22.10. Neil Bermel (Sheffield): Speaker responses to unusual input: looking at defective and overabundant slots in inflectional morphology through a cognitive lens
29.10. Mason Wirtz (Zurich): At the intersection of sociolinguistics and SLA: Exploring intra- and inter-individual variation in L2 sociolinguistic development
12.11. Lars Bülow (Munich): Intra-individuelle Variation und Lectal Coherence: Konzeptionelle und methodische Implikationen
19.11. Paul O'Neill (Munich): Intra- and inter-individual variation in Brazilian Portuguese: methodological challenges and theoretical implications
03.12. Jakob Neels (Leipzig): Grammatical variability and change in middle adulthood: Cognitive and social constraints
10.12. Johanna Fanta-Jende (Graz): Language Chameleon or Anchor? Exploring Use and Attitudes toward Dialect-Standard Repertoires in Austria
17.12. Svetlana Vetchinnikova (Helsinki): Idiosyncratic entrenchment: Usage shapes grammar at the individual level too!
Abstract:
Usage-based approaches argue that language structure emerges from language use. Sequences of co-occurring items can become entrenched as chunks, leading to their reanalysis, conventionalization, and potential grammaticalization. As famously stated, "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax” (Givón 1971) and "items that are used together fuse together” (Bybee 2002). However, most studies of language variation and change have been conducted at the level of a community. Consequently, we know relatively little about language variation and change within an individual.
In principle, repetition in an individual’s own usage should lead to chunking and entrenchment specific to that person. An item that appears compositional based on data aggregated at the community level might, in fact, be an entrenched lexical item for a given individual. The level of schematicity at which an item is represented in the mind – grammatical vs lexical – is a significant difference in form. Crucially, in the usage-based framework a difference in form always corresponds to a difference in meaning. This raises intriguing questions: to what extent do we operate with idiosyncratic, individually entrenched items, and what are the consequences for the meaning communicated?
To address these questions, I model variation and change in the Diachronic Blog Community Corpus, which consists of both individual- and community-level subcorpora and operationalizes a complex adaptive system approach to language.
Organisation:
Nicole Benker, Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Lars Bülow, Germanistische Linguistik
Paul O'Neill, Romanische Philologie
Hans-Jörg Schmid, Anglistik und Amerikanistik