Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Beat Siebenhaar
Language Variation - European Perspectives VI showcases a selection of papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which was held in Leipzig in 2015. The volume includes plenaries by Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere (“The large and the small of it: Big issues… read more
Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller, Anders Holmberg and Mohammad Almoaily
Most of what we know about pidgin and creole languages is the result of research into contact languages that developed as a consequence of European expansion into Africa and the Caribbean. The narrow focus on European lexifier and West African substrate languages has resulted in insufficient… read more
Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Ingrid van Alphen
Research on quotation has yielded a rich and diverse knowledge-base. Scientific interest has been sparked particularly by the recent emergence of new quotative forms in typologically related and unrelated languages (i.e. English be like, Hebrew kazé, Japanese mitai-na).The present collection gives… read more
The quotative system is a highly dynamic domain characterised by competing traditional variants (say, think) and newcomers (be all, be like) (Buchstaller 2013). Trend and apparent time studies have focused on be like, describing its expansion across the English-speaking world and reporting… read more
In 2016, a special issue of the Linguistic Landscapes: An International Journal explored the nexus between LL and collective memory studies, calling for more research at the interface of these disciplines. Our analysis adds to recent studies by exploring the ways in which commemorative street… read more
An understanding of linguistic heterogeneity in older speakers is crucial for the study of language variation and change. To date, intra-speaker malleability in older populations remains under-researched, in varieties of English and more generally. This paper contributes panel data to the… read more
This paper explores the sociolinguistic patterning of glottal choices in the English spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a variety that variationist research has thus far eschewed. The analysis suggests that the schooling background of the speaker is the most crucial… read more
This chapter examines grammatical features in Northern varieties of English. With the notable exception of Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004), typologies of English dialects adduce dialect regions according to phonological or lexical criteria. The dearth of systematic knowledge about features “above… read more
We report on longitudinal changes in the system of intensification in an innovative corpus that spans five decades of dialectal speech. Our analyses allow us — for the first time in a British context — to trace the quantitative development in the variable across four generations. Longitudinal… read more
Globalization has been defined as the process whereby “events happening in one place … impact upon many other places, often remote in time and space” (Urry 2003: 39). This paper examines the impact of two globally available linguistic resources — the quotatives be like and go — in two spatially… read more
