Variationist Analysis Research Articles

Perspective and politeness in Finnish Requests

This study makes use of elicited request speech act data in Finnish to view variability of personal perspective and T/V forms across a variety of situations. The speakers exhibited a great deal of congruency when they were scripted as addressing someone familiar, being in a position of equal or higher status than the interlocutor, and when the request was considered a low imposition. In such situations, speakers tended to use a second person perspective, with informal T/V forms. The Finnish T-forms were found to be the default form, showing up in half of the request utterances. The Finnish V-forms showed up in only 10 percent of the requests. A variationist analysis using Varbrul complemented the main findings, but was found to not be a reliable tool for elicited pragmatic data, using sociopragmatic factors as independent variables.

Prestige, accommodation, and the legacy of relativewho

AbstractThis article presents a quantitative variationist analysis of the English restrictive relative pronouns. However, where previous research has largely focused on language-internal explanations for variant choice, the focus here is the social meaning of this erstwhile syntactic variable. We uncover rich sociolinguistic embedding of the relative pronouns in standard, urban speech. The only productivewh-form iswho, which continues to pattern as a prestige form centuries after its linguistic specialization as a human subject relative. This legacy of prestige is reflected not only in the social characteristics of those with whom it is associated, but also in the patterns of accommodation that are visible in its use. These findings simultaneously demonstrate the tenacious nature of social meaning and the enduring effects of grammatical ideology, both of which influence pronoun choice in the context of face-to-face interaction. (Restrictive relative pronouns,who, change from above, age-grading, prestige, accommodation)*

On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: a variationist study of that

This article provides evidence that, just as lexical meaning is retained in grammaticization, grammatical conditioning persists in fixed discourse formulas. Despite their high frequency and formulaic status, such formulas are not completely autonomous from the productive constructions from which they emerge. This evidence comes from a variationist analysis of that and zero complementizer in a corpus of spoken Canadian English. Testing syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors proposed to account for the variation, we focus on claims that frequent collocations have developed as discourse formulas. Multivariate analysis shows that, although the variation is largely lexically constrained, that serves to demarcate the boundaries of two clauses with lexical content, while zero tends to occur when the clauses function like a single unit. Moreover, the linguistic conditioning of that in frequent collocations that behave like discourse formulas parallels its conditioning in the general construction. These findings suggest that the principle of semantic retention or persistence should be extended to grammar.

Constraints on nonstandard -s in expletive there sentences: a generative–variationist perspective

This article examines grammatical conditioning of the use of nonstandard -s in expletive there sentences. The discussion is based on data from a Midlands variety of English (UK). In negative constructions, speakers tend to allow for nonstandard -s with no and constituent not, but not to use it with n't or clausal not. Further, nonstandard -s is admitted in declarative existentials, but disfavoured in interrogatives. By comparison, occurrences of nonstandard -s in nonexistential structures did not seem to demonstrate these constraints. Investigating such constraints is instructive in several respects. First, they help to identify the nature of nonstandard -s. Second, they provide new evidence for the generative inquiry into issues relating to subject–verb agreement. Third, they delimit variable contexts for variationist analyses. In this way generative and variationist objectives meet. I will argue that researching syntactic variation necessitates combining generative and variationist methodology.

Standardization, functional shift and language change in Basque

This paper presents a quantitative variationist analysis of data collected in sociolinguistic interviews in the Basque town of Oiartzun in an effort to gauge the influence of a generation of language planning eff o rts on the local Basque ve rn a c u l a r. In part i c u l a r, this paper makes the following three claims about these processes. First, the data provide strong apparent-time evidence of change in progress toward standard features. For two morphological variables and one lexical variable, young speakers show significantly lower frequencies of nonstandard forms than middle-aged and older speakers. Second, the changing functional distribution of Basque vs. Spanish in Oiartzun also appears to have had an important impact on younger speakers’ speech. In particular, younger speakers show significantly lower frequencies than older speakers for two informal phonological features. This difference plausibly reflects the fact that younger speakers, unlike their elders, have grown up using Basque in high-register domains –especially schools and the media–where these phonological processes are least common. Third and finally, quantitative variation data together with speake r s ’ metalinguistic comments in sociolinguistic and ethnographic interviews suggests support for Echeverria’s (2000) proposal that masculinity is iconically linked to informal/low-prestige forms through their association with ‘traditional’ rural Basque spheres.

