Language on the Internet and social media varies due to time, geography and social factors. For example, consider an online chat forum where people from different regions across the world interact. In such scenarios, it is important to track and detect regional variation in language. A person from the UK, who is in conversation with someone from the USA could say “he is stuck in the lift” to me...

A parametric model must not only account for linguistic variation but also provide elements that guide the learner in the process of acquiring a particular I-language. Indeed, we stress that the central problem of parametric theory is the so-called Plato’s problem (how do humans learn a language?), whereas what we may call Greenberg’s problem (what is the shape and degree of linguistic variabil...

Many readers will be familiar with the quantitative and distributional techniques of register analysis presented by Biber (1988). The present book re-uses this earlier study on variation in British English [henceforth El, along with "a synthesis" (p. xv) of Ph.D. studies done with Biber at the University of Southern California: by Niko Besnier on Nukulaelae Tuvaluan IT], Mohamed Hared on Somali...

Microtexts, like SMS messages, Twitter posts, and Facebook status updates, are a popular medium for real-time communication. In this paper, we investigate the writing conventions that different groups of users use to express themselves in microtexts. Our empirical study investigates properties of lexical transformations as observed within Twitter microtexts. The study reveals that different pop...

This paper deals with cross-linguistic variation in WH-pied-piping. In this paper, I claim that pied-piping is the result of the intermediate stages of WH-movement (i.e., the indirect feature checking movement of Chomsky (1998)) to the Spec of XP and the subsequent percolation of the WH-feature to the XP and that cross-linguistic variation in pied-piping can be explained in terms of various uni...

Variation in natural language is constrained: languages tend to lose competing variants over time, and where variation persists, its use tends to be conditioned on grammatical or sociolinguistic context. We had adult participants learn and communicate with artificial languages exhibiting unpredictable variation in plural marking. Using an iterated learning procedure, the languages produced by p...