The study of second language acquisition involves understanding what bilinguals know about their second language and how they acquire and use it. Because acquisition and use occur in a social context, it is important for secondlanguage acquisition researchers to understand the ways in which social context and the acquisition and use of a second language are related. In recent years, our underst...

Following Macaulay’s (2002, 2005) repeated calls for a fuller integration of discourse-pragmatic features into the variationist research agenda, the last decade or so has seen an unprecedented upsurge in quantitative research investigating patterns of variation and change in the use of conventionalised, polyfunctional linguistic items and constructions such as innit, you know, as I say, and stu...

1. Introduction Many areas connected with sociolinguistics in which quantitative data play a role, have seen the application of statistical methods, both traditional (experimental design, sampling, estimation, hypothesis testing) and heuristic (clustering, scaling). Some of these are discussed in other entries (see Social Psychology; Sociometry; Attitude Surveys: Question and Answer Process; Sc...

In recent years, a major growth area in applied natural language processing has been the application of automated techniques to massive datasets in order to answer questions about society, and by extension people. Sociolinguistics, which combines anthropology, statistics and linguistics (e.g. Labov 1994, 2001), studies linguistic data in order to answer key questions about the relationship of l...

No português brasileiro (PB), podemos tanto usar o artigo definido antes de possessivos pré-nominais, em eu vi seu irmão , como também não usar, ᴓ . Pesquisas que descrevem essa variação no PB demonstram tipo sintagma qual possessivo está inserido interfere (não) uso: sintagmas nominais há tendência para uso do artigo, achei cachorro e preposicionais uso, você com Neste trabalho, base aporte te...

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Drawing on previous analyses of the social meaning of demonstratives and other function words, we argue that the semantics of demonstratives facilitates affective uses that can be characterized as attempts by the speaker to foster a sense of shared perspective and common ground with other discourse participants. We present large-scale quantitative evidence that this strategy is widely used and ...