Labov goes on to argue that the observed patterning of deletion with regards to other variable phenomena (specifically, copula contraction) argues for one analysis in particular: that by which forms of be are deleted by phonological processes. The more broadlyapplicable argument is that the patterns and correlations observed in natural speech data provide evidence for the particular locus of th...

We analyze a Big Data set of geo-tagged tweets for a year (Oct. 2013 – Oct. 2014) to understand the regional linguistic variation in the U.S. Prior work on regional linguistic variations usually took a long time to collect data and focused on either rural or urban areas. Geo-tagged Twitter data offers an unprecedented database with rich linguistic representation of fine spatiotemporal resolutio...

This paper aims to propose a new account for the cross-linguistic variation of resultative constructions in natural languages. Specifically, I shall show why certain languages like English have the typical resultatives while others like Romance languages or Japanese systemically miss them. I shall first review Washio’s (1996, 1997) typological pattern for resultative constructions as well as th...

The central topic of this inquiry is a cross-linguistic contrast in the interaction of conjunction and negation. In Hungarian (Russian, Serbian, Italian, Japanese), in contrast to English (German), negated definite conjunctions are naturally and exclusively interpreted as `neither’. It is proposed that Hungarian conjunctions simply replicate the behavior of plurals, their closest semantic relat...

The oldest branch of dialectology is the study of what is today often referred to as " dialect geography " , i.e. the study of the geographical distribution of language varieties, as opposed to the study of many other relations between language varieties and external conditioning factors, such as social class, age, and sex. While it is clear that geography has a massive influence on the distrib...

The concern with word classes, parts ofspeech, or, as they are referred to in this paper, syntactic categories, dates back to antiquityfor better and for worse. For better, since in lingui stics, as in any other disc ipline, one sees further when standing on the shoulders of giants . But for worse, ifit is the case that the giants themselves are standing in the wrong place. Or, in the case at h...