Back to the Future in Acadian French

Our article presents a variationist analysis of future verb forms in Acadian French. The main variants considered are the inflected future (e.g. je partirai) and the periphrastic future (e.g. je vais partir). The purpose of this study is two-fold: a) it will determine the distribution of these variants and their linguistic correlates; b) it will compare the use of future verb forms with other varieties of French. Our results reveal that the inflected future is used with greater frequency in Acadian French than in other Canadian varieties and that the factors that condition the variable in Acadian are not the same as in other varieties.

Living and working in immersion French

Our study presents a variationist analysis of lexical variation in L2 immersion in French. Two variables are considered: a) words referring to remunerated work, e.g. travail; b) verbs used to indicate one's place of residence, e.g. habiter. One linguistic factor, priming in the interviewer's question, is shown to condition both variables. A number of social factors are also considered. The only correlation that obtains with a social factor is speakers' home language for the ‘work’ variable. The main finding from our study is that in comparison to L1 Canadian Francophones, the immersion students make use of a limited number of lexical variants and show no knowledge of highly frequent non standard L1 forms.

The acquisition of verbal morphology by Chinese learners of Hungarian

This article is the first variationist analysis of speakers of an analytic language acquiring an agglutinative language: we investigate the acquisition of the rich Hungarian verbal morphological system by adult Chinese immigrants to Budapest. Multivariate analyses of data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with nine untutored Chinese learners of Hungarian suggest that the acquisition of verbal morphology is systematic. Factors that have been identified as significant in studies of the acquisition of other languages, such as frequency, perceptual salience, morphophonological regularity, and semantic complexity, all play a significant role in the acquisition of Hungarian as a second language. The marking of definiteness or indefiniteness of the object on the verb, a rare aspect of verbal morphology, also has a significant effect. Chinese learners are more likely to mark definite than indefinite forms of the verb, despite the fact that these forms express largely redundant functions and that indefinites are more frequent. Hence, our data allow for an analysis of relative weights of factors affecting acquisition and address the issue of the relative weight of frequency over other factors.

‘We all speak the same round here’: Dialect levelling in a Scottish‐English community

In this paper the formation of a new dialect in Corby, Northamptonshire, a former steel town in the English Midlands, is traced across three generations. The study focuses on whether dialect levelling processes can account for the features of the new dialect formed by contact between the displaced Scottish and indigenous English inhabitants in the town. The results of a variationist analysis of the reflexes of two phonological variables are interpreted within a language ideology framework, with reference to commentary from the speakers themselves. Such a combination of perspectives offers a means of socially embedding the interpretation of the data with reference to the identity issues arising from this contact situation.

The effects of study abroad on the L2 learner’s structural skills

This article compares the relative effect of study abroad as opposed to foreign language instruction on an aspect of the L2 learner’s grammatical development, namely the expression of past time in target language (TL) French. Based on a cross-sectional quantitative analysis of oral data elicited from Irish advanced learners, a number of differences and similarities emerge between the learners’ development in the TL community and in the foreign language classroom. On the one hand, the more beneficial effect of study abroad is evident insofar as the study abroad learners attain a higher level of accuracy in their use of past time morphology across a more expansive range of aspectual contexts. On the other hand, however, similarities are also evident between the learners in both domains of acquisition. Based on a variationist analysis which controls for the effect of a number of linguistic factors on the learners’ choice of past time marker (grammatical aspect, inherent lexical aspect, and discourse grounding), the learners’ contextual use of past time morphology appears to be relatively similar. The results are firstly dicussed in relation to existing research evidence concerning the L2 learner’s grammatical development during study abroad, and secondly, in relation to the question of the manifestation of grammatical development in the L2 learner.

