Corpus Dialectology

Corpus Dialectology combines the fields of corpus linguistics and dialectological mapping. It concerns documentation of linguistic variation and mapping of linguistic spaces and boundaries, while ascribing renewed importance to the methodology and the material itself, especially data processing and statistical analysis. This approach considers phenomena that have received little attention to date, such as migration, language contact, mobility and educational level, as well as the differentiation between rural and urban spaces. Transparently described and intersubjectively comprehensible encodings permit the enhancement of dialectometry in the context of Digital Humanities and further development of linguistic theories of variation and change, as well as different levels of structure (phonology, morphosyntax, semantics). This book contains nine chapters on ongoing corpus dialectological research projects. They discuss current issues of data collection, for example the validity of crowdsourced data, explore challenges and possibilities of data analysis and offer theoretical reflections on virtual Romance geolinguistics.

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover, it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book), corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III), and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.

UBLI has conducted field surveys since 2002 and built spoken language corpora for French, Spanish, Italian (Salentino dialect), Russian, Malaysian, Turkish, Japanese, and Canadian multilinguals. This volume features new research presented at the UBLI second workshop on Corpus Linguistics – Research Domain, which was held on September 14, 2006. The first part consisting of eleven presentations to this workshop shows a wide range of subjects within the area of corpus-based research, such as dictionary, linguistic atlas, dialect, translation, ancient texts, non-standard texts, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and natural language processing. The second part of this volume comprises ten additional contributions to both written and spoken corpora by the members and research assistants of UBLI.

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

This new edition of TUFS Studies in Linguistics, we aim to showcase the various linguistics research conducted at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. In this first volume, we report on the international symposium hosted by the Global Center of Excellence Program "Corpus-based Linguistics and Language Education (CbLLE)" throughout 2008.

From Twitter to Reddit, Facebook, and WhatsApp – social media is a part of modern everyday life. Studying the language used on social media platforms presents great opportunities as well as challenges to corpus linguists. The contributions in Corpus Approaches to Social Media address technical, ethical, and methodological issues by showcasing in-depth social media studies as conducted by corpus scholars. The chapters are based on a variety of social media platforms and include corpus perspectives on the language of online communities, linguistic variation in short media texts, and the role of images in computer-mediated communication. A particularly strong point of the collection are the detailed accounts of the methodological aspects of working with social media corpora. The volume features research applying traditional corpus linguistic methods to social media data as well as novel and innovative research methods for the analysis of multimodal material and atypical corpus texts.

The Handbook of Dialectology provides an authoritative, up-to-date and unusually broad account of the study of dialect, in one volume. Each chapter reviews essential research, and offers a critical discussion of the past, present and future development of the area. The volume is based on state-of-the-art research in dialectology around the world, providing the most current work available with an unusually broad scope of topics Provides a practical guide to the many methodological and statistical issues surrounding the collection and analysis of dialect data Offers summaries of dialect variation in the world's most widely spoken and commonly studied languages, including several non-European languages that have traditionally received less attention in general discussions of dialectology Reviews the intellectual development of the field, including its main theoretical schools of thought and research traditions, both academic and applied The editors are well known and highly respected, with a deep knowledge of this vast field of inquiry

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

The use of large, computerized bodies of text for linguistic analysis and description has emerged in recent years as one of the most significant and rapidly-developing fields of activity in the study of language. This book provides a comprehensive introduction and guide to Corpus Linguistics. All aspects of the field are explored, from the various types of electronic corpora that are available to instructions on how to design and compile a corpus. Graeme Kennedy surveys the development of corpora for use in linguistic research, looking back to the pre-electronic age as well as to the massive growth of computer corpora in the electronic age.

Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation illustrates the ways in which linguistic variation can be explored through corpus-based investigation. Two major kinds of research questions are considered: variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature, and variation across dialects or registers. Part 1: “Exploring variation in the use of linguistic features” focuses on the study of specific words, expressions, or grammatical constructions, to study variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature. Part 2: “Exploring dialect and register variation” describes salient characteristics of dialects or registers and the patterns of variation across varieties. Part 3: “Exploring Historical Variation” applies these same two major perspectives to historical variation. One recurring theme is the extent to which linguistic variation depends on register differences, reflecting the importance of register as a key methodological and thematic concern in current corpus linguistic research.