The four papers in this issue of the journal are jointly focused on two distinct themes: sociophonetics—the study of speakers and listeners’ sensitivity to the social context in which language is produced and perceived—and exemplar theory, as a way of explaining this behavior. In these comments, I will try to relate the findings in the first area to the field of sociolinguistics, and then relat...

Language variationists study how languages vary along geographical or social lines or along lines of age and gender. Variationist data is available and challenging, in particular for DIALECTOLOGY, the study of geographical variation, which will be the focus of this paper, although we present approaches we expect to transfer smoothly to the study of variation correlating with other extralinguist...

Language variationists study how languages vary along geographical or social lines or along lines of age and gender. Variationist data is available and challenging, in particular for DIALECTOLOGY, the study of geographical variation, which will be the focus of this paper, although we present approaches we expect to transfer smoothly to the study of variation correlating with other extralinguist...

This paper describes the techniques used by the system presented at the TweetLID shared task for Twitter language identification. The system is based on Support Vector Machines and Rational Kernels. An algorithm for multilanguage labeling is described. Its evaluation and application to Sociolinguistics is also included.

The present study uses variationist sociolinguistic methods to examine the intensifier system in Oslo Norwegian. Results indicate that both linguistic and social factors influence use. Predicative adjectives were intensified more frequently than attributive adjectives, women used intensifiers men, younger speakers had higher intensification rates older speakers. Apparent time analyses also reve...

Theoretical framework: ŸSociolinguistics (Labov, Chafe, Biber, etc.) ŸConversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Wooffitt, etc.) ŸIntonational Analysis (Pierrehumbert, Beckman, etc.) Diverse units in spontaneous speech: Ÿspeech act Ÿidea unit Ÿinformation unit Ÿintonation unit, intonational phrase, tone group Ÿprosodic unit, prosodic phrase, prosodic group, prosodic utterance Ÿbreath g...