Linguistic variation in European languages

25 November

University of Copenhagen

South Campus, room 24.4.01

11:00		Registration
12:00		Lunch
13:00		Welcome
	Coseriu and the diasystem revisited
13:15	Lene Schøsler (Copenhagen)	The diasystematic status of the diatopic level
14:00	Viggo Bank Jensen & Lorenzo Cigana (Copenhagen)	Between linguistic geography and structural linguistics. The development of Coseriu’s variational approach in the 1950s
14:45		Coffee break
15:15	Araceli López Serena (Sevilla)	What place do Discourse Traditions occupy in research on linguistic variation? Coseriu’s distinction between the historical and the individual levels of language in nowadays DTs model
16:00	Marius Nagy (Tours)	Discourse traditions and the dynamics of linguistic varieties

26 November

Engskiftevej 1, 2100 CopenhagenResidence of the Romanian Ambassador in the Kingdom of Denmark

09:00	H.E. Alexandru Grădinar, Ambassador of Romania in the Kingdom of Denmark	Welcome
09:15	Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh & Erling Strudsholm (Copenhagen)	Address forms in a diasystematic perspective
10:00	Flavia Teoc (Aarhus)	Kennings for battle, snake, and fish as repeated speech within the linguistic theory of Eugeniu Coseriu
10:45		Coffee break
	Variation in the new media
11:15	Jean-Pierre Chevrot (Grenoble)	Can we predict the socio-demographic characteristics of Twitter users from their tweets? The contribution of massive data and artificial intelligence
12:00	Axel Bohmann (Freiburg), Alex Rosenfeld & Lars Hinrichs	Diatopic variation in digital space: What Twitter can tell us about Texas dialect areas
12:45		Lunch
14:00	Mirjam Schmuck (Copenhagen)	Söder und die Merkel – Gender asymmetries in referring expressions in non-standard German
	Diaphasic variation in a language learning perspective
14:45	Roberto Paternostro (Genève)	Linguistic variation and style-shifting in the learning of French as a second and foreign language: sociolinguistic and educational perspectives
15:30		Farewell reception hosted by the Embassy of Romania in the Kingdom of Denmark

Lene Schøsler (Copenhagen)

The Diasystematic Status of the Diatopic Level

In variational linguistics, the dimension of ‘space’ is essential. According to Flydal (1952:245) this dimension is one of the “extrastructuralismes” which, together with the structures of language, forms the “architecture of language”. The other important extrastructural dimension is diastratic, i.e., social variation. Coseriu takes over these two notions, adding a third dimension: the diaphasic variation (1969:148 ss. A fourth dimension proposed by Koch & Oesterreicher, opposing the spoken vs written conception (the diamesic variation), was not included by Coseriu.

A number of publications and articles have recently questioned the theoretic basis of the three or four dimensions taken over from Flydal by Coseriu and further elaborated in variational linguistics, see e.g., Dufter 2018). My contribution focuses on the diatopic level but intends to show that this level cannot be considered independently of other variationnal factors. My position will be exemplified by cases studied in previous research (Glessgen & Schøsler 2018, Schøsler 2020, Schøsler 2021).

References

Coseriu, E. (1969): Einführung in die strukturelle Linguistik. Autorisierte Nachschrift besorgt von Gunter Narr und Rudolf Windisch,Tübingen, Romanisches Seminer der Universität.

Dufter, A. (2018) : « Repenser la spatialisation de la linguistique variationnelle ». in : Martin Glessgen, Johannes Kabatek, Harald Völker (éds.) : Repenser la variation linguistique, Actes du Colloque DIA IV à Zurich (12-14 sept. 2016), Société de Linguistique Romane / Éditions de linguistique et de philologie, Strasbourg, 63-73

Flydal, L. (1952): « Remarques sur certains rapports entre le style et l’état de langue ». Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 16, 240-257.

Glessgen, M. & Schøsler, L. (2018) : « Repenser les axes diasystématiques : nature et statut ontologique », in : Martin Glessgen, Johannes Kabatek, Harald Völker (éds.) : Repenser la variation linguistique, Actes du Colloque DIA IV à Zurich (12-14 sept. 2016), Société de Linguistique Romane / Éditions de linguistique et de philologie, Strasbourg, 11-52.

