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Variation in the lexicon: the ‘Cinderella’ of sociolinguistics?

Why does variation in word forms and word meanings present such challenges for empirical research?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2012

Philip Durkin
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Extract

All of the contributions in this special issue respond to a somewhat paradoxical situation: lexis (or vocabulary) is probably the area of linguistics that is most accessible and most salient for a non-specialist audience, but at the same time it presents some uniquely difficult challenges for systematic scholarly linguistic analysis. This is especially the case for approaches that focus on statistics or quantification of data, such as are typical of modern work in sociolinguistics. For this reason, it often seems that lexis is the Cinderella that is excluded from the ball, a topic that modern sociolinguists tend to steer clear of because of the methodological difficulties. This special issue will try to investigate the background to this problem, and suggest some possible solutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 3 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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