This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological 'complexity' and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages ap...

This thesis presents a socio-phonological analysis of three diphthongs in Mersea Island English (MIE). Mersea Island is situated off the North East coast of Essex in South East England. Socio-economically, the Island has seen dramatic change over the past century. Originally quite isolated and economically largely self-sufficient, social and demographic changes have led to significantly greater...

Hubble, Ryan M. M.A. Purdue University, December 2013. The ‘X it up’ Verb Construction: A Syntactic and Sociolinguistic Approach. Major Professor: Elena Benedicto. This thesis focuses on a unique and, as of yet, unstudied particle verb construction in English, referred to as the ‘X it up’ construction (e.g. I partied it up last night). Syntactic and sociolinguistic perspectives are taken to exp...

The current study investigated the developmental trajectory of listeners’ ability to perceive regional dialect variation in American English using a free classification paradigm. Listeners ranged in age from 4 years old through late adulthood. In two experiments, listeners sorted a set of talkers into groups based on where the talkers were from. Talkers from four regional dialects of American E...

The study of a range of sociolinguistic variables in second language acquisition research has allowed a number of trends to be identified concerning the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by the L2 learner. Based on quantitative analyses, this article considers such trends in relation to the variable use of the liaison in French interlanguage by a group of classroom learners in Ireland. W...

Arabic, which is the fifth world language with regard to the number of speakers, geographical spread, and socio-literary prestige (Weber, 1997), similar to all other languages whose orthographical system is not based on Latin symbols has been subject to various types of changes resulted from the language contact with English as the default language used in the computer mediated communication su...

Deciding what to code for in archived online corpora from sociolinguistic recordings is important, but enriching such recordings to include more variable situations is an important prerequisite if these corpora are to serve as a resource for the analysis of situational or stylistic variation, still a neglected variable in sociolinguistic theory and analysis. Accordingly, much of this paper is d...

Across languages of the world /r/ is known for its variability. Recent literature incorporates sociolinguistic factors, such as bilingualism, in order to explain /r/ variation. The current study investigates to what extent /r/ is a marker of a bilingual’s dominant language. Specifically, the effects of several sociolinguistic and phonotactic factors on the production and perception of /r/ are i...

Over the past few years I have been engaged in a collaborative research project examining a collection of sociological interviews with ten adolescent African American girls in Washington, DC (Froyum Roise 2004; Kendall 2009; Mallinson & Kendall forthcoming). A major thread of our work with these recordings has focused on assessing the degree and manner to which these recordings, conducted by th...