The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the somewhat older historical and comparative research traditions. Particularly within cognitive and functional linguistics, the evolution towards a maximally dynamic approach to language goes hand in hand with a renewed interest in corpus research and quantitative methods of analysis. Many researchers feel that only in this way one can do justice to the complex interaction of forces and factors involved in linguistic variability, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributions to the present volume illustrate the ongoing evolution of the field. By bringing together a series of analyses that rely on extensive corpuses to shed light on sociolinguistic, historical, and comparative forms of variation, the volume highlights the interaction between these subfields.
Most of the contributions go back to talks presented at the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea held in Leuven in 2001. The volume starts with a global typological view on the sociolinguistic landscape of Europe offered by Peter Auer. It is followed by a methodological proposal for measuring phonetic similarity between dialects designed by Paul Heggarty, April Mc Mahon, and Robert Mc Mahon. Various papers deal with specific phenomena of socially and conceptually driven variation within a single language. For Dutch, José Tummers, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts analyze inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, Reinhild Vandekerckhove focuses on interdialectal convergence between West-Flemish urban dialects, and Arjan van Leuvensteijn studies competing forms of address in the 17th century Dutch standard variety. The cultural and conceptual dimension is also present in the diachronic lexicosemantic explorations presented by Heli Tissari, Clara Molina, and Caroline Gevaert for English expressions referring to the experiential domains of love, sorrow and anger, respectively: the history of words is systematically linked up with the images they convey and the evolving conceptualizations they reveal. The papers by Heide Wegener and by Marcin Kilarski and Grzegorz Krynicki constitute a plea against arbitrariness of alternations at the level of nominal morphology: dealing with marked plural forms in German, and with gender assignment to English loanwords in the Scandinavian languages, respectively, their distributional accounts bring into the picture a variety of motivating factors. The four cross-linguistic studies that close the volume focus on the differing ways in which even closely related languages exploit parallel morphosyntactic patterns. They share the same methodological concern for combining rigorous parametrization and quantification with conceptual and discourse-functional explanations. While Griet Beheydt and Katleen Van den Steen confront the use of formally defined competing constructions in two Germanic and two Romance languages, respectively, Torsten Leuschner as well as Gisela Harras and Kirsten Proost analyze how a particular speaker’s attitude is expressed differently in various Germanic languages.
Innehållsförteckning
Introduction
Peter Auer Europe’s Sociolinguistic Unity, or: A Typology of European Dialect/Standard Constellations
Paul Heggarty, April Mc Mahon and Robert Mc Mahon Dialect classification by phonetic similarity: A computational approach.
José Tummers, Dirk Speelman and Dirk Geeraerts Inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: A usage-based account of the adjectival inflection
Reinhild Vandekerckhove Interdialectal Convergence between West-Flemish Urban Dialects
Arjan van Leuvensteijn Substitutions in Epistolary Forms of Address in the 17th Century Dutch Standard Variety
Heli Tissari Love in Words: Experience and Conceptualisation in the Modern English Lexicon of Love
Clara Molina On the Role of Semasiological Profiles in Merger Discontinuations
Caroline Gevaert The ANGER IS HEAT Question: Detecting Cultural Influence on the Conceptualization of Anger through Diachronic Corpus Analysis.
Heide Wegener Bücher, Bäche, Bachs – Development and Motivation of Marked Plural Forms in German
Marcin Kilarski and Grzegorz Krynicki Not Arbitrary, not Regular: the Magic of Gender Assignment
Griet Beheydt Future Time Reference – Dutch and English Compared
Katleen Van den Steen Cleft and Pseudo-cleft Constructions in French and Spanish
Torsten Leuschner How to Express Indifference in Germanic: Towards a Functional-Typological Research Programme
Gisela Harras and Kristel Proost The Lexicalization of Speech Act Evaluations in German, English and Dutch
Om författaren
Nicole Delbecque is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium.
Johan van der Auwera is Professor at the Center for Grammar, Cognition, and Typology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Dirk Geeraerts is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium.
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