Parameter setting within a socially realistic linguistics

Abstract

This article considers the theoretical and practical relationship between core linguistics and sociolinguistics in relation to the emergence of Principles and Parameters Theory. Parameters were introduced into core Chomskyan linguistics in an effort to account for variation between languages. However, as we argue – and as has long been known in sociolinguistics – languages (French, Italian etc.) are social rather than abstract products. In this sense, core linguistics may need to pay more attention than it has in the past to aspects of actual variation in order to understand the limits and range of parameters. Thus we argue that dialects of languages in themselves have parameters, and as such may be defined within parametric limits. Here we believe there is something of interest to sociolinguists, in terms both of structural definitions and of overall historical development. In general, then, while variation has always been central to sociolinguistics, it is now central, in one sense, to core linguistics; and here we have the opportunity to explore ways in which sociolinguistics and core linguistics may relate to each other in their interest in variation. (Parameters; variation; dialect; Belfast; Ireland)

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

“…In contrast to these smaller studies, we examine the behaviour of a wide range of locative verbs in the 14 UK English corpora in the CHILDES child language database (MacWhinney, 2000). We extracted all utterances in the UK corpora in CHILDES (Cruttenden, 1978;Fletcher & Garman, 1998;Forrester, 2002;Gathercole, 1986;Henry, 1995;Howe, 1981;Johnson, 1986;Korman, 1992;Lieven, Salomo, & Tomasello, 2009;Rowland & Fletcher, 2006;Theakston, Lieven, Pine & Rowland, 2001;Tommerdahl, 2009;Wells, 1981;Wilson & Henry, 1998;Wooten, 1984) for the 140 locative verbs for which Ambridge et al (2012) collected grammaticality ratings. We created the full corpus of 38,231 utterances by searching for all possible forms of each of the 140 locative verbs (e.g., stick, sticking, stuck), and found tokens of 103 forms (see Appendix A for details).…”

An interview on linguistic variation with Leonie Cornips

“…The dialogue between them is still marginal although it had some upswing since the nineties in the former century especially through publications by Kroch (2001), Wilson & Henry (1998), Hudson (1995), Cornips & Corrigan (2005), Adger & Smith (2010) and many more etc. Recently, sociolinguists and generativists have combined their expertise in studies about the phenomenon of micro-variation but in the end the questions posed by both and their research interests are too different.…”

The no man’s land between syntax and variationist sociolinguistics: The case of idiolectal variability

“…This issue is related to questions within the successive generative models about the locus of syntactic variation, its restrictions and predictions. In the literature, two alternative approaches to this "choice" are suggested (Muysken 2005): Either the "choice" is put outside the grammatical mechanisms (Adger andSmith 2005, 2010;Adger 2006;Kroch 1989) or it is put inside the grammar by reintroducing optional rules (Henry 2002;Wilson and Henry 1998). In the same vein as Henry (1995), Barbiers (2005) argues that the categorical absence or presence of specific word orders in the verb clusters discussed above are the result of optional movement in the syntactic component.…”

“…Labov 1972Labov , 1994; but more specifically Eckert 2000Eckert , 2008Silverstein 1985). The attempt to let these two approaches interact with each other (Adger 2006;Adger and Trousdale 2007;Adger and Smith 2010;Corrigan 2005a, 2005b;Wilson and Henry 1998, among many others) should give us insight into how syntactic variation is driven by social factors but constrained by the nature of possible grammars (cf. Wilson and Henry 1998: 82).…”