More on the Third Dialect of English: Linguistic constraints on the use of three phonological variables in Pittsburgh

Traditional dialect boundaries in the United States have received renewed attention (Labov, 1991, 1994). Labov outlined three dialects of English (the Northern Cities Chain Shift, the Southern Chain Shift, and the Third Dialect), the boundaries of which are defined by chain shifts in the vowel system and roughly correspond to traditional dialectal boundaries defined through the bundling of lexical items (Kurath, 1949) and phonological isoglosses (Kurath & McDavid, 1961). Other research has suggested that the Third Dialect may be the most heterogeneous of these dialects, with speakers in different areas displaying widely disparate behaviors (see, e.g., Clarke, Elms, & Youssef, 1995; Di Paolo, 1988; Di Paolo & Faber, 1990; Labov, 1996; Moonwomon, 1987). The present article contributes towards a richer picture of the Third Dialect by offering the first systematic variationist analysis of speech in Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on three phonological processes: vocalization of /l/, laxing of /i/ before /l/, and laxing of /u/ before /l/. I argue that Veatch's (1991) model of English syllable structure provides a unified account of these seemingly unrelated phonological changes in Pittsburgh; the implications of this argument for further research on Pittsburgh speech are also noted.

Variação e funcionalidade no uso de pronomes de 2ª pessoa do singular no português carioca

Previous variationist analysis of subject pronoun expression inlanguages like Portuguese and Spanish provide arguments for theso-called functional compensation hypothesis: pronouns tend tobe used whenever they are needed for the felicitous flow ofcommunication. On the other hand, some researchers have shownthe opposite effect of the parallel processing principle: markingtends to attract more marking, in a redundant way. This articlediscusses both hypotheses, applied to the use of the second personsubject pronoun, bringing evidence from natural conversation inPortuguese as spoken in Rio de Janeiro. The data were collectedin 1989/1990.

Resultados de análises quantitativas da representação do sujeito no PB: indícios de uma nova gramática?

In this paper I discuss the characterization of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in terms of the possibility of null subjects. Some recent analyses (TARALLO:1993b, DUARTE:1993/1995 and MENON:1994) have argued, on the basis of quantitative results, that BP has lost its prodrop character. But other variationist analyses (PAREDES DA SILVA:1988; NEGRAO:1990; NICOLAU:1994; etc.) prove that BP can be characterized as presenting the possibility of null subjects. I show then that the proposal of linguistic change mentioned above cannot be maintained when faced with the Principles & Parameters model (cf. CHOMSKY:1981-1995). In other words, I show that the quantitative results of the variationist analyses cannot be considered as evidence of a parametric change or, more specifically, of the emergence of a new grammar.

Subject NP doubling, matching, and minority French

ABSTRACTOur study presents a variationist analysis of subject doubling in the French of Ontario, Canada. Two principal variants are distinguished: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. In our analyses, both linguistic and social factors are taken into account and analyzed usinggoldvarb2. It is proposed that subject clitics are marked for default features, and that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP; lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant. Discussion of linguistic factors for the present study, therefore, is limited to those factors which can be explained in terms matching. The principal social factor studied is restricted language use (cf. Mougeon & Beniak, 1991). Our results show that the greater the restriction, the fewer doubled subjects one finds.

La linguistique variationniste comme méthode

This paper explores Labov's work on phonology and linguistic change during the last ten years. The concepts of inherent variation and heterogeneity are shown to provide an adequate methodological basis for the study of phonetic change. The neo-grammarian controversy is analysed along with some phonological synchronie processes. With an enlargement of the empirical basis, the variationist analysis gives linguists internal and external decision-making criteria with which to evaluate linguistic theories.

When does variation indicate linguistic change in progress?

AbstractIt is argued that two variables of Modern French (the negative particleneand the consonantlof clitic pronouns such asil) are indeed indices of ongoing linguistic change, even though this change appears to be of long duration. This conclusion is based not only on the distribution of the variables in a corpus of natural French discourse, but also on independent linguistic evidence, together with the available historical record. In the absence of adequate ‘real-time’ data, variationist analysis yielding synchronic, “apparent-time” data provides a useful means of charting the drift of the language.

Conséquences linguistiques du contact des langues : un modèle d'analyse variationniste

Linguistic consequences of language contact : a variationist analysis model. Exposition of the variationist model of code switching and of borrowing, determined by the observing or breaking of equivalence constraint between the syntaxes of the languages in contact at the intra-sentence level. This constraint predicts that the switch will occur at such boundaries where the syntaxes of both languages can be observed. This switch may be smooth and without rhetorical effect or flagged and with identificable ihetorical functions. As for borrowing, one can distinguish between widespread loans and "nonce" borrowing. Between typologically distant languages (Tamil/English, Finnish/English), one can show that the scarcity of boundaries where switchqig is permitted according to the equivalence constraint reduces the rate of true code switching towards borrowing. A model opposing switching and borrowing is proposed.