Dennis R. Preston

Nonlinguists' Views of Areal Linguistics

Perceptual Dialectology

Robert Bayley

Xiaoshi Li

Variationist work in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) began in the mid 1970s and steadily progressed during the 1980s. Much of it was reviewed along with newer approaches in Bayley and Preston 1996 (B&P), heavily devoted to VARBRUL analyses that exposed the variability in developing interlanguages and placed variationist work within the canon of SLA. This new volume features three developing trends. First, it widens the scope of L1s of learners (from 6 in B&P to 8) and L2 targets (2 in B&P to 7) and in each case has brought more careful demographic and variable considerations to bear, including heritage languages and study abroad. Second, it modernizes statistics by moving from VARBRUL to the more widely used log-odds probabilities that allow more detailed consideration of variables and their influences. Finally, it deepens consideration of variable sociolinguistic meaning in learner behaviors, a dominating feature of 3rd Wave variationist work.

Crosslinguistic perspectives

Variation in Second and Heritage Languages

James N. Stanford

Indigenous minority languages have played crucial roles in many areas of linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, typology, and the ethnography of communication. Such languages have, however, received comparatively little attention from quantitative or variationist sociolinguistics. Without the diverse perspectives that underrepresented language communities can provide, our understanding of language variation and change will be incomplete. To help fill this gap and develop broader viewpoints, this anthology presents 21 original, fieldwork-based studies of a wide range of indigenous languages in the framework of quantitative sociolinguistics. The studies illustrate how such understudied communities can provide new insights into language variation and change with respect to socioeconomic status, gender, age, clan, lack of a standard, exogamy, contact with dominant majority languages, internal linguistic factors, and many other topics.

Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages

Daniel Long

The Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume 2, expands on the coverage of both regions and methodologies in the investigation of nonlinguists' perceptions of language variety. New areas studied include Canada (anglophone and francophone), Cuba, Hungary, Italy, Korea, and Mali, and most prominent among the new approaches are studies of the salience of specific linguistic features in variety identification and assessment. As in Volume I, the reader will find in these chapters everything from the statistical treatment of the ratings of dialect attributes to studies of the actual discourses of nonlinguists discussing language variety. Dialectologists, sociolinguistics, ethnographers, and applied linguists who work in areas where language variety is a concern will appreciate the findings and methods of these studies, but social scientists of every sort who want to understand the role of language in the cultural lives of ordinary people will also find much of interest here.

Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology

Containing all new material and published for the American Dialect Society's centennial celebration (1889-1989), this volume bings together in one place, as no previously published work has, current approaches to the general problems of language distribution and variation. The several chapters offer accounts of how questions are formulated and how data are collected, stored, and intepreted in the various research traditions of dialectology and sociolinguistics, particularly as they have been carried out by researchers associated with the American Dialect Society. More specifically, this book takes trips to the scholar's laboratory. How is this work done? What pitfalls in fieldwork, processing, and interpretation have been encountered and how have they been overcome? What techniques have been used to get at the facts and underlying explanations of language variety? What does recent work suggest about the most rewarding areas and methods for future investigation?

Dennis R. Preston

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