Variationist Research Research Articles

Multidimensional Identity as Bricolage: Indexing Race and Place in Bakersfield, California

While traditional variationist research has been critiqued for positioning ethnic and regional variation in terms of separate “lects,” recent work has adopted a more nuanced view in which racialized subjects can combine individual linguistic resources to index multiple identities. Expanding upon this perspective, this paper explores how 12 African Americans in Bakersfield, California, combine elements of a local variety— California Vowel Shift (CVS)— and elements of a racialized variety— African American Language (AAL) via their realization of BOOT-fronting, BAT-backing, and the BOT-BOUGHT merger. While African Americans front BOOT and increasingly back BAT over time— as predicted by the CVS— they maintain a BOT-BOUGHT distinction— a pattern in line with descriptions of AAL. These patterns, which do not mirror either CVS or AAL in a wholesale way, align with the aforementioned perspective describing the linguistic practices of racialized individuals as a fluid linguistic repertoire, in which individual variables can be leveraged to articulate identity in complex ways. Relatedly, conversations in gender and linguistics have used bricolage as a theoretical framework to describe a similar phenomenon. Bridging these disciplinary conversations, it is argued that through stylistic bricolage, speakers draw from a fluid linguistic repertoire to articulate their identities as multidimensional.

Variation of Spoken Slovene in the Case of Geographically Mobile Speakers

Based on the pioneering variationist research on Slovene language material, the article explores the authentic language use of speakers of the Cerkno dialect who commute daily or weekly to work or school in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana. The research corpus comprises excerpts from informants’ full-day audio self-recordings, selected to represent variation of location, interlocutors, and conversation topic. Through a quantitative analysis of five phonological variables, the study reveals distinct language strategies with speakers of other varieties, resulting in a classification of one code-switcher, three code-mixers, and one dialect speaker language strategies employed by the informants when communicating with speakers of other varieties, resulting in a classification of code-switchers, code-mixers and dialect speakers. Furthermore, the qualitative data derived from interviews shed light on various sociopsycholo­gical aspects of the focal topic, such as the informants’ perception of their own speech behaviour, their experiences with language use, and their language attitudes, providing deeper insights into their language variability and highlighting the intricacies of language choice and interpersonal communication.

Computer-based Reading Recall on Sociolinguistic Research

Global bilingual communities are a fascinating phenomenon that has received constant attention from different angles and disciplines. Sociolinguistic research has also turned interest towards what motivates change in these globalized settings, as well as psycholinguistic research has wanted to focus on the cognitive aspects of L2 speakers. With the widespread use of computer-based methods, it seems natural to add them to contemporary research as a way of understanding variation and change to a deeper level. Through the data I have collected, I debate in this article the importance of including computer-based tests as part of traditional variationist research. I argue that the traditional separation of methods and data collection has influenced the research process to a point where some new behaviors could be overlooked. In this article I report the relationship between cognitive adaptation and social experiences in the Colombian in the Philadelphia bilingual community, which becomes more proficient not only because of age and time of L2 learning, but also because of how welcoming their social circles are, as well as how diverse their friendships and workplaces are.

Medium-shifting and intraspeaker variation in conversational interviews

AbstractWe investigate the impact of medium of communication (in-person versus video) on intraspeaker variation in conversation—a process we refer to asmedium-shifting. To quantify the effects of medium-shifting and understand its possible motivations, we analyze three variables that show intraspeaker effects of “clear” or “careful” speech: articulation rate, density-controlled vowel space area, and (ING). The data come from matched in-person and video-mediated interviews with thirty-three repeat guests fromThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert, recorded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixed-effects regression models show that compared to in-person interviews, video-mediated interviews involve a significantly lower articulation rate and larger vowel space, but no significant difference in (ING). The results suggest that speakers may engage in medium-shifting in order to enhance their intelligibility over video, for example, through more precise articulatory movements and greater contrast between phonemic vowel categories. The null effect of medium on (ING) further suggests that medium-shifting is a motivator of intraspeaker differences even within a single contextual style. An emergent extralinguistic factor affecting speaking behavior and choices, medium-shifting should be carefully considered especially when designing variationist research involving mixed media interviews.

From learners to users—errors, innovations, and universals

Abstract This paper looks into the dilemma of what counts as a grammatical ‘learner error’ in ELT on the basis of recent results from English variationist research and English as a lingua franca research. Examples from these studies show that features often perceived as ‘errors’ for EFL speakers also occur in ESL production—where they are called ‘innovations’—and even in English as a native language (ENL) production—where the term ‘spoken language universal’ would seem more appropriate. It is proposed that the traditional categorization of English speakers into EFL, ESL, and ENL actually hinders us from seeing the linguistic realities of the English-speaking world, disfavouring EFL speakers in particular. The paper calls for ELT to see EFL speakers as users of the language rather than learners in order to acknowledge their grammatical creativity as similar to that of other speakers of English.

