Meaning and Linguistic Variation
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Introducing Sign-Based Construction Grammar IVA N A
September 4, 2012 1 Introducing Sign-Based Construction Grammar IVA N A. SAG,HANS C. BOAS, AND PAUL KAY 1 Background Modern grammatical research,1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, in- cludes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surpris- ingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantia- tions of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth highly abstract hypotheses making use of a complex system of repre- sentations, operations, and constraints that are offered as a theory of the rich biological capacity that humans have for language.2 This community eschews writing explicit grammars of individual languages in favor of offering conjec- tures about the ‘parameters of variation’ that modulate the general grammat- ical scheme. These proposals are motivated by small data sets from a variety of languages. A second community, which we will refer to as the Typological (TYP) camp, is concerned with descriptive observations of individual languages, with particular concern for idiosyncrasies and complexities. Many TYP re- searchers eschew formal models (or leave their development to others), while others in this community refer to the theory they embrace as ‘Construction Grammar’ (CxG). 1For comments and valuable discussions, we are grateful to Bill Croft, Chuck Fillmore, Adele Goldberg, Stefan Müller, and Steve Wechsler. We also thank the people mentioned in footnote 8 below. 2The nature of these representations has changed considerably over the years. Seminal works include Chomsky 1965, 1973, 1977, 1981, and 1995. -
Style and Sociolinguistic Variation Edited by Penelope Eckert and John R
This page intentionally left blank The study of sociolinguistic variation examines the relation between social identity and ways of speaking. The analysis of style in speech is central to this field because it varies not only between speakers, but in indi- vidual speakers as they move from one style to another. Studying these variations in language not only reveals a great deal about speakers’ strate- gies with respect to variables such as social class, gender, ethnicity and age, it also affords us the opportunity to observe linguistic change in progress. The volume brings together a team of leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and varia- tion. Beginning with an introduction to the broad theoretical issues, the book goes on to discuss key approaches to stylistic variation in spoken language, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinc- tiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in socio- linguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology. is Professor of Linguistics, Courtesy Professor in Anthropology, and co-Chair of the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University. She has published work in pure ethnography as well as ethnographically based sociolinguistics including Jocks and Burnouts: Social Identity in the High School (1989) and Variation as Social Practices (2000). . is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. He is also Courtesy Professor in Education, and Director of the Program in African and African American Studies. -
Lauren Hall-Lew
Lauren Hall-Lew Linguistics & English Language http://LaurenHall-Lew.com The University of Edinburgh [email protected] Dugald Stewart Building [wk] (+44/0) 131 651–1836 3 Charles Street Edinburgh, EH8 9AD United Kingdom EMPLOYMENT 2017– Reader, Linguistics and English Language School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences University of Edinburgh 2010–2017 Lecturer, Linguistics and English Language School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences University of Edinburgh 2009–2010 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociolinguistics Faculty of English Language and Literature (ELL) Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics (LPP) University of Oxford 2009–2010 Early Career Development Research Fellow Wolfson College, University of Oxford 2009 Teaching Fellow, Department of Linguistics Stanford University 2008 Teaching Fellow, Center for Teaching and Learning Stanford University Additional Affiliations 2017 Sabbatical Fellow Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Oxford Personal Leave 2018 Adoption Leave (March–July) 2014 Adoption Leave (March–April) Lauren Hall-Lew Curriculum Vitae, Monday 16th July, 2018 2 EDUCATION 2009 PhD in Linguistics Dissertation: “Ethnicity and Phonetic Variation in San Francisco English” Co-Advisors – Penelope Eckert & John R. Rickford Readers – Miyako Inoue & Meghan Sumner External Reader – Ray McDermott Stanford University 2006 MA in Linguistics Stanford University 2002 BA in Linguistics (summa cum laude) University of Arizona Additional Coursework 2007 LSA -
Pauline Jacobson-Cv, 7/21
