Brief course description This seminar deals with the linguistic and sociolinguistic sources of variation in speech and their formal treatment in theories of phonetics and phonology. Variation is here broadly construed to encompass both low-level phonetic variation (often referred to as gradience) and sociolinguistically-related variation (such as the existence of alternant forms). Similarly, “f...

The article analyzes mental representations of Russian lyrical prose texts. The texts demonstrate collective memory engrams that are defined by cultural and historical legacy of the nation and authors’ creative world perception. In architectonics of a lyrical prose text, sense perception reveals itself in accumulated underlying meanings and wisdom conveyed by expressive means. The author’s inte...

A challenge for most theoretical and computational accounts of linguistic reference is the observation that language users vary considerably in their referential choices. Part of the variation observed among and within language users and across tasks may be explained from variation in the cognitive resources available to speakers and listeners. This paper presents a computational model of refer...

Since the early papers of Sokal (1988) and Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1989) there has been an increasing interest in depicting the history of human migrations by comparing genetic and linguistic differences that mirror different aspects of human history. Most of the literature concerns continental or macro-regional patterns of variation, while regional and micro-regional scales were investigated le...

This paper first summarizes some phonetic observations that challenge theories of speech perception and speech understanding which assume the speech signal is converted to an abstract form, such as features or phonemes, before it can be understood, and that ‘knowledge-driven’ processes are largely ‘top down’ rather than signal-driven. Systematic variation in fine phonetic detail is shown to ind...

This paper discusses language variation from a minimalist perspective. Building on work from MacDonald (2006, 2008a,b), I discuss a clustering of inner aspectual properties from English eventive predicates, which Russian lacks. Interestingly, English statives also lack this cluster. I offer an account for the presence vs. absence of this aspectual cluster in terms of the presence vs. absence of...

The Caucasus, inhabited by modern humans since the Early Upper Paleolithic and known for its linguistic diversity, is considered to be important for understanding human dispersals and genetic diversity in Eurasia. We report a synthesis of autosomal, Y chromosome, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation in populations from all major subregions and linguistic phyla of the area. Autosomal genome v...

The paper presents a review of Kövecses’s book Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (2005) advancing a more general critique to the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor. Kövecses addresses a pending problem for the cognitive linguistic approach, namely the observed variation both cross-culturally and within cultures in the use of metaphors. If, as predicted by cognitive linguistics,...

Languages tend not to exhibit unpredictable variation, and learners receiving variable linguistic input tend to eliminate it, making the language more regular. We explore how this behavior is influenced by social cues, in particular when variability is distributed within and across teachers. We trained participants on an artificial language that contained lexical variability and manipulated how...

Leonie Cornips is affiliated to the Department of Language Variation, Meertens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and is professor in the Department of Literature and Art, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. She is a researcher in variationist linguistics and has extensively worked on the morphosyntactic variation in new varieties of Dutch, but als...