Fasold Ralph W., Schiffrin Deborah (Eds.). Language Change and Variation

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989. — 465 p. — (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 52).The study of language variation in social context continues to hold the attention of a large number of linguists. This research is promoted by the annual colloquia on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English' (NWAVE). This volume is a selection of revised papers from the NWAVE XI, held at Georgetown University. It deals with a number of items, some of which have often been discussed, others that have been less emphasized. The first group of articles in the volume center on a frequent theme: speech communities as the essential setting for understanding variation in language. Earlier work in linguistic variation dealt for the most part with phonological variation and change. Syntactic and morphological change and variation in syntax are also discussed. A selection on the role of variation in understanding first language acquisition comprises three papers. Articles in the last section of the volume concern theoretical controversy and methodological advances.Variation in Speech Communities
The exact description of a speech community: Short a in Philadelphia - William Labov
Patterned symmetry of shifting and lengthened vowels in the Montreal French Vernacular (MFV) - Malcah Yaeger-Dror
New results on Montreal French /r/ - Cl. Tousignant and David Sankoff
Is urban influence VARB-able? - Ann H. Pitts
Montreal French: Language, class and ideology - David Sankoff, Henrietta J. Cedergren, W. Kemp, Paul J. Thibault and Diane Vincent
Social determinants of the use of English in Sweden - H. LjungSyntactic and Morphological Change
Function and grammar in the history of English: Periphrastic do -Anthony S. Kroch
The English gerund: Syntactic change and discourse function - A. Houston
Morphological productivity word frequency, and the Oxford English Dictionary - F. Anshen and Mark AronoffSyntactic Variation
Syntactization in language development: Clause status variation - B. Wald
Choosing between that and it - Michael Montgomery
Inside and outside relative clauses: Pronominal redundancy in Portuguese - Fernando TaralloVariation in Language Development
Addressing new questions about Black children’s language - Ida J. Stockman and F. Vaughn-Cooke
Structural variability in phonological development: Final nasals in Vernacular Black English - Walt Wolfram
The development of syntactic complexity in narrative, informative and argumentative discourse - L. Dubuisson, Louisette Emirkanian and David SankoffControversies and Methods in the Study of Linguistic Variation
Some problems in defining syntactic variables: The case of WH questions in Montreal French - Claire Lefebvre
A closer look at some so-called variable processes - Alan Ford
Some approaches to syntactic variation - S. Jacobson
A versatile program for the analysis of sociolinguistic data - P. Rousseau
The care and handling of a mega-corpus: The Ottawa-Hull French project - Shana Poplack