Schøsler, L. (2020) : « Le rapport entre continuité référentielle et expression du sujet envisagé dans une perspective diasystématique » in La continuité référentielle ou le choix des mots. Dans les textes français et anglais, sous la direction de Depuis, Estèle, Millogo, Victor et Lay, Marie-Hélène, Presses Universitaires de Rennes : Rennes, 123-145.

Schøsler, L. (2021): « Problèmes concernant la séparation entre ceraines distinctions systématiques, en particulier entre diatopie et diachronie » in Réflexions théoriques et méthodologiques autour des données variationnelles.Textes réunis et édités par Annie Bertin, Françoise Gadet, Sabine Lehmann, Anaïs Moreno Kerdreux, Presses Universitaires 21, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, Chambéry, 25-43.

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Viggo Bank Jensen & Lorenzo Cigana (Copenhagen)

Between linguistic geography and structural linguistics. The development of Coseriu’s variational approach in the 1950s

The aim of our talk is to investigate how Coseriu developed his model of variational linguistics in the 1950s. Particular attention will be reserved to the relationship between him, Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1963) and Leiv Flydal (1904-1983) and the key-role it played in the theoretical transition from the notion of “system of isoglossae”, belonging to the framework of linguistic geography, to the later notion of “functional language”. We will make use of material issued from the archives of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, and especially unpublished letters concerning our three protagonists. In the light of the correspondence between Flydal and Hjelmslev, we will discuss some examples taken from Coseriu’s work, contrasting them with Hjelmslev’s notion of “connotation” and “connotators”.

References

Cigana, L. (2021), Eugenio Coseriu. Past, present and future, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 115-134.

Coseriu, E. (1952), Sistema, norma y habla, Montevideo, Universidad de la República (Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias).

Coseriu, E. (1955), “La geografía lingüística”, Revista de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias (Montevideo) 14, 29-69.

Coseriu, E. [1958] (1981), “Los conceptos de ‘dialecto’, ‘nivel’ y ‘estilo de lengua’ y el sentido propio de la dialectologia”, Lingüística española actual 3:1, 1-32.

Coseriu, E. (1958), Sincronía, diacronía e historia. El problema del cambio lingüístico, Madrid, Gredos.

Flydal, L. (1951), "Remarques sur certains rapports entre le style et l'état de langue”, Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 16, 240-257.

Hjelmslev, L. (1943), Omkring Sprogteoriens Grundlæggelse, København, Munksgaard.

Jensen, V.B. (2021), “Coseriu’s Hjelmslev”, Eugenio Coseriu. Past, present and future, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 97-113.

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Araceli López Serena (Sevilla)

What place do Discourse Traditions occupy in research on linguistic variation? Coseriu’s distinction between the historical and the individual levels of language in nowadays DTs model

Contemporary linguistics shows an undoubted interest in the study of variation. As part of this current trend, it pays increasing attention to the various patterns for the construction and interpretation of the different registers, styles, types of texts or genres, which are referred to as ‘discourse traditions’ (hereafter DTs) in German Romance Philology—and more precisely within the framework of what could be called Coserian-inspired Linguistics of Varieties (Varietätenlinguistik). This present-day consideration towards the real complexity and heterogeneity of language is not necessarily accompanied by a clear dissociation between the specific facts of variation aimed to be delimited by these and other concepts used in linguistic literature, even though many studies reveal a certain yearning for a better delimitation of such concepts. Without trying to delve deeper into this marshy ground, my communication will focus both on the notion of DT and on the place that the latter occupies in research on linguistic variation. Its content is structured around three questions: (i) to what extent is the concept of DT linked to the interest in studying linguistic variation? (ii) how is the notion of DT defined – latu sensu – in its original coining? and (iii) to what extent is it possible and/or necessary –and, if so, from what point of view – to distinguish DTs (stricto sensu, in this case) from categories such as genre, register, style, and conceptional profile?

