Linguistic Variation

(4 Credits)

This course is an intensive graduate-level introduction to the quantitative study of variation in language. The course has two goals: 1. Students will gain an understanding of some of the fundamental questions in variationist sociolinguistics, concerning how variation in language is structured and how it is represented formally. 2. Students will gain currency in methods for the analysis of variationist sociolinguistic data. This comprises quantitative and statistical techniques and the processing of corpus data. In class, we will learn by reading and by doing. We will read and discuss classic and recent papers in the field addressing the two points above. Throughout the semester, we’ll work on a group project studying the structure of a particular linguistic variable decided on by the class. Ideally, this will culminate in a co-written abstract to be submitted to a conference such as New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV).