Variationist Paradigm Research Articles

HINDUSTANI DIALECT ANALYSIS AT PHONOLOGICAL LEVEL: SPOKEN IN WESTERN UTTAR PRADESH

The current study addresses the issue of insufficient phonological analysis of the Hindustani dialect spoken in the town of Atrauli, Aligarh district, Western Uttar Pradesh, India. Although there have been research on the phonology of numerous dialects in different places, no extensive analysis has been carried out in this particular case. This study employs William Labov's variationist paradigm as an experimental approach to define the phonemic inventory and analyse systematic patterns of variation in the Hindustani dialect spoken in Atrauli. The study is quantitative, using natural speech recordings to investigate how social factors like religion and age affect phonological variance. The study demonstrates that, while the dialect conforms to the Khari Boli phonemic inventory, distinct patterns of phonological variation are impacted by religion and age, demonstrating the importance of sociodemographic factors on language behaviour. The study suggests that these differences represent deeper social and cultural identities within the community, emphasising the significance of context-specific phonological research.

Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact by Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine Travis

Reviewed by: Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact by Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine Travis Ricardo Otheguy Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. By Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine Travis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 254. ISBN 9781108415828. $110 (Hb). Linguists have long asked whether one finds in bilinguals, in addition to lexical transfer, crosslinguistic influences in morphosyntax. The familiar answer given in most places is: yes (see e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988). But in this book the answer, in a revealing dissent, is pursued by Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine E. Travis (TC&T) with such seriousness and rigor as to make this substantial volume indispensable. Their answer to the question is that there is no morphosyntactic convergence in bilinguals. Not, at least, in this painstakingly carried out case study of the use of subject personal pronouns by fluent English-Spanish bilinguals in the state of New Mexico in the United States. Subject personal pronouns in Spanish (yo, tú, ella, él, etc. 'I, you, she, he', etc.) and especially the difference between expressed versus unexpressed pronominal subjects in finite clauses (ella camina ∼ camina, both 'she walks') represent a mature research topic (Carvalho et al. 2015). Most studies, like the authors', have been conducted on the basis of speech data under the quantitative variationist paradigm first established by William Labov (1966). Also comprising a large variationist literature is the related matter of the possible influence of English on the use of these pronouns in the Spanish of bilinguals. But scholars plowing this field have mostly concentrated on the presumed target of contact influence, Spanish, and not enough on the presumed source, English. This is because while the expression of subjects is obviously variable in Spanish, it is typically assumed to be essentially categorical in English. Yet TC&T make a point that is no less crucial for its being obvious: unexpressed subjects are also found in English (e.g. He .. took off for .. Big Bear. // You're kidding. // 0 Had no idea where he was going (112); the '0' indicates an unexpressed pronoun). There are other important differences between this book and most work on English-Spanish bilingualism in the US. First, the speakers here are almost all US-born and belong to a 150-year-old bilingual community, thus differing from those of the relatively recent immigrant settings studied in most US bilingual research. This speaker profile facilitates conclusions about long-term linguistic change that are harder to reach when a time depth of only two or three generations is considered. Second, the very frequent code-switching that marks the normal speech mode of many bilingual settings is especially noticeable in the corpus utilized here. This allows TC&T to analyze pronominal use in stretches of both languages produced by the same speakers. In this way the authors take into account more directly than other investigators the familiar dictum that the true locus of crosslinguistic influence is the bilingual individual. And since, more than in [End Page 575] other studies, English here thrives in the mind of a single speaker as much as does Spanish, the authors can expose their central claim of no contact effects to the highest risk of falsification, increasing the value of their conclusions. Moreover, the authors can dismiss the claim that the incidence of crosslinguistic influence of English on Spanish is greater in stretches of Spanish located in the vicinity of English stretches. And of special interest to the wider field of bilingual studies, the characteristics of the corpus lead TC&T to note that our confidence is misplaced in such notions as 'the native language', 'the matrix language', 'the second language', or more generally in what they correctly discount as the belief in 'the regime of ordered first and second language acquisition' (66). A third distinctive trait of the study is that the corpus comes with a prosodic transcription, crucially incorporating into the analysis intonational units, or IUs, that are not always found in this literature. A fourth and final differentiating feature is that the English and Spanish stretches of the bilingual corpus are contrasted with two different English...

Paris: a sociolinguistic comparative perspective

AbstractThis article assesses the sociolinguistic impact and importance of the other articles in this special issue on Paris, considering three main themes that are evoked. First, the contribution of the articles here to the development of work on language variation and change on Hexagonal French within the variationist paradigm. Second, I address what I see as the important contribution made to our understanding of the ‘city’ as a sociolinguistic site. Finally, I focus on ethnicity as a social construct in recent variationist work in cities and consider what the articles here, and in comparison with cities elsewhere, add to our understanding of the impact of immigration on local manifestations of language variability. In each case, I attempt to show how these articles foreground or even problematize these three issues, and provide a prospectus for further research that can address unresolved questions.

New speakers: Challenges and opportunities for variationist sociolinguistics

AbstractWhile the field of variationist sociolinguistics has advanced rapidly since Labov (1966), it remains the case that a socially informed theory of language change continues to be influenced by only very few languages, typically English and a handful other dominant European languages. This article considers recent work on the emergence of new speakers in (severely) endangered or minority language communities, and what they might have to offer variationist theory. Although definitions can vary, it has become convention to describe new speakers as individuals ‘with little or no home or community exposure to a minority language but who instead acquire it through immersion or bilingual education programs, revitalization projects or as adult language learners’ (O'Rourke, Pujolar, & Ramallo, 2015: 1). There is now a wealth of literature available on new speakers in typologically dissimilar language contexts, though, so far, very little work has adopted the variationist paradigm. This article will argue that new speakers can figure prominently in variationist models of diffusion and change, taking the classic sociolinguistic factor of social networks as an example. The article ends by proposing a manifesto of potential research trajectories, based on current gaps in the literature.

