Volume 25, Issue 1

The use of computerized systems for geolinguistic data processing began in the 1970s with the production of maps for linguistic atlas projects. From that moment, dialect studies have continuously benefitted from the innovations that took place in the field of digital technologies. At present, linguistic geography projects are fully integrated within the Digital Humanities and are governed by the same principles that guide studies in this discipline: the interoperability of applications, free reuse of data and interdisciplinarity. This paper provides a brief outline of the structure and design of the database that currently houses the Atlas Lingüístico Galego materials, a linguistic atlas of Galician begun as a project in the 1970s. This database is being used as an information source for the publication of the project’s volumes, for research into variation and change of Galician varieties, and to contribute to the elaboration of geolinguistic projects that are greater in scope.

Coda-final consonant deletion has been extensively documented in Eastern Andalusian Spanish; however, its effects on neighbouring segments is still unknown. Scholars working on consonant deletion in Eastern Andalusian Spanish have mainly focused on /s/, given the semantic importance of this consonant in Spanish. As a result, other consonants which are often deleted syllable-finally in this geolect have been studied to a much lesser degree. The present paper aims to expand the traditional view on vowel doubling by analysing /-s/, /-r/, and /-Ɵ/ deletion before /a/. Firstly, the speech of 24 speakers from El Ejido (Eastern Andalusia) is analysed to ascertain how the deletion of word final /s/, /r/, and /Ɵ/ changes the quality of a preceding /a/. Secondly, a perception test is carried out with native speakers from the local area to confirm whether these speakers can differentiate perceptually between word-final /a/ and /a/ preceding underlying /-s/, /-r/, or /-Ɵ/. This paper presents two main conclusions: 1) /-s/, /-r/, and /-Ɵ/ deletion changes the quality of a preceding /a/ to different degrees; 2) EAS speakers can identify whether /a/ is followed or not by an underlying /-s/, /-r/, or /-Ɵ/, but they cannot identify which consonant has been deleted in each case.

This article addresses the issue of mother tongue retention in the Slovene Canadian community of Vancouver. A brief social and historical profile of the community is followed by a description of the general linguistic situation, based on the data collected through questionnaires and participant observation. The results show substantial intergenerational variation in terms of the immigrants’ language use and language attitudes and point in the direction of a relatively rapid shift from Slovene to English, but not to the weakening of their sense of ethnic identity. The focus then shifts to the linguistic aspects of Slovene-English language contact themselves. In addition to interference phenomena in the immigrants’ language such as borrowing from English and Slovene-English code switching, special attention is paid to the presence of dialect or standard features in their mother tongue. Lexis in particular is interesting as it shows traces of other languages. Next, we try to identify the most significant factors which affect the immigrants’ choice between Slovene and English in various contexts as well as their use of either dialect or standard in Slovene.

The semantics of German ‘touch’ verbs include corresponding motor concepts. These seem to result from experiences and learning from subjective bodily actions and interactions with the environment during language acquisition (cf. Bailey 1997). When we learn a new action word, we often do so embedded in a particular motor context (cf. Bailey et al. 1997; Bergen et al. 2004). In this pilot study, we investigate how the motor concepts of German hand-related ‘touch’-verb variants ([ an ] fassen , [ an ] greifen , [ an ] langen , cf. VWB: 38–39, 40, 42) – which are often considered to be true synonyms – are applied by speakers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The empirical study draws on research into cognitive semantics (Pulvermüller 2005; Steels & Belpaeme 2005; Barsalou 2008; Evans 2009) and motor cognition (Bailey et al. 1997; Marocco et al. 2010) and aims at adding a variationist linguistic component to the existing research (cf. Fink in prep.). By use of a stimulus response experiment with 25 native speakers from the three countries, we will show a) that the three verb variants differ in terms of motor concepts and therefore are no true synonyms and b) that the motor concepts for each verb differ between speakers of German in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Western Peninsular Spanish possesses a type of causative construction in which an intransitive lexeme is used as transitive. Specifically, the verbs caer (‘to fall’), quedar (‘to stay’) and entrar (‘to enter) can induce a direct object in detriment of the standard verbs tirar (‘to throw’), dejar (‘to leave’) and meter (‘to put in’). This phenomenon (called lability) has not been investigated in depth for Spanish and, with this paper I attempt to pinpoint its current geographical extension as well as the semantic factors that favour the transitivisation of these verbs.

In this paper, a phase of language divinisation is posited as the deeply-rooted origin of the standard language/variety ideology, which devalues the nonstandard dialects thus causing a permanent sociolinguistic conflict. Present linguistic standardisation is seen as the form divinisation has taken in the course of the history of humankind and it is justified by the search of stability and functionality for organised speech communities, which is not objectionable as such for some aspects of social life. The sociolinguistic conflict emerges because the first stage of the process requires the selection of usually one variety (or more than one in some cases) out of the dialectal complex of any natural language, generally responding to class-related interests allied to power and prestige. It is evidently, an ideological issue. Our approach to this problem is based on data from the Spanish-speaking world, analysed mainly on a minimal unitary phonetological approach (MUPA) in search of different dialectal dimensions and parameters. MUPA is justified and possible because of the great cohesiveness of Spanish varieties. When attention is paid to this extensive linguistic dominion, one finds that the notion of the inevitability of the weakening of regional varieties has to be revised.