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The unwritten Gaelic of East Sutherland fishing communities offers an example of linguistic variation in which individual speakers' competing variants lack social weighting. Dense face‐to‐face interaction, multiplex social roles, and absence of socioeconomic stratification obviate accommodation and allow variants arising from early population mixture to persist. Similar personally patterned linguistic variation can be seen in other small minority‐language populations with similar social organization. Speech style, gender, family membership, social network, extra‐community language norms, and language contact have relatively little effect. Unlike age‐related variation, personal‐pattern variation is relatively stable over apparent time. Unlike inter‐village variation, it is socially neutral. Reasons for delayed recognition of such variation in the sociolinguistic literature include residual prescriptivism among linguists, data control via source selection, an assumption of linguistic uniformity and accommodation in small, face‐to‐face communities, concentration on the group rather than on the individual, and an expectation of linkage between linguistic variation and social differentiation.

This chapter launches a frontal assault not just on the parametric approach to grammar, but also on the very idea that it is the job of Universal Grammar (UG) per se to account for typological generalizations. It contrasts two approaches to typological variation in grammar within the general envelope of formal theory. In one approach, variation is captured largely by means of parameters, either directly tied to principles of UG or to functional projections provided by UG. In the other approach, variation is captured by means of extragrammatical principles. The chapter concludes that the second approach is better supported than the first.

This chapter presents a synthesis of discussions in the preceding chapters. The most important conclusion from studying the six Aristophanic case studies is that it is feasible to operate with categories of variation which are more fine-grained than the well-known ones of ‘foreign dialect’, ‘paratragic style’, or ‘colloquial language’. The universally recognised absence of linguistic continuity in Aristophanes, and the lack of continuous linguistic characterization should not discourage the analysis of discontinuous characterization: first because variation is an interesting topic in its own right, and secondly because linguistic characterization is possible even in a discontinuous mode.

This chapter explores some of the ways in which the ‘communicative environment’ changed in the period of Umbruch in the early 1990s, and the ways in which the Germans have adapted to life in a new‘speech ecology’, with its own inventories of linguistic forms and repertoires of speech behaviours. It is organized as follows. Section 4.2 examines the impact of different experiences of forms of everyday interaction and considers how far this represents an obstacle to the integration of east Germans into the ‘new’ German speech community. Section 4.3 investigates the more general relationship between social and linguistic mobility in Germany after unification. Section 4.4 considers research on the changing evaluations of particular linguistic varieties such as vernacular speech and standard forms in Berlin, on the ideology of standardization, and on ways in which the disparagement of linguistic varieties can function as a tool of social domination.

Different types of features contribute to the linguistic distance between any two locations. Yet, the correlation between different feature types in defining patterns of dialectal variation represents an area of research still unexplored. In traditional dialectology, there is no obvious way to approach this matter beyond fairly superficial and impressionistic observations. This chapter summarises the results of a correlation study focusing on linguistic variation in an Italian region, Tuscany. By exploiting a multilevel representation scheme of dialectal data, the study analyses attested patterns of phonetic and morpho-lexical variation with the aim of testing the degree of correlation between phonetic variation and morpho-lexical variation, and between linguistic variation and geographic distance. The correlation analysis was carried out by combining two complementary approaches proposed in dialectometric literature, namely by computing both global and place-specific correlation measures and by inspecting their spatial distribution. The results demonstrate that phonetic and morpho-lexical variations in Tuscany seem to follow a different pattern than encountered in previous studies.

‘Register’ is the linguistic code that is used in the creation of text that belongs to a ‘genre’. In other words, register is the signifiant (e.g., the language used in a culinary recipe), ‘genre’ the signifié (the recipe itself). Register variation seems to occur in all languages, although the number and registers may vary. This chapter discusses register variations, register dimensions, religious language, prayers and hymns, forms of invocation, epithets, speech-act verbs, register-specific vocabulary in prayers, prayer syntax, and hymn syntax.

The Dutch-German state border south of the river Rhine was established in 1830. Before that time, the administrative borders in this region frequently changed. The Kleverlandish dialect area, which extends from Duisburg in Germany to Nijmegen in The Netherlands, crosses the state border south of the Rhine. This chapter assesses the impact of the Dutch-German state border on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area by relating linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other. Three models for explaining today's pattern of linguistic variation in the area are tested. In each model, another variable is used as the determinant of linguistic variation: geographic distance (continuum model), the state border (gap model), and social distance (social model). For the social model, perceptual data for friends, relatives and shopping locations are used. Testing the three models shows that nowadays the dialect variation in the research area is closely related to the existence of the state border and to the social structure of the area. The geographic spatial configuration hardly plays a role anymore.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the lack of sociolinguistic data and the comic mixture of linguistic varieties. It then presents the main theme of the book, which deals with linguistic variation from Aristophanes' comedy. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter provides an overview of the types of linguistic variation attested in pre-demotic Egyptian. More specifically, a sociolinguistic perspective is adopted in order to describe the impact that extralinguistic factors—such as time, origin, and social status of the scribe, situation of communication—may have on the written performance at the time. It is observed that the dimensions of variation related to the scribes, while not entirely absent, are rather elusive in this corpus. Variation resulting from the contexts of communication, conversely, is significant: within a multifaceted scribal repertoire, each genre imposes the selection of specific linguistic registers, which range from greater vernacularity and variation to greater formality and standardization. In a final section, the community of Deir el-Medina, namely the settlement of (royal) tomb-builders during the New Kingdom, is in focus so as to describe the effects that this particular scribal environment had on the written production.