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Marius Nagy (Tours)

Discourse traditions and the dynamics of language variation

The notion of discourse traditions, introduced by Peter Koch (1987) as a second historical level beside the historical level of language in the Coserian tripartition of language levels, refers to the historical models of text elaboration and reception. Our communication proposes to discuss the different elaborations of this notion and to examine the relation between discourse traditions and the language variety types identified by Coseriu. We will try to show that the notion of discourse traditions allows us to capture the dynamics of language variation and, following Gadet (2007), we will discuss the variation in terms of adjustment phenomenon between interlocutors.

References

Coseriu, Eugenio, 1988, Die Ebenen des sprachlichen Wissens. Der Ort des ‚Korrekten’ in der Bewertungsskala des Gesprochenen, in Energeia und Ergon, vol. I Schriften von Eugenio Coseriu, Tübingen, p. 327-375

Coseriu, Eugenio, 2000, L’homme et son langage, Louvain/Paris, Peeters

Coseriu, Eugenio, 2007, Lingüística del texto. Introducción a la hermenéutica del sentido, ed. De Oscar Loureda Lamas, Madrid, Arco Libros

Gadet, Françoise, 2007, La variation sociale en français, Paris, Ophrys

Kabatek, Johannes, 2018, Lingüística coseriana, lingüística histórica, tradiciones discursivas, Madrid, Iberoamericana

Koch, Peter; OESTERREICHER, Wulf, 2007, Lengua hablada en la Romania: español, francés, italiano, Madrid, Gredos

Lopez Serena, Araceli, 2012, Lo universal y lo histórico en el saber expresivo: variación situacional vs. variación discursiva, Analecta Malacitana, 86, 261-281

Stehl, Thomas, 2017, Historische Sprache und Funktionelle Sprache: Strukturierung und Periodisierung, in G. Hassler & Th. Stehl (eds), Kompetenz -Funktion -Variation. Linguistica Coseriana V, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 387-402

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Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh & Erling Strudsholm (Copenhagen)

Address forms in a diasystematic perspective

Our paper concerns different strategies of communication with respect to formality and politeness, and how these differences relate to the diasystematic dimensions. Our contrastive approach involves forms of address in French and Italian compared to Danish, German, and English norms and usage.

Both Romance and Germanic languages have two systems of address pronouns with different levels of formality (Schøsler & Strudsholm, 2013). There are, however, significant differences in usages in the respective languages, both typological and interlinguistical. Different language areas have different conventions for communication and politeness, and we believe that address forms reflect such socio-cultural differences (Durst-Andersen, 2011; Hofstede, 2001; Kragh, Skafte Jensen, & Strudsholm, 2016).

Our analyses of these differences are anchored in the diasystematic dimensions as proposed by Eugenio Coseriu (Völker, 2009), with special focus on the diaphasic variation and its intertwinement with diastratically conditioned factors.

References

Durst-Andersen, P. (2011). Bag om sproget. Det kulturmentale univers i sprog og kommunikation. København: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.

Kragh, K. J., Skafte Jensen, E., & Strudsholm, E. (2016). Åbninger og lukninger i e-mailkorrespondance på fire sprog. Globe: A Journal of Language, Culture and Communication (Special issue 1: Festschrift for Per Durst-Andersen), 119-139.

Schøsler, L., & Strudsholm, E. (2013). Preservation, modification, and innovation. Paradigmatic reorganisation of the system of personal pronouns - from Latin into Modern Italian. In K. J. Kragh & J. Lindschouw (Eds.), Deixis and pronouns in Romance languages (pp. 49-68). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Völker, H. (2009). La linguistique variationnelle et la perspective intralinguistique. Revue de Linguistique Romane, 73, 27-76.

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Flavia Teoc (Aarhus)

Kennings for battle, snake, and fish as repeated speech within the linguistic theory of Eugeniu Coseriu

My research aims to define the kenning as a unit of repeated speech, within the conceptual frame of the linguistic theory of Eugeniu Coseriu. My paper begins with a theoretical discussion on the definition of kennings as units of repeated speech as well as on the latter’s possibility to contribute to the creation of new meaning at textual level. In order to reveal their contribution to a global meaning, I will complete my analysis with an approach from the perspective of text linguistics. My presentation explores the patterns of kennings for battle, fish and snake in skaldic poetry composed during the heathen and the conversion times.

