Isabelle Buchstaller

INTENSIVE AND QUOTATIVE ALL: SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

this article presents a synchronic and diachronic investigation of the lexeme all in its intensifier and quotative functions. We delimit the new from the old functions of the lexeme and present a variationist account of all ’s external and internal constraints in various syntactic environments. our analysis is based on a variety of data sets, which include traditional sociolinguistic interviews as well as data culled from internet searches and a new Google-based search tool. on the basis of these data sets, we show that intensifier all is not new but has expanded in syntactic environments. We further pinpoint the syntactic and semantic niches which all has appropriated for itself among California adolescents and compare its patterning with that of other intensifiers in our data and the data of other researchers. All ’s extension to quotative function, however, is new, apparently originating in California in the 1980s. our investigation of its development spans across data sets from 15 years. using variable rule analysis and other quantitative techniques, we examine the distribution of quotative all vis-a-vis its competitor variants (including be like, say, and go) and show that the constraints on quotative all have undergone a marked shift in recent years and that quotative all is in decline right now, after peaking in the 1990s. the lexeme all in its intensifier and quotative functions (as in 1a and 1b, respectively) occurs commonly in media representations of adolescents’ speech: 1. a. my mom is all mad at me. [Jerry Scott and Jim borgman, “Zits” (comic strip), king features, Aug. 30, 2005] b. the dog just—she was all “bark! bark! bark!” [ibid, July 28, 2005] in the only published article devoted to these uses of all, Waksler (2001, 128) describes both quotative all and intensifier all as “ new constructions” in the speech of adolescents and young adults in San francisco:

The lady was al demonyak : historical aspects of Adverb all

In this diachronic study, we shed light on the development of the functions and structural properties of Adverb all, and suggest that degree modifiers in general should be analyzed in similar terms. We show that the harmonic relationship between Adverb all and its head is best accounted for in terms of boundedness rather than gradability (see Kennedy & McNally, 2005; Paradis, 2001). The stability over a millennium of indeterminacy between bounded and unbounded readings of Adverb all + head sequences, and of the ambiguity in many contexts between Adverb and Quantifier-floated all, shows that a division of labor over time between ambiguous meanings is not necessary (Geeraerts, 1997). Despite its long history, Adverb all has been treated as conversational or an innovation (B¨ acklund, 1973; Waksler, 2001). We address the question why certain items like all come to be stereotyped as ‘new’ when in fact they are not.

T-to-R and the Northern Subject Rule: questionnaire-based spatial, social and structural linguistics

Accents and dialects of English and Scots in Britain have been under active investigation for many decades, as reported through the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al. 1962–71) and the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather et al. 1975–86), Wells’ three-volume compendium (1982), and a host of detailed studies of individual varieties. There are also welcome recent signs of the reintegration of variation data into theoretical discussion (see Henry 2002, Cornips & Corrigan 2005a and Trousdale & Adger 2007 for morphosyntax, as well as Anttila 2002 and Coetzee & Pater 2011 for phonology). Nonetheless, the precise structural, geolinguistic and sociolinguistic patterning of many features of vernacular Englishes in the UK is still largely unknown.

The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data

ABSTRACT Thispaperexaminesashort-livedinnovation,quotativeall,inrealandapparenttime.Weusedatwo-prongedmethodtotracethetrajectoryofalloverthepasttwodecades:(i) Quantitativeanalysesofthe quotativesystem ofyoungCalifornians fromdifferentdecades;thisrevealsastartlingcrossoverpattern:in1990/1994,allpredominates,butby 2005, it has given way to like. (ii) Searches of Internet newsgroups; these confirmthat after rising briskly in the 1990s, all is declining. Tracing the changing usage ofquotative options provides year-to-year evidence that all has recently given way tolike. Our paper has two aims: We provide insights from ongoing language changeregarding short-term innovations in the history of English. We also discuss ourcollaboration with Google Inc. and argue for the value of newsgroups to researchprojects investigating linguistic variation and change in real time, especially whererecorded conversational tokens are relatively sparse. AnearlierversionofthispaperwaspresentedatNWAV35(NewWaysofAnalyzingVariation)atOhioState University in Columbus. We are grateful forcomments from the audience,in particularto John V.SinglerandMaryBucholtz.Allremainingerrorsare,ofcourse,ourown.WearegratefultoJohnSinglerandotherreviewersofthispaperfortheirhelpfulfeedbackon anearlierdraft. WethankGoogleInc.forthe opportunity to collaborate on this exciting project, drawing on their both personnel and facilities.Many thanks go to Thorsten Brants for his enthusiasm for and support of the project as well as forhis enormous input in terms of computational methods. We are also indebted to David Hall fordeveloping and implementing the tools needed to do the searches we requested and for respondingswiftly and extensively to all our queries and suggestions. Thanks are due to Carmen Fought,Rachelle Waksler, and Ann Wimmer for allowing us to use their data on quotative all and otherforms from the 1980s and 1990s as well as to Bob Bayley and Mackenzie Price for guidance withstatistical analysis. Finally, we are grateful to Stanford faculty colleagues for their input and toseveral Stanford students who provided substantial assistance with data collection and analysisbetween 2004 and 2010, especially Zoe Bogart, Crissy Brown, Kayla Carpenter, Tracy Conner,Kristle McCracken, Rowyn McDonald, Cybelle Smith, Francesca Smith, and Laura Whitton.

The Quantitative Analysis of Morphosyntactic Variation: Constructing and Quantifying the Denominator

At its inception, the sociolinguistic enterprise focused on research on phonological variability and only later broadened its remit to include ‘variability [that] occurs and can be dealt with at level of grammar above (and beyond) the phonological’ (Sankoff 1972:45). This extension, however, has not been without controversy and continues to fuel heated debates in the field. This article addresses some of the contentious issues that quantitative research on (morpho-)syntactic variation has brought about. Can we operationalise variation in the field of morphosyntax as a sociolinguistic variable? If yes, how do we define such a variable? Is morphosyntax constrained in the same way as variation in the sound system? How do we quantify variability in the field of morphosyntax in an accountable manner? What do we quantify out of? I also introduce some of the methods used by researchers dealing with non-phonological variation, focusing especially on the quantification of morphosyntactic and discourse variables.

Investigating the Effect of Socio-Cognitive Salience and Speaker-Based Factors in Morpho-Syntactic Life-Span Change

This article explores changes across the life-span of the individual speaker. Three morpho-syntactic variables that operate at different levels of socio-cognitive salience—quotation, stative possession, and future temporal reference—are traced across longitudinal trend and panel data. The analysis of a panel corpus that spans forty-two years reveals that linguistic malleability is contingent on the variables’ embedding in speakers’ cognitive-evaluative structures but also on a range of speaker-based factors, such as the speakers’ socio-economic trajectory, personality profile, as well as their type and intensity of contact with children and younger speakers. The study thus supports research that has shown that the adaptive behavior across the life-span results in complex outcomes that cannot be characterized by wholesale convergence or divergence.

The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English and The Talk of the Toon: Issues in Preservation and Public Engagement

This chapter explores the ways in which issues of corpus sustainability and dissemination have been addressed in the creation of the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE, Corrigan et al. 2012. The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) and The Talk of the Toon. Newcastle University) and, in particular, in the design and development of the project’s public-facing multimedia website, The Talk of the Toon. This open-access site is at the heart of the outreach activities through which the DECTE project seeks to fulfil the aim of fostering mutually beneficial and productive relationships with diverse non-academic user groups in the wider community, in keeping with the concept of linguistic gratuity advocated by Wolfram (1993) and the requirements of the current public engagement and impact agendas in UK higher education.