Pauline Jacobson CURRICULUM VITAE updated: July, 2021 Department of Cognitive. Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Box 1821 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 phone: (401)-863-3037; (401)-863-2727 fax: 401-863-2255 e-mail: [email protected] Primary Areas of Specialization: formal (compositional) semantics, syntactic theory, the interaction of syntax and semantics Secondary Areas: pragmatics; the interface of pragmatics and semantics; lexical semantics; language processing and linguistic theory Area of 'expertise' for the purposes of teaching (only!): Linguistic Relativity hypothesis Education A.B. (Anthropology), University of California at Berkeley, 1968. M.A. (Linguistics), University of California at Berkeley, 1972. Masters thesis: Crossover and Some Related Phenomena. Ph.D. (Linguistics), University of California at Berkeley, 1977. Dissertation: The Syntax of Crossing Coreference Sentences. Teaching and Research Positions Visiting teaching and research positions: Visiting Professor, Harvard, Semester I, 2004-5. Visiting Professor, UCLA, May, 2001. Visiting Professor, Institute for Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (Institute for Computational Linguistics), University of Stuttgart, Germany, May- June, 1998. Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, August- December, 1997. Visiting Associate Professor, Ohio State University; January-June, 1990. Summer Institutes: (courses at Linguistic Society of America Institutes were by invitation of the host institution; courses at the European Summer School in Language, Logic and Information were by invitation of the organizing committee or refereed proposal submission; others by invitation of the organizing committee) Second Annual East Asian Summer School in Language, Logic, and Information, Southwest University, Chongqing, China, August, 2012. "The Syntax-Semantic Interface: Compositionality Issues". Pauline Jacobson - cv - 2021 2 European Summer School in Language, Logic, and Information, Copenhagen, August, 2010. -
VP Ellipsis and Semantic Ldentity1
VP Ellipsis and Semantic ldentity1 Daniel Hardt University of Pennsylvania 1. Introduction The grammar of English provides a broad array of elliptical constructions, where what is communicated goes beyond what is explicitly stated. One example of this is verb phrase ellipsis, in which a verb phrase is elided, its position marked only by an auxiliary verb. It is generally agreed that VP ellipsis is governed by an identity condition, to the effect that an identical copy of the antecedent is "reconstructed" at the ellipsis site. A basic question arises as to whether the identity condition is to be stared in syntactic or semantic terms. There is a well known body of evidence which indicates that VP ellipsis is governed by a semantic identity condition. Consider the following example (Sag and Hankamer (1982)): (1) A: Do you think they will like me? B: Of course they will. Here, the only reading of the elliptical VP is "like you"; this preserves the meaning of the antecedent "like me", but it requires that the target and antecedent VP are not syntactically identical. Similarly, examples such as (2) Wendy is eager to sail around the world and Bruce is eager to climb Kilimanjaro, but neither of them can because money is too tight. have been taken to indicate that inference is sometimes required to resolve VP ellipsis, or at least that VP ellipsis must be defined at the level at which inferential relations are definable (Webber (1978)). In sum, it appears that VP ellipsis interacts in a fundamental way with external, non-linguistic mechanisms such as indexicality and inference, which suggests that it must be dealt with at a semantic level. -
1 Three Waves of Variation Study
1 Three Waves of Variation Study: The emergence of meaning in the study of variation Penelope Eckert Stanford University Abstract The treatment of social meaning in variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macro-sociological categories of socioeconomic class, sex class, ethnicity and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In both waves, variation was seen as marking social categories. This paper sets out a theoretical foundation for the third wave, arguing that (1) variation constitutes a robust social semiotic system, expressing the full range of social concerns in a given community; (2) variation does not simply reflect, but constructs, social meaning, hence is a force in social change and (3) the meanings of variables are basic and underspecified, gaining more specific meanings in the context of styles (personae). 1. The fate of social meaning in the study of variation The first quantitative community study of variation was all about social meaning. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews on Martha's Vineyard, William Labov (Labov 1963) established that the pronunciation of /ay/ had been recruited as an indexical resource in a local ideological struggle. This diphthong had a centralized nucleus in the Vineyard dialect, but for some years, island speakers had been following the mainland trend to lower the nucleus to [ɑ]. Labov found that some speakers were reversing this lowering trend, in an apparent move to recapture one of the most salient features of the distinctive island dialect. -
16 Language and Gender in Adolescence
Language and Gender in Adolescence 381 16 Language and Gender in Adolescence PENELOPE ECKERT 1 Introduction Adolescence is a critical site for the study of language and gender. First, it is a life-stage at which a tremendous amount of identity work is being done, and gender is perhaps more salient in this work than at any other life-stage. Ado- lescents are moving away from identities based in the family to identities based in a newly organized and newly heterosocial peer social order, and this heterosociability both makes gender more salient, and changes its constitution. Second, adolescents are the major institutionalized population within indus- trial, and perhaps particularly within US, culture, and this institutionalization intensifies identity work, giving rise to an unusual amount of symbolic activity – much of it linguistic. Finally, institutionalization also subjects adolescents to particular kinds of monitoring and policing, much of which is gendered, and much of which focuses on language. 2 Adolescence as Ideology In introducing my discussion of gender and adolescent language, and of adult activity around this use, I would like to emphasize that adolescence, like gender, is an ideological construct. The joint consideration of gender and adolescence provides a double opportunity to discuss the problems of power, homogeniza- tion, reification, and essentialism in the study of language and social groups. Just as gender does not unfold naturally from biology, neither do life-stages such as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, or old age. Biology imposes some constraints, and culture takes off from there. Adolescence is an outgrowth of industrialization – of the shift to institutionalized preparation for work, and the need to keep the young out of the workforce. -
Lessons from the English Auxiliary System1
This is an author-generated pre-published draft. c Journal of Linguistics, Cambridge University Press (2019) The final version is available at Cambrige Journals Online DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002222671800052X Lessons from the English Auxiliary System1 IVAN A. SAG† Stanford University RUI P. CHAVES University at Buffalo, SUNY ANNE ABEILLE´ Universit´eParis Diderot–Paris 7 BRUNO ESTIGARRIBIA University of North Carolina DAN FLICKINGER Stanford University PAUL KAY University of California, Berkeley LAURA A. MICHAELIS University of Colorado Boulder STEFAN MULLER¨ Humboldt-Universit¨at zu Berlin GEOFFREY K. PULLUM University of Edinburgh FRANK VAN EYNDE University of Leuven THOMAS WASOW Stanford University [1] The primary author of this paper, Ivan Sag, worked on aspects of the auxiliary system of English throughout his career in linguistics. He left a version of this comprehensive overview IVAN A. SAG ET AL. 2 The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. -
Contextualizing the Third Wave in Variationist Sociolinguistics: on Penelope Eckert's (2018) Meaning and Linguistic Variation
ISSN 2074-9864 (online) VIENNA ENGLISH WORKING PAPERS HTTP://ANGLISTIK.UNIVIE.AC.AT/RESEARCH/VIEWS/ VOLUME 27 2018 BARBARA SOUKUP Contextualizing the Third Wave in variationist sociolinguistics: On Penelope Eckert’s (2018) Meaning and Linguistic Variation Published online: December 2018 VIEWS 27 (2018) Contextualizing the Third Wave in Variationist Sociolinguistics: On Penelope Eckert’s (2018) Meaning and Linguistic Variation Barbara Soukup, Austrian Academy of Sciences* 1. Introduction The present paper started its life as a project for a conventional book review of Penelope Eckert’s Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). However, it soon became clear that my own long-standing engagement and grappling with sociolinguistic variation study in its various incarnations was creating the urge to go beyond the usual exercise of a brief summary and evaluation. The result is an extended commentary, and one which openly places the discussion of Eckert’s book within my own academic (interactional sociolinguistic, European) perspective and context.1 I begin with an overview of the book’s basic set-up and configuration (section 2). A detailed summary follows that attempts to capture and distill Eckert’s perspective as put forth in her book (section 3). Section 4 then consists of a critical reflection on the book that discusses its notable contributions as well as some potential for expansion. The latter also takes a more general view on the Third Wave in variation studies. In essence, I argue that Third Wave research would greatly benefit from better integration with the research tradition of interactional sociolinguistics, both in terms of theory and analysis. -
Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender, and Power All Live1
In Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz and Birch Moonwomon eds., Locating Power, Proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley:Berkeley Women and Language Group, 89-99. Communities of practice: Where language, gender, and power all live1 Penelope Eckert Institute for Research on Learning Sally McConnell-Ginet Cornell University 1. Introduction: Too much abstraction spoils the broth. Studies of language and gender in the past twenty years have looked at many different dimensions of language use and have offered a rich variety of hypotheses about the interaction between gender and language and especially about the connection of power to that interaction. On the one hand, language has been seen as supporting male dominance; on the other, it has been seen as a resource for women resisting oppression or pursuing their own projects and interests. We have all learned a lot by thinking about such proposals, most of which have been supported by interesting and often illuminating observations. But their explanatory force has been weakened by the absence of a coherent theoretical framework within which to refine and further explore them as part of an ongoing research community. The problem is not an absence of generalizations. Our diagnosis is that gender and language studies suffer from the same problem confronting sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics more generally: too much abstraction. Abstracting gender and language from the social practices that produce their particular forms in given communities often obscures and sometimes distorts the ways they connect and how those connections are implicated in power relations, in social conflict, in 1Many of the ideas expressed in this paper have appearedalso in Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, (1992) Think practically and look locally:Language and gender as community-based practice. -
Probabilistic Models of Word Order and Syntactic Discontinuity
PROBABILISTIC MODELS OF WORD ORDER AND SYNTACTIC DISCONTINUITY a dissertation submitted to the department of linguistics and the committee on graduate studies of stanford university in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy Roger Levy September 2005 Copyright by Roger Levy 2005 All Rights Reserved ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Christopher Manning (Principal Adviser) I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Daniel Jurafsky I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Ivan Sag I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Thomas Wasow Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies: iii Acknowledgements Toward the later stages of work on this thesis, I have found myself thinking often of one of my favorite Chinese idioms: p¯ao zhu¯an yˇın y`u, literally ‘throw brick attract jade.’ One of the so-called 36 Stratagems, the idea is that by throwing out something of perhaps limited value, one can induce others to produce something more valuable in return. (Although it originally referred to a deceptive wartime tactic, in modern Chinese the expression has come to be used in cooperative contexts as well.) This id- iom captures what for me has been the singularly most rewarding feature of academic research: the collective process by which you share your ideas with other people, who help them grow, mature, and improve. -
Exophoric VP Ellipsis Philip Miller and Geoffrey K
1 Exophoric VP Ellipsis Philip Miller and Geoffrey K. Pullum 1Introduction The question addressed in this paper emerged 35 years ago out of a classic paper by Jorge Hankamer and Ivan Sag (1976) and a response to it (Schachter 1977; see also Schachter 1978).1 Hankamer & Sag drew adistinctionbetweendeep anaphora and surface anaphora.A central claim of their paper was that deep anaphoric devices can be used either endophorically (i.e. anaphorically if linked to an earlier an- tecedent or cataphorically if the antecedent follows) or exophorically (with no linguistic antecedent). Exophoric uses are interpreted either through ostension or via inference from the nonlinguistic context. Sur- face anaphoric devices, on the other hand, were claimed to require endophoric linkage to an antecedent identical in form (with the excep- tion of minor inflectional variation) to the material that is ellipted or pronominalized away. In subsequent work, these hypotheses were modified. Sag (1976) 1We are pleased to dedicate this paper to our good friend Ivan Sag, whose in- sightful work on ellipsis and many other topics has influenced and enlightened us for more than three decades. An earlier version was presented (by Pullum, to an audience including Sag) at the 2012 LSA meeting in Portland and (by Miller) at the 2nd conference on Topics in the Typology of Elliptical Constructions in Paris. We thank Chris Barker, Francis Cornish, Jonathan Ginzburg, Liliane Haegeman, Dan Hardt, Philip Hofmeister, Polly Jacobson, Anne Jugnet, Laura Kertz, Jason Merchant, Hannah Rohde, Jeff Runner, Tom Wasow, Bonnie Webber, and an anony- mous reviewer for their very useful constructive comments on earlier drafts.