My presentation explores the patterns of kennings for battle which present a variation from the set formula ”battle is Storm of Weapons or of Sheltering Shields, or of Odin or the Valkyrs, or of Host-Kings; and Din and Clashing” introduced by Snorri Sturluson in Skáldskaparmál to the study case when the battle is periphrased as a play. Focus will be on the proper meaning of the term leik (play, game) in Old Norse and the contextual meaning of the kenning metaphor battle is play in four skaldic poems. My study aims to demonstrate the different degrees of integration of play’s proper meaning from a calculated strategy to performing a sacred game in Christian poems.

Keywords: repeated speech, kennings, Coserian linguistics

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Jean-Pierre Chevrot (Grenoble)

Can we predict the socio-demographic characteristics of Twitter users from their tweets? The contribution of massive data and artificial intelligence

Since its beginnings, sociolinguistics has taken the issue of data seriously (Labov, 1975). It is not surprising, then, that the field of computational sociolinguistics has emerged as a result of our new ability to collect large digital data sets.

Here, I will present the exploitation of the Sosweet database (Abitbol et al., 2018) which includes 650 million tweets written by 3 million users located in French-speaking areas. From this database, we randomly extracted 3648 users located in France and 364800 tweets they produced. Their gender, an approximation of their age and their annual income were coded, by direct inspection of the account, or by an inference based on their GPS location.

After presenting a classical analysis of some sociolinguistic variables (e.g., variable deletion of the French negative "ne", Hansen & Malderez, 2004), I will report on two machine learning attempts (logistic regression and deep learning) to predict sociodemographic traits through the totality of linguistic information included in the tweets. I will also present recent attempts to model the trajectories of lexical innovations that have appeared in the database after the beginning of the collection (year 2013) and that, depending on the case, have maintained or disappeared over the years.

References

Hansen, A.B., & Malderez, I. (2004). Le ne de négation en région parisienne: une étude en temps réel, Langage et société, 107(1), 5-30.

Labov, W. (1975). What is a linguistic fact?, Peter de Ridder.

Levy Abitbol, J., Karsai, M., Magué, J.-P., Chevrot, J.-P., & Fleury, E. (2018). Socioeconomic dependencies of linguistic patterns in Twitter: a multivariate analysis. In Proceedings of ACM WWW conference, Lyon, France, April 2018 (WWW’18), https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01155

Nguyen, D. Doğruöz, A.S. Rosé, C.P. & de Jong, F.M.G. (2016). Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey, Computational Linguistics, 42 (3), 537-593.

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Axel Bohmann (Freiburg), Alex Rosenfeld & Lars Hinrichs

Diatopic variation in digital space: What Twitter can tell us about Texas dialect areas

Recent work on dialect variation has successfully drawn on large social media corpora (e.g., Hovy & Purschke 2018). The advantage to such methods, compared to traditional dialectology, is that they are able to identify gradient rather than categorical transitions (Chambers & Trudgill 1998) at a high geographic resolution. However, differences in population densities and Twitter usage, as well as sparsity of demographic user data, limit the insights that can be drawn.

For this study, we use a corpus of 3.5 million tweets posted over six years and compiled through a combination of streaming API calls and harvesting from the Internet Archive’s Twitter Stream Grab (Internet Archive 2019). To quantify the transitions in geographical language use patterns, we developed a novel machine learning method that characterizes lexical variation in an area, as well as gradations between areas, and maps these transitions down to a resolution of a voting precinct (about 1,100 people). In a second study, we investigate the relationship between social and geographical variation by considering demographic information at the level of voting precincts. For each precinct, frequency information about 80 linguistic features is extracted. Clustering of the precincts shows a combination of geographically and socially conditioned variation, the latter chiefly along lines of ethnicity.

Our findings emphasize the need to integrate features at different planes of linguistic description (lexical, grammatical, and orthographic variation) as well as different external factors of variation (diatopic, diastratic) in an account of regional variation in Texas English. Methodologically, they demonstrate the potential, but also some of the pitfalls of working with large amounts of Twitter data.

