Sociolinguistic studies suggest the similarity of language use among people with similar social state, and recent large-scale computational analyses of online text are providing various supports, for example, the effect of social class, geography, and political preference on the language use. We approach the tasks of TASS 2015 with sociolinguistic insights in order to capture the patterns in th...

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...

Conversational practices do not occur at a single unit of analysis. To understand the interplay between social positioning, information sharing, and rhetorical strategy in language, various granularities are necessary. In this work we present a machine learning model for multi-party chat which predicts conversation structure across differing units of analysis. First, we mark sentence-level beha...