Variationist Dialectology: Chain Shifts and Mergers in Yiddish

Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts

The monophthongization of /ay/ in the Southern United States is disfavored by following voiceless consonants (PRICE) relative to voiced or word-final environments (PRIZE). If monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Shift (Labov, 2010) and chain shifts operate as predicted by a modular feedforward phonological theory (cf. Bermúdez-Otero, 2007), this implies PRICE and PRIZE must be two...

Khemye: Chemical Literature in Yiddish

English, along with a few other languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese), is the primary vehicle for transmitting chemical knowledge and discoveries today. Yet languages are not neutral carriers of information; the very act of choosing a language for instruction implies an educational, ethnic, and perhaps even a social class among the users. Given the impetus and the mea...

Sub-optimal Paradigms in Yiddish

It is well known that the phonological form of a word can depend on its morphological structure. In serial approaches, this follows naturally from the fact that words have derivational histories: morphologically complex words undergo successive levels of phonology as they are constructed. A crucial distinction is typically made, however, between derivational and inflectional morphology. Whereas...

Title: Variationist Sociolinguistics -syntax

The variationist sociolinguistics model assumes that the human language faculty accommodates and generates language variation, and that the workings of grammar may have a quantitative and non-categorical component. By means of the linguistic variable, one describes and analyzes orderly heterogeneity in language use. The linguistic variable as a structural unit depends on the model of syntax one...

Yiddish: Between Languages and Theories