The linguistic diversity enduring beyond institutional pressures and social prejudices against non-standard dialects questions the social forces influencing language maintenance across generations and how children contribute to this process. Children encounter multi-dialectal interactions in their early environment, and increasing evidence shows that the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation...

Sociolinguistic studies suggest the similarity of language use among people with similar social state, and recent large-scale computational analyses of online text are providing various supports, for example, the effect of social class, geography, and political preference on the language use. We approach the tasks of TASS 2015 with sociolinguistic insights in order to capture the patterns in th...

This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological 'complexity' and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages ap...

This thesis presents a socio-phonological analysis of three diphthongs in Mersea Island English (MIE). Mersea Island is situated off the North East coast of Essex in South East England. Socio-economically, the Island has seen dramatic change over the past century. Originally quite isolated and economically largely self-sufficient, social and demographic changes have led to significantly greater...

One of the major goals of the Sustainable Agriculture Farming initiatives at UC Davis is to provide information about the feasibility of adopting conservation tillage and cover cropping at the farm level. The project includes two tillage schemes: standard tillage (ST) and conservation tillage (CT), and three farming methods: conventional, organic, and winter legume cover crop. All three product...

Global biodiversity continues along a trajectory of decline despite enormous conservation efforts (Rands et al., 2010). This is also true in China, one of the most biodiversity-rich countries in the world (Liu and Raven, 2010; Ministry of Environmental Protection of China, 2010a). To fundamentally change this trajectory, it is essential to understand complex interactions among various forces af...