References

Chambers, J. K., & Trudgill, P. (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Hovy, Dirk & Christoph Purschke. 2018. Capturing regional variation with distributed place representations and geographic retrofitting. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 4383–4394. Brussels, Belgium: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Internet Archive. (2019). Archive Team: The Twitter Stream Grab. https://archive.org/details/twitterstream

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Mirjam Schmuck (Copenhagen)

Söder und die Merkel. Variation and gender asymmetries in referring expressions in non-standard German

Diaphasic variation is a characteristic of terms of reference in general, equally in German. Official or academic titles typically occur in formal speech, especially when referring to distinguished public figures (Bundeskanzlerin ‘Chancellor' [Angela] Merkel), whereas in informal speech alternative strategies are available. In German, the inventory includes terms of address (Frau Merkel) also being used in reference, definite articles (die Merkel) and combinations of both (die Frau Merkel). When choosing a referring expressions, several crucial factors (text internal and external) have been identified in the literature, such as text type (conceptional orality/literacy) and position within the text (first time/repeatedly mentioned) on the one hand and properties of the referent, such as the referent‘s age, popularity, and gender (cf. Rolnik 2014) on the other. Whereas the focus so far has been on newspapers, the present paper focuses on informal, quasi-spontaneous speech. Based on web data (DECOW corpus), it will be shown that compared to written newspapers the impact of gender is even more striking.

References

Kalverkämper, H. (1994): Eigennamen in Texten. In: Canisius, P./Herbermann, C.-P./Tschauder, G. (eds.): Text und Grammatik. Festschrift für Roland Harweg zum 60. Geburtstag. Bochum, pp. 205–238.

Lenk, Hartmut (2002): Personennamen im Vergleich: Die Gebrauchsformen von Anthroponymen in Deutschland, Österreich, der Schweiz und Finnland. Hildesheim et al.

---(2014): Gebrauch von Familiennamen in Zeitungstextsorten. In: Debus, F./Heuser, R./Nübling, D. (eds.): Linguistik der Familiennamen. Hildesheim et al. pp. 345–366.

Löffler, H. (2002): Die unterschiedliche Verwendung von Personennamen und Personenkennzeichnungen in deutschsprachigen Zeitungen. Vergleichende Beobachtungen zur Pragmatik der Eigennamen und zur Zeitungssprache. In: Kremer, D. (ed.): Akten des 18. Internationalen Kongresses für Namenforschung Trier, 12-17. April 1993. Tübingen, pp. 523–532.

Rollnik, K. (2014): Personennamen in Zeitungstexten. Zum Zusammenhang von Referenzher-stellung und Geschlecht. In: Debus, F./Heuser, R./Nübling, D. (eds.): Linguistik der Familiennamen. Hildesheim et al., pp. 321–344.

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Roberto Paternostro (Genève)

Linguistic variation and style-shift in the learning of French as a foreign language: sociolinguistic and educational perspectives

This presentation will focus on diaphasic variation in spoken French and on the issues related to its teaching in the context of French as a foreign language. The theoretical reflection on the teaching of spoken French will be accompanied by the description of some concrete didactic tools implemented in Ticino, in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, with teenage learners in some high schools.

Bibliography

Blanche-Benveniste, C. (2005). Le français parlé. Études grammaticales. Paris : CNRS.

Boulton, A. & Tyne, H., (2014). Des documents authentiques aux corpus. Démarches pour l’apprentissage des langues. Paris : Didier.

Eckert, P. (2008). “Variation and the indexical field”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4), pp. 453-476.

Gadet, F. (1997). Le français ordinaire, 2^e édition. Paris : Colin.

Gadet, F. (2007). La variation sociale en français. 2^e éd. Paris: Ophrys.

Gadet, F. & Guerin, E. (2008). « Le couple oral / écrit dans une sociolinguistique à visée didactique ». Le français aujourd’hui, 162, pp. 21-27.

Gumperz, J.J. (éd.) (1982). Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paternostro, R. (2020) « Vers une didactique de l’oralité en FLE : l’apport du numérique ». Rivista italiana di psicolinguistica applicata, 1(2020), pp. 83-99.

Ravazzolo, E., Jouin, E. Traverso, V. Vigner, G. (2015). Interactions, dialogues, conversations : l’oral en français langue étrangère. Paris : Hachette FLE.

Weber, C. (2013). Pour une didactique de l’oralité. Enseigner le français tel qu’il est parlé. Paris: Didier.