One Cartesian reason for taking thought to be independent of language—or to have its own ‘Language of thought’—is that language is subject to massive cross-linguistic variation, while thought is not. So Chapter 5 addresses the issue of cross-linguistic variation: its dimensions, and its extent. Does it provide a challenge for our account of universal grammar? Not inasmuch as the primary dimension of variation is the organization of language at a lexical and morphological level; not, if what have traditionally been thought of as syntactic parameters actually reduce to variation in modes of externalization.

This chapter explores relevant work in the fields of the bilingual lexicon and cross-linguistic compound variation, which should contribute to research investigating questions that surface at the interface of the two fields—that is, when bilinguals process compounds. It begins with an overview of what is known about the bilingual lexicon from psycholinguistic studies of monomorphemic words, in order to provide concepts useful for discussions of compounding. It then discusses compounds and particular characteristics of compounds that vary crosslinguistically, thereby raising questions about how such differences might affect the way bilinguals process compounds. These questions lead to several hypotheses; the chapter reviews the small number of experiments that provide data relevant to these hypotheses, and suggests directions for future studies to better understand the mental representation of compound words and morphological processing within the bilingual lexicon.

This chapter argues that variation is a constitutive property of language use; its study allows one to explain how grammars change over time. The present discussion is concerned with the latter issue, i.e. the restructuring of grammars underlying language use. Starting from the assumption that language acquisition is a likely source of change, it is argued that explanations of diachronic changes must not stand in conflict with what is known about the human Language Making Capacity in general and, more specifically, about the Language Acquisition Device and the principles constraining acquisition. But although the individual is hypothesized to be the locus of change, it is argued that adequate accounts of diachronic change cannot ignore the fact that speakers share their linguistic knowledge with other members of speech communities. The main question pursued in this book is how core properties of grammars change, i.e. those aspects of grammars which have been shown to be most resistant to change. In the theoretical framework adopted here, this concerns principles constrained by Universal Grammar (UG), most importantly syntactic parameters.

This chapter investigates linguistic variation in the texts written by the Deir el-Medina scribe Amennakhte son of Ipuy in New Kingdom Egypt (Twentieth Dynasty; c. 1150 BCE). After a discussion of the challenge posed by the identification of scribes and authors in this sociocultural setting, I provide an overview of the corpus of texts that can tentatively be linked to this individual and justify the selection that has been made for the present study. The core of this paper is then devoted to a multidimensional analysis of Amennakhte’s linguistic registers. By combining the results of this section with a description of Amennakhte’s scribal habits—both at the graphemo-morphological and constructional levels—I test the possibility of using ‘idiolectal’ features to identify the scribe (or the author) of other texts stemming from the community of Deir el-Medina and closely related to Amennakhte.

This chapter focuses on the concept of technical language. It provides the theoretical background for the study of technical languages in comedy, and critically reviews some of the evidence collected by earlier researchers. It argues that technical languages are far less prominent in Aristophanes' plays than is often assumed — an observation which does not in the least lessen the poet's linguistic achievements. The chapter also considers why technical languages are a marginal phenomenon.

This chapter continues the discussion of Maximize On-line Processing (MaOP), focusing on the distinction between symmetry and asymmetry in cross-linguistic variation. Symmetry is observed when two categories A and B are found productively in A + B and B + A orders: both VO and OV are productive across languages, as are NRel and RelN. Asymmetry occurs when only A + B is attested or is significantly preferred, either in all languages or in a subset for which independent evidence suggests that symmetry could have occurred. Section 8.1 begins with a summary of some major symmetries and asymmetries. Section 8.2 examines asymmetric orders that appear to reflect asymmetries in the dependency relations between the categories in question. Section 8.3 considers symmetrical dependencies and orders. The central hypothesis for the distribution of symmetries and asymmetries is summarized in Sections 8.4. Section 8.5 tests some predictions deriving from this hypothesis for morphosyntactic asymmetries (principally verb agreement and case marking), and Section 8.6 discusses the processing approach presented in relation to Kayne’s (1994) antisymmetry theory.

This chapter offers readings of two recent Russian novels, Valerii Votrin’s Logoped (The Speech Therapist, 2012) and Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Zakhvat Moskovii: natsional-lingvisticheskii roman (The Occupation of Muscovy: a national-linguistic novel, 2012). Votrin represents a linguistic dystopia governed by strict orthoepic norms. The story is told through the portrayal of two persons, a speech therapist representing the authorities, and a journalist, expelled for his oppositional views. Gigolashvili’s novel tells about a young German student of Russian and his encounter with the grammar nazi movement, a group of self-appointed language mavens who monitor, expose and ridicule linguistic liberties and orthographic errors in highly aggressive ways. Both novels can be read as responses to language legislation and language cultivation, highly topical issues in present-day Russian language culture.