Sociophonetics, semantics, and intention

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler observes that the role of speaker intention seems to differ in the meanings of primary interest in variationist sociolinguistics on one hand and semantics and pragmatics on the other. Taking this observation as its point of departure, the central goal of the present work is to clarify the nature of intention-attribution in general and, at the same time, the nature of these two types of meaning. I submit general principles by which observers determine whether to attribute a particular intention to an agent – principles grounded in observers’ estimation of the agent’s beliefs, preferences, and assessment of alternative actions. These principles and the attendant discussion clarify the role of alternatives, common ground, and perceptions of naturalness in intention-attribution, illuminate public discourses about agents’ intentions, point to challenges for game-theoretic models of interpretation that assume cooperativity, and elucidate the nature of the types of meaning of interest. Examining the role of intention vis-à-vis findings and insights from variationist research and the formally explicit game-theoretic models just mentioned foregrounds important differences and similarities between the two types of meaning of interest and lays bare the contingent nature of all meaning in practice.

Evidence of Variable Gender Role in Defining Language Change Leadership in Syrian Arabic

This study aims to present evidence of gender variability among leaders of language change across different sociolinguistic variables, five phonological variables (a consonant and four vowels) and a discourse variable in Syrian Arabic, within the same speech community. Employing a sociolinguistic variationist approach and comparing children to adults yielded different gendered linguistic behavior. Children show the same dramatic gendered linguistic difference as adults regarding the variable (q), with males using much more rural (q) than urban (ʔ) than females. Regarding the vowel variables, children dramatize their gendered linguistic difference much more than adults; boys show much higher use of the rural vowels than girls compared to the difference between men and women. This pattern is reversed in the discourse variable (yaʕni) ‘that is/I mean’; the gendered linguistic difference is more dramatic among adults than it is among children, and gender effect diminishes in the linguistic distribution of the variable. This multidirectionality in gender effects bears implications for sociolinguistic variationist research. Variables indexed to urban refinement/prestige and social meanings such as femininity/masculinity are more likely to be led by females than males. Conversely, variables that lack these types of social/gender identification indexicality, regardless of whether they are phonological or discursive, do not follow the same pattern of leadership..

Perceptual validation of vowel normalization methods for variationist research

AbstractThe evaluation of normalization methods sometimes focuses on the maximization of vowel-space similarity. This focus can lead to the adoption of methods that erase legitimate phonetic variation from our data, that is, overnormalization. First, a production corpus is presented that highlights three types of variation in formant patterns: uniform scaling, nonuniform scaling, and centralization. Then the results of two perceptual experiments are presented, both suggesting that listeners tend to ignore variation according to uniform scaling, while associating nonuniform scaling and centralization with phonetic differences. Overall, results suggest that normalization methods that remove variation not according to uniform scaling can remove legitimate phonetic variation from vowel formant data. As a result, although these methods can provide more similar vowel spaces, they do so by erasing phonetic variation from vowel data that may be socially and linguistically meaningful, including a potential male-female difference in the low vowels in our corpus.

(h) in Marshallese English

Abstract This paper explores the sociolinguistic patterning of glottal choices in the English spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a variety that variationist research has thus far eschewed. The analysis suggests that the schooling background of the speaker is the most crucial determinant for both /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion. These findings are not surprising given the dramatic social inequalities regarding access to educational opportunities that characterise the RMI. The locally-specific contact situation, in conjunction with the constraints on /h/-insertion, suggest that the English spoken in the Marshall Islands is typologically distinct from the Southern British dialect root described for other parts of the Pacific by Schreier (2019).

Voice and Mirroring in SLA: Top-Down Pedagogy for L2 Pronunciation Instruction

There are two broad approaches to the research and teaching of second-language (L2) pronunciation—‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’—which roughly align with structural and communicative approaches to language teaching. A bottom-up approach, explicitly focusing on de-contextualised linguistic forms, is structuralist and predominated in the second half of the 20th century; a top-down approach to L2 pronunciation takes a more communicative orientation, defining the instructional goal not as acquiring a native-speaker accent, but rather as ‘intelligibility.’ In consideration of this pronunciation goal (i.e. intelligibility) and recent L2 acquisition theoretical frameworks emphasising the role of social and contextual factors in shaping interlanguage (IL) systems, we argue that a top-down approach is paramount to L2 pronunciation instruction. Drawing on variationist research on IL phonology and a brief recount of International Teaching Assistant pronunciation course programs in the US, we present the Mirroring Project as an effective top-down pedagogical approach for L2 pronunciation instruction.

