LSA.107 | Dialectology: Aggregate Dialectal Variation

John Nerbonne
MW 10:10-11:50
location: 32-D461
course web site: http://www.let.rug.nl/~nerbonne/teach/dialectology/

This course will focus on what Hans Goebl has called the "linguistic management of space," how language variation is structured geographically. We shall begin with basic ideas from categorical data analysis which we'll apply to lexical and syntactic data, then examine a technique from computational linguistics (edit distance or Levenshtein distance) for the analysis of sequences of segments in pronunciation. We shall examine questions of validity and consistency, and we show how to visualize analyses using the L04 package, where the emphasis is on visualization for the purpose of exploration and understanding. Time permitting we shall turn to one or two advanced topics, e.g., explanatory models of the geographic conditioning of language variation, and/or attention to the role of linguistic structure in the geographic distribution.

This three-week course precedes Bill Kretzschmar's three-week course on the feature-based analysis of language variation. We have coordinated with Kretzschmar on the focus, deliberately focusing here on the analysis of large aggregates, while he intends to focus on analyses based on single features.

The course assumes no familiarity with dialectology or computational techniques. Some basic linguistics is helpful, as is an unintimidated attitude toward software. We have three goals:

1) to show how aggregate analysis works, and give participants a chance to learn it
2) to provide tools for exploring and evaluating analyses
3) to compare this to other sorts of analyses

Students will have the opportunity to practice aggregate analysis of language variation data on data from American dialects.