Course materials for/by Peter L.
Patrick. Contains copyright material used for educational purposes. Please
respect copyright.
Peter
L Patrick
o
We can examine closely the forms that a linguistic variable takes, and
note what features of the context co-occur with these forms. (“Context” means
the surrounding linguistic environment and the social phenomena that co-occur with
a given variable form.)
o
With a large enough data-set, we can make statements about the
likelihood of co-occurrence of a variable form and any one of the contextual
features we are interested in. These statements express in quantitative terms
the strength of association between a contextual feature and the linguistic
variable.
o
It
is unlikely that any single contextual factor can explain the variability
observed in natural language data.
Other principles of language variation:
o
Individual
speakers may differ in their basic rate of use of a variable rule, ie, in their input probability for the rule (in Varbrul terms).
o
Individuals
belonging to the same speech community will be similar or identical in the
factor values assigned to linguistic constraints on the rule.
The
first of these principles allows for, eg, social
stratification within a speech community whose members nevertheless (by the
second principle) adhere to the same hierarchy of constraints.
LG554 Sociolinguistic Methods
page
Last updated 05 December 2007