La adquisición de segmentos del inglés desde la sociolingüística: la fricativa postalveolar sorda /ʃ/

En la tradición laboviana el estudio de la variación lingüística ha comenzado a aplicarse recientemente en investigaciones de segunda lengua, donde se ha demostrado que en este tipo de contextos (principalmente inmigración) surgen patrones sociolingí¼í­sticos similares a los encontrados en estudios de variación en lengua materna. Este artí­culo recoge la fricativa postalveolar sorda (ʃ)[1] como variable fonética en el habla de 18 estudiantes chilenos de inglés. Por medio de análisis de factor por factor y de variable múltiple se buscó determinar, en primer lugar, si los patrones de variación lingüística del español de Chile también ocurren en situaciones de inglés como lengua extranjera, dado que esta variable ha sido históricamente correlacionada con factores sociales y, en segundo término, si los hablantes no nativos de inglés replican la variación que muestran los hablantes nativos. Los resultados sugieren que tanto factores lingí¼í­sticos como sociales contribuyen a la variación de (ʃ). De esta forma, el artí­culo contribuye a fortalecer la noción de que la variación es inherente a las lenguas, tanto en lengua materna como en lengua extranjera.
 
 [1] En sociolingüística los paréntesis se utilizan para referirse a una variable lingüística; las variantes lingüísticas (las distintas realizaciones de una variable) serán identificadas con corchetes.

Register in variationist linguistics

Abstract Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Professor of Linguistics in the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics research group at the Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven, writes this article exploring the connections between register and variationist linguistics. He is involved with various large-scale research projects in areas such as probabilistic grammar, variationist sociolinguistic research, linguistic complexity, and dialectology/dialectometry. Szmrecsanyi’s books include Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects: A Study in Corpus-based Dialectometry (2013, Cambridge) and Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis: Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech (Szmrecsanyi & Wälchli 2014, Mouton de Gruyter). He is currently a principal investigator on a major grant-funded research project titled ‘The register-specificity of probabilistic grammatical knowledge in English and Dutch’, a project aimed at exploring the question of whether register differences lead to differences in the processes of making linguistic choices. In sharp contrast to the status quo in variationist linguistics, where register is often ignored entirely, much of Szmrecsanyi’s variationist research treats register as a variable of primary importance. The findings from these studies have led Benedikt Szmrecsanyi to state that “we need more empirical/variationist work to explore the differences that register makes” (Szmrecsanyi 2017: 696).

Electronic Database of Variation

The paper is an overview of the Repository of Variationist Research (https://vastry.ru/), an online storage and interactive plotting tool for quantitative sociolinguistic data. The paper describes a number of sociolinguistic experiments from which the data come and outlines the Repository and the toolkit it provides to its users.

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.

Gender and language change in Old Norse sentential negatives

AbstractOne consistent finding across sociolinguistic studies is the tendency for female speakers to lead in ongoing change. Different explanations have been proposed for this and a key method of testing these explanations is to identify whether the pattern occurs in the languages of a wider range of societies than have been studied thus far. Historical societies are relatively understudied in this regard, but undertaking variationist research into gender in historical varieties presents many challenges. One way to overcome these is to examine variation internal to fiction data. This paper presents an analysis of the effect of gender on the adverb selected for sentential negation in Old Norse prose fiction. It finds that female characters lead consistently in this change over time. In doing so, it demonstrates the feasibility of using fiction data when examining the effect of gender in historical varieties such as Old Norse.

The future tense in Spanish L2 textbooks

This paper revisits the treatment of the expression of futurity in Spanish foreign language (FL) textbooks. We analyzed twenty college-level Spanish FL textbooks to determine and quantify how futurity is represented. Variationist research has shown the periphrastic future (PF) to be the most frequent variant of futurity followed by the simple present (SP) and the morphological future (MF). Our findings reveal that, despite over two decades of communicative language teaching, Spanish FL textbooks still do not completely present the reality of the expression of futurity. Introductory texts present all three variants of futurity. However, there is a dramatic difference in the formal representation of these three variants in intermediate texts. The PF is formally presented in only four of the ten intermediate texts analyzed. Interestingly, all ten intermediate textbooks include a formal section on the MF. From a formal treatment perspective and unlike native speaker usage, the MF continues to be the futurity variant most often presented to learners, followed by the PF, and the SP, respectively.

