in Ch. 10. Quantitative analysis is emphasized in Ch. 11, while qualitative methods utilized in multilingual circumstances are presented in Ch. 12. The remaining two chapters in Part 2 concentrate on longitudinal studies and methods for studying sign language respectively. Each chapter in this section contains a wealth...

Recent developments in contact linguistics suggest considerable overlap of branches such as historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pidgin/creole linguistics, language acquisition, etc. This book highlights the complexity of contact-induced language change throughout the history of English by bringing together cutting-edge research from these fields. Special focus is on recent debates surrounding substratal influence in earlier forms of English (particularly Celtic influence in Old English), on language shift processes (the formation of Irish and overseas varieties) but also on dialects in contact, the contact origins of Standard English, the notion of new epicentres in World English, the role of children and adults in language change as well as transfer and language learning. With contributions from leading experts, the book offers fresh and exciting perspectives for research and is at the same time an up-to-date overview of the state of the art in the respective fields.

This study investigates the evolving nominal terms of address in the urban community of Irbid City, Jordan, within a broader sociolinguistic framework. Based on 500 instances of naturally occurring address terms collected over six months through non-paticipant observation in public settings like cafés, markets, and service encounters, the study examines how address practices vary across generations, genders, and social-classes. Using qualitative content analysis within a sociolinguistic variationist framework, the findings reveal a decline in traditional kinship-based terms and the emergence of innovative address forms, particularly among younger speakers. These changes reflect broader social transformations and evolving identity dynamics. A comparative analysis with English-speaking contexts highlights linguistic evolution similarities, particularly the informality trend. However, while English address systems increasingly favor first-name usage and gender-neutral terms, Jordanian Arabic exhibits a restructuring process that blends traditional and modern influences. Additionally, the study highlights the implications of address term variation for English language studies, particularly in second language acquisition and cross-cultural communication. Misalignment in address norms between Jordanian and English speakers can lead to pragmatic challenges, emphasizing the need for intercultural awareness in language learning. These findings contribute to broader sociolinguistic discussions, particularly regarding linguistic change, social identity, and globalization’s impact on verbal interaction. The study underscores how address terms function as markers of both cultural continuity and adaptation, offering context-specific insights that may contribute to broader understandings of global linguistic trends in address practices. Future research could explore similar transformations in other non-Western languages, further enriching the discourse on language contact and sociolinguistic variation.

W.C. Ritchie and T.K. Bhatia, Second Language Acquisition: Introduction, Foundations, and Overview. Research and Theoretical Issues in Second Language Acquisition: K.R. Gregg, The Logical and Developmental Problems of Second Language Acquisition. Issues of Maturation and Modularity in Second Language Acquisition: L. White, Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition: Current Trends and New Directions. S. Flynn, A Parameter-Setting Approach to Second Language Acquisition. J. Schachter, Maturation and the Issue of Universal Grammar in Second Language Acquisition. F.R. Eckman, A Functional-Typological Approach to Second Language Acquisition Theory. B. McLaughlin and R. Heredia, Information-Processing Approaches to Research on Second Language Acquisition and Use. D. Preston, Variationist Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Second Language Speech and the Influence of the First Language: J. Leather and A. James, Second Language Speech. S. Gass, Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory: The Role of Language Transfer. Research Methodology and Applications: D. Nunan, Issues in Second Language Acquisition Research: Examining Substance and Procedure. A. Sorace, The Use of Acceptability Judgments in Second Language Acquisition Research. Modality and the Linguistic Environment in Second Language Acquisition: M.H. Long, The Role of the Linguistic Environment in Second Language Acquisition. G.P. Berent, The Acquisition of English Syntax by Deaf Learners. The Neuropsychology of Second Language Acquisition and Use: L.K. Obler and S. Hannigan, Neurolinguistics of Second Language Acquisition and Use. Language Contact and its Consequences: R.W. Anderson and Y. Shirai, The Primacy of Aspect in First and Second Language Acquisition: The Pidgin-Creole Connection. S. Romaine, Bilingualism. H.W. Seliger, Primary Language Attrition in the Context of Bilingualism. T.K. Bhatia and W.C. Ritchie, Bilingual Language Mixing, Universal Grammar, and Second Language Acquisition. Glossary. Author Index. Subject Index.

Reviewed by: Nouvelles Voies D'accès Au Changement Linguistique by Wendy Ayres-Bennett et al. Carole Salmon and Jenelle Thomas Ayres-Bennett, Wendy, et al., éd. Nouvelles voies d'accès au changement linguistique. Garnier, 2018. ISBN 978-2-406-06944-7. Pp. 548. This volume is a welcome addition to the literature on French diachrony, highlighting a renewed interest in finding new data to illuminate old questions and the application of new methods to old data. Despite the large number (24) and variety of contributions, as well as the project's origin as conference papers (the second meeting of the Société internationale de diachronie du français, 2014), the editors have created a coherent organizational structure centered around three thematic sections: "Nouvelles sources pour la connaissance de l'histoire du français"; "La représentation de l'oral dans les textes médiévaux"; "Le rythme des changements linguistiques". Taken together, this tripartite focus does indeed constitute "un échantillon représentatif des champs de recherche qui sont d'actualité en linguistique diachronique" (19), as the editors argue. The theme of new sources for historical investigation, raised in the first section and the first half of the second, continues throughout the volume so that studies of correspondence (Scharinger; Amatuzzi; Klippi), legal texts and treaties (Balon and Larrivée; Gerstenberg), sermons (Skupien Dekens), and accounting texts (Wirth-Jaillard) are nicely balanced with those grounded in the language of the theater and large electronic corpora. These are also the chapters that engage most closely with the creative role of the individual speaker, in line with the trend in contemporary socio-linguistics and historical studies of other languages such as English. New approaches to the now-familiar topics of orality in written texts and the pace of linguistic change are exhibited in the second two sections, showcasing the contributions of both qualitative case studies and large-scale pattern analysis aided by new and larger amounts of data and computational methods (Parussa; Guillot-Barbance et al.; Scrivner; Siouffi et al.). The third section has the broadest theoretical focus, adding a cross-Romance perspective (Lamiroy) to French-specific diachronic studies, including two focused on the very recent past (Siouffi et al.; Combettes and Kuyumcuyan). Alongside other chapters touching on other disciplines or linguistic varieties: music (Caron) and creoles and language contact (Ludwig; Sharinger), these connections bring an additional innovative element to a volume on historical French. However, text type is the major variable in focus when considering new sources of data, meaning that other sociolinguistic variables such as regional variation (Vorobei) or speaker characteristics (Klippi), which might provide new avenues for investigation, receive less attention. The volume also feels slightly weighted towards case studies of medieval French due to the size of the second section (10 chapters) and its narrower focus. In general, [End Page 183] however, the variety of subjects and structures included means that the volume will appeal to scholars of all time periods of French. Jenelle Thomas University of Oxford, England Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

The majority of studies conducted on first language acquisition concentrates on the acquisition of standard varieties, where deterministic, or invariant, forms are the focus of research. At the same time, research in sociolinguistics has shown that language is full of variable forms which are governed by a series of interacting social and linguistic constraints on variant choice. Such variation is interesting from the perspective of acquisition because of the apparent challenge it presents to a young child: learning a language is alreadyhighly complexbut what happens when variation is added to the mix? The initial chapters in this volume focus on the analysis of variation in the speech of young children in a number of different languages worldwide and across different contexts of use in both production and perception. In doing so, they provide an excellent contribution to questions surrounding the acquisition of vernacular norms in the initial stages of acquisition and in later life.

Applied Linguistics in North America