Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers...

Cross-linguistic research has shown that boundaries for lexical categories differ from language to language. The aim of this study is to explore these differences between languages in relation to the categorization differences within a language. Monolingual Dutch(N=400) and French-speaking (N=300) Belgian adults provided lexical category judgments for three lexical categories that are roughly e...

We proceed from the view that linguistic variation must be examined from an aggregate perspective, i.e. from a perspective which encompasses as much of the variation between language varieties as possible rather than concentrating on single linguistic features. We review the motivation for this position in the rst section of the article, and then examine ways in which aggregate variation can be...