A Variationist Approach to Text: What Role-Players Can Teach Us about Form and Meaning

The purpose of my essay is twofold: (1) I demonstrate how analytical techniques from the variationist research paradigm in sociolinguistics provide the scholar with additional tools to understand the relationship between form and meaning, and (2) through this kind of analysis, I present an example of how real-world notions of gendered speech are extended to the dialogue in texts that emerge from virtual interactions. I use the term form in the linguistic sense to represent a meaningful unit of language. In this sense, go and going are two distinct linguistic forms. By contrast, literary form, as it is typically construed, represents the assembly of linguistic forms into a literary composition. For example, poets utilize the syllabic structure of particular linguistic forms in the creation of systematically metered verses. In this case, aspects of the linguistic form (i.e., syllable structure) are integral to the development of the literary (i.e., poetic) form. For authors who leverage dialogue as a means of characterization (e.g., William Faulkner), vernacular linguistic forms are used to create a sense of authenticity, which contributes to the plausibility of their fiction. While distinct, the meanings associated with linguistic forms help to shape the meaning that readers associate with particular literary forms. Through quantitative analysis, I describe how social meaning—those ideologically grounded notions that emerge from the social experiences and understandings of a particular group—becomes associated with particular linguistic forms and how these meanings serve to characterize a particular text. I examine collaboratively authored texts that emerge from interactions in an online role-playing game to demonstrate that authors’ use of nonstandard spellings helps create stereotypically male characters who are linguistically positioned in opposition to non-male characters in their dialogue. In order to understand why a variationist approach can be useful to literary scholars, I will begin by exploring why previous quantitative approaches have had little success in contributing to literary theorization and will then describe how the variationist approach differs.

Models, forests, and trees of York English:Was/werevariation as a case study for statistical practice

AbstractWhat is the explanation for vigorous variation betweenwasandwerein plural existential constructions, and what is the optimal tool for analyzing it? Previous studies of this phenomenon have used the variable rule program, a generalized linear model; however, recent developments in statistics have introduced new tools, including mixed-effects models, random forests, and conditional inference trees that may open additional possibilities for data exploration, analysis, and interpretation. In a step-by-step demonstration, we show how this well-known variable benefits from these complementary techniques. Mixed-effects models provide a principled way of assessing the importance of random-effect factors such as the individuals in the sample. Random forests provide information about the importance of predictors, whether factorial or continuous, and do so also for unbalanced designs with high multicollinearity, cases for which the family of linear models is less appropriate. Conditional inference trees straightforwardly visualize how multiple predictors operate in tandem. Taken together, the results confirm that polarity, distance from verb to plural element, and the nature of the DP are significant predictors. Ongoing linguistic change and social reallocation via morphologization are operational. Furthermore, the results make predictions that can be tested in future research. We conclude that variationist research can be substantially enriched by an expanded tool kit.

<i>Deber (de)</i> + infinitivo: ¿un caso de variación libre en español? Factores condicionantes en un fenómeno de alternancia sintáctica

The present study analyzes the results of variationist research on the alternation between deber and deber de + infinitive; it is based on samples of oral speech contained in the Macrocorpus sociolinguistico de Castellon y sus comarcas [Sociolinguistic macro-corpus of Castellon and surrounding districts]. The study confirms the findings of other research projects by revealing that an advanced stage has been reached in the replacement of the variant deber de by the periphrasis without a preposition ( deber ) in the Spanish-speaking world, although data from speech communities in the Castellon region show the persistence of the former usage in certain linguistic contexts. Such uses do not reflect the prescriptions of academic norms by revealing a functional opposition between the epistemic and deontic modalities, but they do show the importance of other factors relating to modalization. These include, on the one hand, emphasis and the degree of spontaneity of interactions; and on the other, attenuation and orational modality. These sets of factors condition the use of periphrasis with a preposition in opposing ways. Whereas the first set – especially emphasis – are associated with the presence of such a variant, the second act as a serious stimulus against it. Of the other factors selected by multivariate analysis it is possible to distinguish between a number of groups, in accordance with the differences observed. Among those which show the greatest number of such differences, some are revealed in an apparently anarchical fashion (the number of syllables in the verbal complex) or in the opposite manner to what might have been expected (the phono-syntactical context). Others show a high level of interaction or dependence with diverse factors, and cannot therefore be demonstrated to have explicative relevance in themselves (grammatical person, degree of animacy). Other factors display more consistent differences which cannot, however, be confirmed by the study because of their scarce representation in the sample (degree of adjacency between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, and the simple vs. compound nature of the main verb).

Dialect and Register Hybridity: A Case from Schools

This case study explores the academic writing practices of some African American English-speaking high school students, focusing in particular on interactions of dialect and register. In some instances, students appear to draw from a range of dialect and register resources and to deploy them in hybridized forms in their compositions. One implication of this hybridity is that it suggests the need to include register analysis as part of linguistically informed approaches to writing instruction (i.e., approaches that apply variationist research and methods to educational settings). Additionally, this case study examines some of the reasons that motivate the production of hybridity, analyzing how the linguistic tasks in which students are asked to engage and students’ metalinguistic understandings play a role in the creation of hybridized texts. Finally, this study presents analytic methods that, while not new, are applied in a mixed way that attempts to systematically examine both dialect and register in texts.