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Levels of linguistic variation in Durham1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Paul E. Kerswill
Paul E. Kerswill
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading
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Extract

Sociolinguistic studies have shown that variation may occur on any of the accepted levels of linguistic analysis. Variation on the phonological level has been the most commonly treated in studies of English from Labov's (1966) New York study onwards. By contrast, it is rather rare that we find studies of morphological or lexical variation (the latter being the variation in the lexical form of words, for example, the Belfast alternation of /Λ/ and /Λ/ in the word foot (L. Milroy, 1980: 118)). However, morphological and lexical variation has been favoured in studies of some other languages, for instance Norwegian (Fintoft & Mjaavatn, 1980; Kerswill, 1985a), Swedish (Thelander, 1982) and Persian (Jahangiri & Hudson, 1982). On the other hand, studies of syntactic and prosodie variation have been altogether much less common (but see Cheshire, 1982; Local, 1982). In spite of differences in emphasis, the various methodologies used have all had the aim of discovering co-variation between linguistic and non-linguistic parameters.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 25 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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