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Language Variation - European Perspectives VI: Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 8), Leipzig, May 2015
Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Beat Siebenhaar
[Studies in Language Variation 19] 2017
► pp. 23–46

A case for clustering speakers and linguistic variables

Big issues with smaller samples in language variation

| Victoria University of Wellington
| University of Aukland
We undertake a detailed analysis of a sample of over 10,000 utterances from 18 speakers in a corpus of Bequia English and apply constrained cluster analysis to discern patterns that identify the linguistic signatures for different villages and to see how individuals pattern in relation to the rest of their village. The analysis of multiple variables provides a richer picture of both group and individual than any one variable does and holds promise for better understanding the mysterious mechanisms by which variation between individuals scales up to variation between groups.
Keywords: Bequia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, creole, group and individual, multiple variables, cluster analysis, scaling up, historical linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Going big from small (samples)
  • 3.Language variation in context
  • 4.Addressing a big problem for variationist sociolinguistics
  • 5.The missing link – a sociolinguistic Higgs-Boson particle?
  • 6.Individuals and groups in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)
  • 7.Linguistic features in the Bequia corpus
  • 8.Clustering speakers with respect to multiple linguistic features
  • 9.Where this takes us and where it leaves us
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.19.02mey
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