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Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.

Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.

This study investigates some aspects of grammatical variation in vernacular Jordanian Arabic (JA), namely word order variation and pro(noun)-drop variation. Much previous research on word order and subject expression in Arabic has been hampered by the use of eclectic methodologies (Bakir 1980; Eid 1983; El-Yasin 1985; Fassi Fehri 1993; Aoun & Li 1993; Brustad 2000). Conspicuously rare in contemporary studies of syntactic variation in Arabic are systematic analyses of spontaneous speech data (Edwards 2010: 94; but see e.g., Owens, Dodsworth & Rockwood 2009; Owens, Dodsworth & Kohn 2013). The dearth of quantitative studies of word order variation, as well as pro-drop variation, in colloquial Arabic provides the primary motivation for the present investigation. Drawing on the framework of variationist sociolinguistics (Labov 1972), I conduct an accountable analysis of word order variation, as well as pro-drop variation in a corpus of vernacular Jordanian Arabic recorded in the Irbid metropolitan area in 2014. The corpus is based on over 30 hours of digitized recordings obtained from 30 speakers stratified by age, sex, education, as well as urban/rural origin. I exploit these spontaneous speech data to: (i) assess the frequency of different word order and pro-drop variants in vernacular JA; (ii) ascertain which social and linguistic factors constrain the selection of major word order and pro-drop variants; and (iii) determine whether the apparent time component incorporated into the research design reveals any evidence of change in progress. Distributional and multivariate analyses of 4500 tokens (2049 for word order and 2422 for pro-drop) coded for the aforementioned social factors, in addition to an array of linguistic factors hypothesized to constrain variant choice (e.g., morphloexical class of subject, grammatical person and number, type of clause and transitivity) confirm that word order variation, as well as pro-drop variation, are subject to multiple constraints (Holes 1995; Owens et al. 2013). A first important finding concerns the quantitative preponderance of SV(O) word order in vernacular JA, which competes with less frequent VS(O). Another important finding is that null subject pronouns are the norm in vernacular JA. Statistical analyses of the linguistic factors conditioning the observed variability reveal that transitivity and definite subject pronouns are key predictors of SV(O) word order choice, while switch reference and person and number of subject are key predictors of overt subject pronouns, as determined by the relative magnitude of these effects. Particularly compelling is the social embedding of the variation in the case of word order variation. Age- and sex-differentiations in the data (Labov 1990), in addition to urban-rural split, reveal statistically significant differences, offering provisional indications that alternation between SV(O) and VS(O) word orders is implicated in ongoing change. Younger speakers, women and urban-origin speakers lead in the use of SV(O). The results foreground the utility of empirically accountable analyses of spontaneous speech in elucidating key issues relating to syntactic variation in modern varieties of spoken Arabic. The results generated by this approach reveal new findings not previously available from the intuited, elicited or written material on which much previous work on Arabic has been based.

The following thesis reports on an investigation of the attitudes of allophone children and their teachers towards different French accents. Using the matched guise technique, a total of 108 children in grades 4, 5 and 6 (5 groups) evaluated samples of French spoken with a standard accent, a standard Quebec accent, an informal Quebec accent and a foreign accent. The pupils evaluated the accents based on eight criteria related to linguistic, professional and personal characteristics. Secondly, sub-groups from each class participated in a post-experimental discussion about the accents they had heard. The children's teachers were also interviewed privately, in order to give their opinions about the accents, and share their vision of an oral model for these allophone children attending French language schools in Montreal. Findings suggest a strong preference for standard accents, which is confirmed by the analysis of the post-experimental discussions.

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published_or_final_version / abstract / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The thesis investigates the factors which lead to the development of 'prestige' terminology in the Northern Sotho vocabulary. It investigates the factors which lead to the development of 'prestige' language varieties and 'prestige' dialects, which are sources of 'prestige' terminology. These factors include, inter alia, urbanization, industrialization, the missionary activities and standardisation. The thesis tries to explain the reason why most of the Northern Sotho people do not feel free to speak their language when they are among other communitiesK__U explains the reason why the speakers of the so-called 'inferior' dialects of Northern Sotho have an inferiority complex while the speakers of the 'prestige' dialects have confidence when speaking their dialects. The people who are residents of the urban and industrialized areas have a high standard of living due to the availability of employment opportunities, while the rural communities are usually unemployed and, as such, their standard of living is low. This elevates the urban community to a high status which is shared by the type of language they speak. The rural communities start associating themselves with the urban communities by imitating the urban varieties in order to elevate themselves. This is one of the reasons which lead to the widespread use of urban slang and other language varieties which are associated with the urban areas of South Africa, i.e. the PWV (Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Vereeniging). Standardisation of Northern Sotho and the missionary activities within the Northern Sotho communities led to the creation of 'superior' and 'inferior' dialects. The missionary societies established missionary stations among certain Northern Sotho communities while other communities did not have these stations, and became the vanguards of Western civilization among the indigenous people of Southern Africa. ~The dialects among which the missionary stations were established came to enjoy a high status since these varieties were the first to be converted to written forms. In this case, the first varieties to be considered during standardisation were those which had a written orthography, and this is exactly what happened in the standardisation of Northern Sotho. / African Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

This dissertation uses a variety of approaches to investigate the language in two newspapers from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Each approach can give insights into the question of possible language differences, and eventually the authors' intentions and their ideological background will prove to be more relevant than their geographic origin. A comparative study of metaphors shows how certain recurrent metaphors are used to influence the readers' conceptual reality. While the actual effect of these metaphors cannot be determined, their use reveals the intentions of the authors. An investigation of pronouns and terms of address successfully applies sociolinguistic methods to written texts. A study of letters, speeches, and interviews proves that there is in some cases a conflict between the prescribed norm of an informal pronoun and speaker intuition. The concept of a very narrowly defined part of the language, a Textsorte, is used in an investigation of death notices. Notices from the FRG and GDR show great similarity in phrasing. Differences in content can be explained by the different social realities. Finally, a computer-assisted investigation of word formation and new words yields a small number of new words and shows how the content of a text influences the language, even on the level of the affixes that are used. Suffixes and words that stress collectivity are significantly more frequent in the GDR newspaper, while affixes and words expressing something negative are used more often in the newspaper from the FRG. We can see that various methods can give insights into various aspects of language, and benefits and problems of each method are discussed. Finally, we come to realize that the fear of language separation is unfounded, but that author intention has a greater influence on texts than one might expect.

This project explores the social meaning potential of creaky voice using a third wave variationist approach in order to uncover what motivates speakers to deploy this vocal quality. Intraspeaker variation in the use of creak is quantitatively and qualitatively examined in case studies of one male and one female individual who come from a similar social group. In recordings from a range of casual settings, both the male and female speaker are found to use creak at similar rates, for similar purposes. However, creak is found to vary across social settings: the greater the speakers’ self-reported intimacy with their interlocutors, the lower the frequency of creak. This suggests that creaky voice is used for interactional functions, and is conditioned by conversational context. Qualitative discourse analysis of instances of creak further reveals that it has a high frequency of cooccurrence with linguistic features used for epistemic stancetaking. I suggest that creak is an interactional resource available for taking an authoritative position in interaction, especially in situations where speakers feel less intimately connected to their interlocutors. / Graduate / 2017-08-02 / 0290 / 0291 / nchildebrand@gmail.com