quantitative social dialectology explaining linguistic variation geographically and socially量化社会方言学解释语言变异的地理和社会.pdfVIP

Quantitative Social Dialectology: Explaining Linguistic Variation Geographically and Socially 1 1 2 Martijn Wieling *, John Nerbonne , R. Harald Baayen 1 Department of Humanities Computing, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, 2 Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Abstract In this study we examine linguistic variation and its dependence on both social and geographic factors. We follow dialectometry in applying a quantitative methodology and focusing on dialect distances, and social dialectology in the choice of factors we examine in building a model to predict word pronunciation distances from the standard Dutch language to 424 Dutch dialects. We combine linear mixed-effects regression modeling with generalized additive modeling to predict the pronunciation distance of 559 words. Although geographical position is the dominant predictor, several other factors emerged as significant. The model predicts a greater distance from the standard for smaller communities, for communities with a higher average age, for nouns (as contrasted with verbs and adjectives), for more frequent words, and for words with relatively many vowels. The impact of the demographic variables, however, varied from word to word. For a majority of words, larger, richer and younger communities are moving towards the standard. For a smaller minority of words, larger, richer and younger communities emerge as driving a change away from the standard. Similarly, the strength of the effects of word frequency and word category varied geographically. The peripheral areas of the Netherlands showed a greater distance from the standard for nouns (as opposed to verbs and adjectives) as well as for high-fr