Dimensions of Linguistic Variation

The chapters in this book all demonstrate that, while corpora from different communities can vary in different ways, those differences must and can be integrated into data coding and metadata coding in ways that permit the linguistic patterns of various communities to be compared.

In Dimensions of Linguistic Variation, the contributors investigate evidence for the myriad factors which influence language variation and change, and consider how to best account for these factors in data and metadata coding. Given linguists'' increasing ability to preserve and share data, questions arise around the possibility of comparing data from different communities: how should a corpus builder model, elicit, encode, analyze, and archive data that have been collected from highly diverse groups of speakers, from situations beyond the sociolinguistic interview, in a way that supports re-use, comparison across collections, and longer-term archiving? Answering these questions requires a highly nuanced understanding of the social influences on speech variation. Social differences between communities and contexts can permit or encourage comparisons, in some cases, and render comparisons impossible, in others. The current volume builds on a rich foundation of insight from the sociolinguistics community as to how community-specific social distinctions shape variation and change within a given community and presents new, state-of-the-art insights from a diverse range of community and context types. The editors have compiled a volume which will enable researchers both to expand the established set of variables expected to be considered in any community study, and to categorize data and results in ways that best permit cross-community comparisons. They present the issues involved in research planning, the modeling of the target community, subject selection, the elicitation and coding of demographic, situational and attitudinal factors, and how they all affect analysis and potential reuse.