A call for more diverse sources of data: Variationist approaches in non‐English contexts

Over the past 50 years, variationist sociolinguists have taken the influential ideas and pioneering methods of Labov () to many locations around the world. But the majority of variationist research still focuses on English and other European languages, rather than lesser‐studied language communities. Like other subfields of linguistics, the variationist paradigm needs to continually explore new data from a range of languages. The present article examines how the principles and methods of Labov () have been applied to non‐English language communities, testing the impact and relevance of those half‐century‐old notions in new and sociolinguistically diverse settings, and calling for more research in new field sites.

The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics ed. by Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, Ceil Lucas (review)

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...

Methods in discourse variation analysis: Reflections on the way forward1

This paper demonstrates the need for a uniform model of discourse variation analysis which is equipped to capture the complex nature of discourse variation and change whilst also ensuring generalizability. A review of the literature shows that the current heterogeneity in corpus construction, data quantification and theorizing of discourse variables impedes reliability and intersubjectivity. Suggestions are offered to achieve comparability, and a case is made for a consistent integration of pragmatic function as a factor group in the analysis. The extension of the variationist paradigm to the level of discourse is discussed, and the need for a definition of discourse variables which caters for their flexibility and multifunctionality is demonstrated. It is argued that some methodological consistency is required in variationist discourse analysis in order to advance towards a holistic description of patterns in language variation and change which spans all components of the grammar, and to systematically explore how discourse features are used and manipulated to create social identities.

Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in the Analysis of Grammatical Variation in French

Interest in grammatical variation in spoken French has increased substantially in recent years, and in this article I will examine how aspects of the 'problem of meaning' have been tackled with regard to a range of the variables examined within variationist sociolinguistics. It is worth highlighting at the outset one of the main objectives of sociolinguistic research into variation, as this is perhaps not as well known as it should be. Before the middle of the twentieth century, it had generally been assumed that it was impossible to observe linguistic change in progress, and, by implication, to understand fully the mechanisms by which change takes place. This situation altered dramatically with the advent of the variationist paradigm, established by William Labov and others in the 1960s. Detailed analysis of large quantities of tokens of a sociolinguistic variable, drawn from a carefully constructed corpus of speech produced by a representative sample of the population, henceforth enabled researchers to study change in 'apparent time', by observing quantitative differences in the language of comparable age cohorts within a given speech community. The variationist paradigm revolutionised the study of linguistic change, as well as revealing that linguistic variation often correlates both with other social factors such as gender and social class and with aspects of the linguistic context in which variables occur. As is well known, the concept of the sociolinguistic variable was initially applied almost exclusively to phonology, especially in studies of varieties of English. 1 However it was not long before the pioneers of variationist sociolinguistics began to apply their methods to higher linguistic levels, notably morphology and syntax. Trudgill's study of Norwich English, for example, included an analysis of 'the social differentiation of a grammatical feature' the

Discovering the quantity of quality: scoring ‘Regional Identity’ for quantitative research

The variationist paradigm in sociolinguistics is at a disadvantage when dealing with variables that are traditionally treated qualitatively, e.g., ‘identity’. This study essays to level the accuracy and descriptive value of qualitative research in a quantitative setting by rendering such a variable quantitatively accessible. To this end, a scoring system for ‘regional identity’ is innovated. The system, Scova, is employed in a study conducted in Louisville, KY, that investigates the monophthongization of /ai/ in relation to the linguistic expression of identity. The Scova system devised here is designed to provide researchers a tool to rate qualitative variables such as identity with reasonable objectivity and replicability, utilizing emic criteria taken from each interview individually to assign positive or negative point values to statements made by informants in that interview, with the result that each informant generates a score that may be compared across informants and used in statistical analysis. The results of statistical analysis offer promising evidence for the system’s effectiveness and potential application in future research.

The relationship between the group and the individual and the acquisition of native speaker variation patterns: A preliminary study

The relationship between group and individual has been explored within the variationist paradigm. In L1, group patterns of variation are replicated by the individual. Second language acquisition research is concerned with the individual learner, but second language acquisition variationist researchers tend to group learners. Little empirical evidence exists that such grouping is valid, given the importance of individual variation. This article investigates whether it is meaningful to group learners. This is a longitudinal, quantitative study of the acquisition of variation by Irish speakers of French L2 over three years, of which one is a year abroad experience. Participants are five advanced learners, twenty years old, with five years of French classes at secondary school and two at university. A computer (Varbrul) analysis shows similar patterns in group and individual, in the deletion of ne. Theoretical implications are that it is legitimate to apply group standards to individual speakers and that native speaker variation acquisition is linked to a prolonged stay in the native speaker community.

Variation and Change in French: Essays Presented to Rebecca Posner on the Occasion of Her Sixtieth Birthday

The variationist paradigm of sociolinguistics launched by Labov has brought about radical revision in the way we view linguistic evolution. This book is the first to systematically apply the insights within French linguistics. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of linguistics, sociolinguistics, French and Romance linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics.