This study indicates a possibility for improved collaboration between the two professional groups in diagnosing dementia. Possible approaches for improved care should focus on an inter-professional understanding of the importance of early, shared, decision making, emphasizing early identification and care of diagnosed demented patients. Establishing a shared collaboration model including out-patient memory clinics, GPs and DNs could be a first step. This model should also take into account an evaluation of possible consequences for the diagnosed demented patients in terms of treatment and care and consider the indication for referrals to a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation. We are at present planning a study to address these aspects.
This article explores intra-individual variation and language change across the lifespan of eight speakers from a small Austrian village. Four phonological variables in two settings (informal conversation vs. formal interview) are traced across longitudinal panel data that span 43 years. The analysis reveals an increase of dialect features (retrograde change), even though apparent-time as well as real-time trend studies indicate dialect loss in the Bavarian speaking parts of Austria. The panel data also indicate that neither the group means at one moment in time nor their averaged changes are representative of the intra-individual variation of any of the eight speakers. Regarding this non-representativity, the article introduces the classical ergodic theorem to variationist sociolinguistics. Evidence will be provided that change across the lifespan of an individual is a non-ergodic process. Thus, it is argued that variationists have to be more cautious when they generalise from group-derived estimates to individual developments and vice versa.
The overall theme of this special issue is intra-individual variation, that is, the observable variation within individuals’ behaviour, which plays an important role in the humanities area as well as in the social sciences. While various fields have recognised the complexity and dynamism of human thought and behaviour, intra-individual variation has received less attention in regard to language acquisition, use and change. Linguistic research so far lacks both empirical and theoretical work that provides detailed information on the occurrence of intra-individual variation, the reasons for its occurrence and its consequences for language development as well as for language variation and change. The current issue brings together two subdisciplines – psycholinguistics and variationist sociolinguistics – in juxtaposing systematic and non-systematic intra-individual variation, thereby attempting to build a cross-fertilisation relationship between two disciplines that have had surprisingly little connection so far. In so doing, we address critical stock-taking, meaningful theorizing and methodological innovation.
The adaptation of Internet memes is an important practice in social media that is an excellent subject of investigation to explain (the instantiation of) multimodal constructions with regard to social-cognitive processes. In this article, we would like to plead for paying more attention to Internet memes as linguistic research object. By using a qualitative-quantitative corpus-pragmatic approach, we worked out the multimodal character of selected constructions being instantiated within adaptations of the so called Merkel-Meme (n=632). We discuss two constructions, which can only be thought of through the interplay of a pictorial component that shows a gesture and varying linguistic elements. This is on the one hand the construction [[so* adjektiv]AdjP + Ausprägungsgrad anzeigende Armgeste] and on the other the construction [[so* artikel (adjektiv) nomen]NP + Umfang anzeigende Armgeste]. Therefore, it becomes evident that the pictorial component influences the linguistic part of the Internet meme.
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