Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Lancaster University

Home
About FASS
- Home page
- Read the Dean's Welcome
- Contact Us
Departments
Departments
- Find departments, websites and department heads.
- Go to Department list
People
Faculty Office
- Contact Deans, admin, research support, finance and IT staff via the Faculty Office
Find all Academic and Support Staff
- Academic and support staff in departments
- General Contact information
Study Here
Undergraduate Study
- Introduction to undergraduate study
- Studying for a degree
Postgraduate Study
- Introduction to Postgraduate Study
- Go to the Graduate School Website for information about funding, research training, view student profiles etc.
Research
Our Research
Publications
- Download publications from Lancaster's Publications Repository.
- Recent Books
See also
- Business and Enterprise
- Knowledge Transfer
Business & Enterprise
Business and Enterprise
See also
- Research
- Knowledge Transfer
News & Events
FASS Events
- All Forthcoming Events
- Events Archive
FASS News
- Keep up-to-date with our News
- View News Archive
FASS Intranet
FASS Intranet
- LU Staff only. Policies/guidelines, funding, research support, committees etc.
- Go to FASS Intranet

You are here: Home >

Events

News

Subscribe to News and Events

LVLT talk: Heike Pichler (Salford) & Stephen Levey (Ottawa) 'Tracking grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in north-east England'

Date: 2 December 2010 Time: 12.00-1.00

Venue: County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

We are delighted to welcome Heike Pichler (Salford) and Stephen Levey (Ottawa) to the Language Variation and Linguistic Theory Research Group. They will give a talk entitled:

Tracking grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in north-east England

Abstract

General extenders (GEs), i.e., clause- or phrase-final constructions such as those illustrated in (1)-(3), constitute a locus of rampant variability in contemporary varieties of English. In this paper, we present the results of our apparent-time study of 783 GE tokens from a corpus of north-eastern English in order to build on recent variationist work which claims that GEs are undergoing grammaticalization in contemporary varieties of British English (Cheshire 2007; Denis Ms.; Levey fc.).

(1) You have to speak clearly and stuff.

(2) There's no sort of racial tension and things like that.

(3) They'd rather have pot noodles or something.

The focus of our paper will be on outlining the methods we have elaborated to track the grammaticalization of general extenders in synchronic dialect data. Drawing on the combined resources of the frameworks of grammaticalization and variationist sociolinguistics, we operationalize hypotheses about grammaticalization as factor groups for quantitative analysis. Whilst we follow Cheshire (2007) and Tagliamonte & Denis (fc.) in how they operationalized decategorialization, we diverge from previous studies in our operationalization of syntagmatic length and semantic-pragmatic change for quantitative analysis. Application of our methodological apparatus to our corpus data reveals that (i) grammaticalization proceeds at varying rates across the cohort of GE variants; (ii) the changes associated with grammaticalization do not proceed in lockstep; and (iii) different changes are spearheaded by different social groups. These results contribute important insights into the mechanisms underlying the ongoing grammaticalization of GEs, and foreground the utility of a variationist approach in tracking the evolution of discourse-pragmatic features in contemporary varieties of English.

Details

12.00, Thursday 2nd December 2010.

County South C89 (Meeting room 7)

ALL WELCOME

Event website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/groups/lvlt

Contact:

Who can attend: Anyone