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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 253–278

Testing models of diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations in Twitter data

ORCID logo | University of Cambridge
ORCID logo | University of Cambridge
ORCID logo | University of Oxford
ORCID logo | University of Bern
Established models of the spatial diffusion of linguistic innovations vary in their relationship to population density. Differences in prediction between the gravity models (Trudgill 1974), in which probability of diffusion is sensitive to settlement size, and the traditional wave models can be challenging to test due to the difficulty of large-scale and finely-grained geographical sampling. This paper tests the suitability of data derived from Twitter in establishing diffusion patterns. Using two case studies from British English – variation in the realisation of ditransitives, and preposition drop with go – we propose that the correlation between (local) population density and linguistic similarity to geographical neighbours can be used as a measure of hierarchical patterning for an individual innovation.
Keywords: dialectology, syntactic variation, computational sociolinguistics, British English, dative alternation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology and corpus construction
    • 2.1Corpus structure
      • 2.1.1Localisation
  • 3.Mapping the distribution of morphosyntactic variants
    • 3.1Dative alternation revisited
    • 3.2Preposition drop
  • 4.Approaches to the quantification of diffusion
    • 4.1Measurement
      • 4.1.1Simulated data
    • 4.2Evaluating real data
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.11bla
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