At least 40 spoken languages form the large tupi family in its subfamilies tupi-Guaraní, Mawé, Aweti, Arikém, Juruna, Mondé, tupari, Mundurukú, ramarama and Puruborá, providing a wealth of data for linguistic studies about variation – variation explained by genetic relations (common origin, ultimately from the presumed language ‘proto-tupi’) or by contact relations with other indigenous or non-...

Recent work on acquisition in sociolinguistic research suggests that some aspects of the structured variation found in adult speech are evident in children’s speech from the very start of language acquisition, and input from the primary caregiver is crucial in this process. In this article we contribute to this research by conducting a cross-sectional analysis of the acquisition of variable for...

Multi-dimensional (MD) analysis is a methodological approach that applies multivariate statistical techniques (especially factor analysis and cluster analysis) to the investigation of register variation in a language. The approach was originally developed to analyze the full range of spoken and written registers in a language. Early studies focused on English register variation (Biber 1985, 198...

Languages exhibit sociolinguistic variation, such that adult native speakers condition the usage of linguistic variants on social context, gender, and ethnicity, among other cues. While the existence of this kind of socially conditioned variation is well-established, less is known about how it is acquired. Studies of naturalistic language use by children provide various examples where children'...

Abstract Few areas of cognition are as fundamental to our lives representing physical space. However, the way languages represent space varies widely, does non-linguistic spatial behavior. Research on language casts light relationship between and conceptual structure, across linguistic modalities. Most research in this domain treats individual data points, typologizing them basis of, for exampl...

I ndigenous and immigrant speakers from a variety of linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds have in diff erent ways contributed to the development of presentday American English, as have the geographical and social dimensions of the country. This paper provides a survey of contemporary usage of American English by describing and illustrating linguistic features documented for social and regio...

Perceptual attunement to one's native language results in language-specific processing of speech sounds. This includes stress cues, instantiated by differences in intensity, pitch, and duration. The present study investigates the effects of linguistic experience on the perception of these cues by studying the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL), which states that listeners group sounds trochaically (stro...

Introduction Early studies in the linguistic representation of space were commonly inspired by bewildering cross-linguistic diversity; they sought to systematize that diversity and to understand its underlying principles. The theoretical fruitfulness of these efforts notwithstanding, much stands to be gained by looking closely at patterns of variation that recur with surprising regularity in la...

We describe our experience in developing a discourse-annotated corpus for community-wide use. Working in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory, we were able to create a large annotated resource with very high consistency, using a well-defined methodology and protocol. This resource is made publicly available through the Linguistic Data Consortium to enable researchers to develop empirica...

This section considers the actual performance in poverty reduction of selected LDCs for which information is available in order to get an idea of which circumstances promote success and which do not. The analysis has to be carried out in a situation of extreme data constraint, especially for the SSA which has the largest concentration of LDCs. In view of the very different nature and extent of ...