In this article, we present a novel approach towards the detection and modeling of complex social phenomena in multi-party discourse, including leadership, influence, pursuit of power and group cohesion. We have developed a two-tier approach that relies on observable and computable linguistic features of conversational text to make predictions about sociolinguistic behaviors such as Topic Contr...

Research into human communication has been grouped under two traditions: referential and sociolinguistic. The study of a communication behavior simultaneously from both paradigms appears to be absent. Basically, this paper analyzes the use of private and social speech, through both a referential task (Word Pairs) and a naturalistic dyadic setting (Lego-set) administered to a sample of 64 childr...

this study aimed to investigate the effects of economic status and level of education on the choice of address terms by iranian couples in shahrekord, iran. to this end, 50 couples were selected, based on their educational and economic statuses, and were studied in terms of their choice of address terms. a discourse completion task was used as the data elicitation technique and chi-square was c...

We present a method to discover robust and interpretable sociolinguistic associations from raw geotagged text data. Using aggregate demographic statistics about the authors’ geographic communities, we solve a multi-output regression problem between demographics and lexical frequencies. By imposing a composite `1,∞ regularizer, we obtain structured sparsity, driving entire rows of coefficients t...

Although variationist studies of sociolinguistic performance have greatly enhanced our understanding of speakers’ use of linguistic variables and their correspondence with social and contextual factors, these works have largely overlooked the perceptual complement of the production behavior they capture. This paper reports the results of a study which uses multidimensional scaling (MDS) to mode...

Although sociolinguists have performed a valuable service in challenging folk theories about African American English (AAE), they also have unwittingly participated in the construction of sociolinguistic folklore about variation and change in AAE. Several examples of sociolinguistic myths are presented, including the supraregional myth, the change myth, and the social stratification myth. Data ...

Recordings of natural speech play a central role in the diverse subdisciplines of linguistics. The reliance on speech recordings is especially profound in sociolinguistics, where scholars have developed a range of techniques for eliciting and analyzing natural speech. However, sociolinguists have rarely focused explicitly on the storage, management, and preservation of their data – the interfac...

This study involves automatically identifying the sociolinguistic characteristics of fictional characters in plays by analyzing their written “speech”. We discuss three binary classification problems: predicting the characters’ gender (male vs. female), age (young vs. old), and socioeconomic standing (upper-middle class vs. lower class). The text corpus used is an annotated collection of August...

An analysis of six characters from a Chinese television drama reveals socially meaningful patterns of variation in rhythm and final lengthening. Two measures of rhythm, the syllabic PVI and Varco∆S, reveal the three female characters to be more “stress-timed” than the three male characters; smoothing splines analysis, meanwhile, shows that the women do more lengthening of utterance-final syllab...

Quantitative approaches in the study of language variation have been strongly influenced by the sociolinguistic methodologies established by Labov's (1966 [1982]) study of the speech community of New York's Lower East Side. The sociolinguistic variables that have been pursued and studied in subsequent work have often used the non-linguistic variables that Labov investigated as their primary foc...