Preface

Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Preface v
3. Table of contents vii
4. Variation in speech communities
5. The exact description of a speech community 1
6. Patterned symmetry of shifting and lengthened vowels in the Montreal French Vernacular (MFV) 59
7. New results on Montreal French /r/ 85
8. Is urban influence VARB-able? 95
9. Montreal French 107
10. Social determinants of the use of English in Sweden 119
11. Syntactic and morphological change
12. Function and grammar in the history of English 133
13. The English gerund 173
14. Morphological productivity word frequency, and the Oxford English Dictionary 197
15. Syntactic variation
16. Syntactization in language development 203
17. Choosing between that and it 241
18. Inside and outside relative clauses 255
19. Variation in language development
20. Addressing new questions about Black children’s language 275
21. Structural variability in phonological development 301
22. The development of syntactic complexity in narrative, informative and argumentative discourse 333
23. Controversies and methods in the study of linguistic variation
24. Some problems in defining syntactic variables 351
25. A closer look at some so-called variable processes 367
26. Some approaches to syntactic variation 381
27. A versatile program for the analysis of sociolinguistic data 395
28. The care and handling of a mega-corpus 411