Advancing Socio-grammatical Variation and Change In Honour of Jenny Cheshire

This groundbreaking collection showcases Jenny Cheshire’s influential work in bringing greater attention to quantitative analysis of socio-grammatical variation and builds upon her contributions with new lines of inquiry pushing sociolinguistic research forward. Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field, the volume is structured in six parts with a particular focus on syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic variation and change, each section turning a lens on a different aspect of socio-grammatical variation. The first sections of the volume focus on the role of structure, its relevance for sociolinguistic production and perception and the impact of social structure on formal structure. Two sections look at the interface of variationist research with other aspects of linguistic research, including generative syntax and discourse-pragmatic features. The final sections consider the importance of integrating broader external factors in socio-grammatical variation, exploring the impact of interactional pressures in the sociolinguistic environment and the role of multi-ethnic contact varieties. Taken together, this volume demonstrates the critical role of socio-grammatical variation in our understanding of language change as a holistic process.

Foreword Peter Trudgill Introduction Socio-grammatical variation and change: Theoretical and methodological implications Karen V. Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller, Sue Fox, and James A. Walker Section 1: CONCEPTUALISING SOCIAL MEANING Chapter 1.1 Historical and ideological dimensions of grammatical variation and change Lesley Milroy Chapter 1.2 Towards an integrated model of perception: Linguistic architecture and the dynamics of sociolinguistic cognition Erez Levon, Isabelle Buchstaller and Adam Mearns Chapter 1.3 Migration, class, and prestige in grammatical change in London Devyani Sharma Chapter 1.4 The role of syntax in the study of sociolinguistic meaning: Evidence from an analysis of right dislocation Emma Moore Section 2: Combining the Social AND THE GRAMMATICAL Chapter 2.1 What happened to those relatives from East Anglia?: a multilocality analysis of dialect levelling in the relative marker system David Britain Chapter 2.2 Relativiser selection in a super-diverse city Miriam Meyerhoff, Alexandra Birchfield, Elaine Ballard, Catherine Watson and Helen Charters Chapter 2.3 Swabian relatives: variation in the use of the wo-relativiser Karen V. Beaman Chapter 2.4 Modeling Socio-Grammatical Variation: Plural Existentials in Toronto English James A. Walker Section 3: Formal Approaches to Syntactic Variation Chapter 3.1 A sociogrammatical analysis of linguistic gaps and transitional forms Sjef Barbiers Chapter 3.2 Variation and Change in the Particle Verb Alternation Across English Dialects Bill Haddican, Daniel Johnson, Joel Wallenberg and Anders Holmberg Chapter 3.3 Explaining Variability in Negative Concord: A Socio-syntactic Analysis David Adger and Jennifer Smith Section 4: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND Multi-eTHNOLECTS Chapter 4.1 Tracing the origins of an urban youth vernacular: founder effects, frequency and culture in the emergence of Multicultural London English Paul Kerswill and Eivind Torgersen Chapter 4.2 Syntactic variation in prepositional phrases of Cité-Duits, a miners’ multi-ethnolect (and other varieties of Dutch and German) Peter Auer and Leonie Cornips Chapter 4.3 When Contact Does Not Matter: The Robust Nature of Vernacular Universals Daniel Schreier Chapter 4.4 From Killycomain to Melbourne: Historical Contact and the Feature Pool Karen P. Corrigan Section 5: Discourse and Pragmatic Variation Chapter 5.1 That beyond convention: The interface of syntax, social structure and discourse Sali A. Tagliamonte and Alexandra D’Arcy Chapter 5.2 Sociolinguistic variation in the marking of new information: The case of indefinite this Stephen Levey, Carmen Klein and Yasmine Abou Taha Chapter 5.3 Tagging monologic narratives of personal experience: utterance-final tags and the construction of adolescent masculinity Heike Pichler

Karen V. Beaman is a postdoctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Isabelle Buchstaller is professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Sue Fox is senior lecturer at the University of Bern, Switzerland. James A. Walker is professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne.