Stylistic variation in email

This study explores how email is partly shaped by writers’ positions within a corporate structure. This stylistic variation is measurable at scale and can be described by messages’ rhetorical organizations and orientations. The modeling was carried out on a subset of the Enron email corpus, which was processed using the dictionary-based tagger DocuScope. The results identify four stylistic variants (Trained/Technical Support, Decision-Making, Everyday Workplace Interaction, and Engaged Planning), each realizing distinctive combinations of features reflective of their communicative functions. In Trained/Technical Support emails, for example, constellations of words and phrases associated with informational production and facilitation are marshaled in fulfilling routine guidance-seeking and guidance-giving tasks. While writers’ positions motivate stylistic tendencies (e.g., members of upper-level management compose a majority of their messages in the Decision-Making style), all writers avail themselves of a variety of styles, depending on audience and purpose, suggesting that learners might benefit from developing adaptable communicative repertoires.

Zentrum und Peripherie in der deutschen Syntax.

In Linguistik online 2021, I presented a four-level centre-periphery model of German syntax (with the categories “prototype”, “variants”, “competitive forms” and “free stylistic variation”) and tested and refined it on the basis of two well-researched grammatical phenomena, conditionality and passive structures. In the present paper, this model is applied to the sentence types of German, with comparative side glances at English and French. The model proves to be particularly fruitful in the functional area of exclamation, where a great variety of forms can be observed. I argue here that scientific grammars should not only record the form inventory of sentence types but should supplement this with information on their frequency of occurrence, especially with key figures on the relative proportions of the individual structures in their functional field of competition, broken down by different communicative situations or text types. The motto for the grammar writing of the future should be: From the “structures” to the “structures in use”.

Stylistic Variation and the Role of Dialect Contact in the leísmo of Basque-Spanish

There is considerable debate with respect to the status of Basque-Spanish leísmo as a contact phenomenon. To address this conundrum, the present study adds another variable, dialect contact and examines the synchronic variation of Basque-Spanish leísmo among educated young speakers, paying special attention to possible stylistic effects. The speech of 41 Basque-Spanish speakers was gathered by means of sociolinguistic interviews and an elicited production task. Participants were stratified by region: 22 speakers were recruited from Gernika where contact with Basque has been intense and compared to 19 speakers from the Greater Bilbao Area where the contact with Basque is less strong. Dialect contact was operationalized through parental input (Basque Country vs. Monolingual Spain). Results indicate that leísmo is quite extended in the Spanish of the Basque Country and mainly driven by animacy. Basque-Spanish leísmo is also subject to stylistic effects, whereby animacy and grammatical gender effects were found, suggesting that Basque-Spanish speakers alternate between two systems depending on speech formality. Finally, results indicate that parental origin had an effect in Bilbao, but not in Gernika. I situate these results within a discussion of previous work on dialect contact.

“I just sound Sco[ʔ]ish now”

This article investigates the speech of adolescents who have moved directly from Poland to Glasgow, using data from a range of social contexts and comparing their speech to that of their locally-born peer-group. Focusing on the acquisition of word-medial glottal replacement, I find that the Polish participants have replicated one of the constraints shown by their locally-born peers (number of syllables), have come close to replicating another (following segment), and have three which are not significant for the Glaswegians: lexical frequency, preceding segment and speech context. The emergence of the speech context constraint for the Polish group (and not for the Glaswegians) is a novel finding, and sheds light on how learners come to understand and negotiate style in the L2. I suggest that as they are going through the acquisition process, the Polish group use speech context as an interpretive framework around which they structure their stylistic variation.

Varying Means of Grammatical Parallelism in the Church Slavonic Translations of Psalms of the 11th–16th Centuries

As a metrically organized poetic text, the Psalter is built on the principle of substantive and formal parallelism of verses and stanzas in the Hebrew text as well as in Greek and Church Slavonic translations. In the article, based on the material of Slavic translations of different times (from the Sinai Psalter of the 11 th century to the Psalter of 1552 by Maximus the Greek), cases of assimilation / dissimilation of grammatical forms in parallel text structures are considered. The variability which arises in the process of dissimilation has neither genetic (South Slavonic vs East Slavonic, archaic vs new, standard vs non-standard forms), nor functional (literary vs non-literary forms), but rhetorical nature of stylistic variation, conditioned by the structure of the text. The analysis revealed that in early Slavonic psalter redactions the choice and the number of variable grammatical forms are limited; the texts of the 16 th century, namely the Psalms of 1552 translated by Maximus the Greek, are particularly characterized by stylistic grammatical variability, concerning the most different forms (from the substantive Gen. and Dat. cases to the aorist and perfect in the 3 rd person). The examined cases of the dissimilated grammatical forms in parallel contexts of the Psalter are supported by some original Maximus the Greek's works, so that these forms should be considered as stylistic variants of the literary Church Slavonic language.

Zentrum und Peripherie in der deutschen Syntax.

The present paper is the first part of a larger essay which, due to space constraints, will be published in two separate parts. Using evidence of two small corpora, I develop a centre-periphery model inspired by the prototype theory and apply it to the syntax of German. In doing so I proceed in two steps. In the first part, published here, the graded four-level model of linguistic variation presented below (with the categories “prototype”, “variants”, “competitive forms” and “free stylistic variation”) is tested and refined on two already well-researched grammartical phenomena, namely conditionality and passive structures. In the second part (to be published in the next issue of Linguistik online) I apply the model to the more complex subject of sentence types in German, in particular the so-called minor sentence types. A complete description of a language should not only list the grammatical categories, but also contain quantitative information, on both the frequency of occurrence of a particular category and on the position and relative share of this category in the field of its competing means of linguistic expression. A grammar of contemporary German, which not only records the structures, but shows the “structures in use” in different domains and text types, still remains a desideratum.

Stylistic variation in read Arabic

The study of variation in Arabic vernaculars has come a long way since its beginnings as a misguided endeavor to compare features in these contemporary dialects to cognate features in Standard Arabic (Classical or Modern) and view any differences as results of language change. We now recognize that the dialects and Standard Arabic have had different trajectories in different places and over a long period of time. The current study attempts to assess variation in a local variety of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and explore the methodological and theoretical advantages to consider what we already know about variation in the vernacular spoken by the same community whose reading in the Standard we are investigating. The paper draws a distinction between Prescribed MSA and a local variety thereof, as attested in recordings of a text read aloud by speakers of a Palestinian dialect, which were collected as part of a broader battery of sociolinguistic interviews in the speakers’ two dominant languages, Arabic and Hebrew. This is a pilot study, in which variationist methods of quantification and contextual analysis were employed, with the hope for setting the stage for more elaborate studies on the various stylistic repertoires available to speakers of Arabic.

Stylistic variation in Hebrew reading tasks

One of the core assumptions of the sociolinguistic interview methodology is that read speech tasks may be used to elicit more standard variants from a speaker. This link between reading and standardness, however, is a socially constructed relationship that may differ across cultures. Standard language ideologies in Israel differ from those in well-studied English speaking communities, and exhibit a complex tension between the notions of standardness and correctness. Drawing on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews of 21 Hebrew speakers, this paper analyzes the variation in two Hebrew morpho-phonological variables. The results show a pattern of use that differs from the cline typically observed, which suggests that Hebrew speakers have a specialized reading register that recruits distinctive stylistic resources. These findings highlight the nature of reading as a stylistic performance that may manifest differently according to local language ideologies.