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This study examines a collection of expressions for the taboo topic of menstruation in Dutch, German, and Mandarin Chinese. A model for the identification of conceptualization patterns in taboo verbalizations is set up, analyzing each expression according to the X-phemistic mechanisms and, if applicable, the metaphorical source domains or metonymic vehicles at its origin. The various conceptualizations of menstruation are approached from a socio-cultural perspective; variation in conceptualization is examined through a correspondence regression analysis with three speaker-related explanatory variables (L1 and associated cultural background, menstrual experience, and age group). The underlying interest is linguo-cultural as the study aims to verify whether dominant menstrual attitudes are reflected in the linguistic conceptualization of menstruation within each socio-cultural group. Such correlations are indeed found, although the youngest age-group shows some unexpected linguistic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research paradigm of alternation studies is forming an increasingly large share of the empirical foundations of usage-based linguistics. As the paradigm is essentially an amalgamation of research traditions from various subfields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and construction grammar, it sports various definitions of the concept of "alternation" and various ways of conducting an alternation study, which are not always compatible. The present special issue is therefore intended to bring researchers from various backgrounds in usage-based linguistics together to see how we can deal with these issues. This introduction first presents the various ways of defining an alternation and discusses the differences between them and how these definitions determine the methodological set-up of an alternation study. Next, the contributions to the special issue are each in turn summarized and related to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English tense/aspect-marking is an area where variation abounds and where many theories have been formulated. Diachronic studies of the preterit/present perfect alternation indicate that the present perfect (e.g. I have eaten already) has been losing ground to the preterit (e.g. I ate already) (e.g. Elsness 1997, but see Hundt & Smith 2009, Werner 2014). However, few studies have examined this alternation in vernacular speech. This article fills this lacuna by analyzing spoken data from Ontario, Canada, from an apparent-time perspective. Using a large archive of multiple communities and people of different generations, we focus on linguistic contexts known to be variable, viz. with adverbs of indefinite time. Results indicate that, in contrast with previous studies, the alternation is mostly stable. We find evidence of change only with the adverb ever. Where there is evidence of change, this change is different from the predictions in the literature, with the preterit increasing in frequency. We suggest that a minor constructionalization process operates in tandem with ongoing specialization of the preterit/present perfect contrast. Taken together, these results provide another example of the importance of including speech in research on language variation and change and of the unique contribution certain constructions make to more general systems of grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English has many words to refer to an adult man (e.g., man, guy, dude), and these are undergoing change in the Ontario dialects. This article analyzes the distribution of these and related forms using data collected in Ontario, Canada. In total, 6,788 tokens for 17 communities were extracted and analyzed with a comparative sociolinguistics methodology for social and geographic factors. The results demonstrate a substantive language change in progress with two striking patterns. First, male speakers in Ontario were the leaders of this change in the past. However, as guy gained prominence across the twentieth century, women started using it as frequently as men. Second, these developments are complicated by the complexity of the sociolinguistic landscape. There is a clear urban versus peripheral division across Ontario communities that also involves both population size and distance from the large urban center, Toronto. Further, social network type and other local influences are also important. In sum, variation in third-person singular male referents in Ontario dialects provides new insight into the co-occurrence and evolution of sociolinguistic factors in the process of language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Se constructions designate a set of polysemous constructions along a transitivity continuum marked by the clitic se that perform various functions: reflexive/reciprocal, middle, anticausative, passive, and impersonal. A counterpart of these constructions without the clitic – the null se construction – is also attested. Based on an extensive usage-feature and profile-based analysis, and using multivariate statistical methods, we analyze, considering Cognitive Grammar, the conceptual, structural, and lectal factors that determine the choice between overt and null se constructions. The results of the study show that the null constructions are far more frequent in Brazilian (BP) than in European Portuguese (EP). In BP, the focus on the moment of change is a crucial factor for the overt/null variation in reflexive/reciprocal, middle, anticausative, and impersonal constructions. If the moment of the change of state is profiled, the overt se construction is usually produced. If the moment of change is not profiled, the null se construction is preferred. External factors also play a role in the variation. Register is an important predictor for the observed variation of the anticausative construction, and the only predictor for the overt/null variation in the case of the passive construction. In EP, the null se variant is mainly limited to anticausative constructions. In all cases of null constructions, there is a shift to an absolute construal, which has an impact on the way that the transitivity continuum is conceptualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the distribution of a morphological variable that has not gained much attention in the literature: adverbial -s versus -Ø. This morpheme predominantly occurs with adverbs ending in -ward(s), like forward(s), afterward(s), and inward(s), or -way(s), such as anyway(s) or halfway(s). Using a large database of sociolinguistic interviews of Ontario English and an apparent-time perspective, we show that the use of the variants changes over the twentieth century, with the adverbial suffixes -ward(s) and -way(s) behaving differently. -Ward(s) shows a trend towards -s, while most words in -way(s) increasingly take -Ø–splitting by adverbial suffix. Anyway(s) is an exception to this pattern, with a change from below towards -s, strongly conditioned by social standing. We also find evidence for lexicalization of forms without -s in phrasal verbs like to move forward. We explain these findings against the background of variationist sociolinguistic theory and principles of language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we assess the merits of Digital Humanities, and argue that this approach has advanced the field of Dutch linguistics considerably, but at the same time holds some dangers and misconceptions, like (i) the assumption that the new-fangled studies clash with older, more traditional research, (ii) a conceited but unwarranted disdain for current-day non-quantitative work, (iii) the idea that the early adoption of quantitative methods in linguistics created an unbridgeable gap with its neighbouring discipline, the literary studies, and (iv) the risk of the dialectics of lead. We then detect the weak spot of the Digital Humanities approach in linguistics. Though we acknowledge that great strides are currently being made and that earlier research grappled with the issue as well, what turns out to be frustratingly elusive is the whole field of 'semantics', especially given the insights from cognitive linguistics about its complicated nature, including encyclopaedic and contextual knowledge. The aporia of semantics is coped with differently in linguistics and literature. While linguistics has sought a rapprochement with the exact sciences, it steered clear from interpretation as much as possible. The field of literary studies, by contrast, remains loyal to its original 'humanities' mission, but is now no longer exclusively -- or primarily -- driven by critically interpreting the meaning of texts as such. Instead, its focus has shifted to offering a critical investigation of the field itself, and of society at large. Both approaches are in danger of derailing: the 'semanticophobia' of some linguists dismisses a real and fascinating part of language from its purview; the 'critical discourse' approach of some literary colleagues runs the risk of ignoring some useful text-based techniques for empirical research. The main task of Digital Humanities, in both fields, will be to navigate between these pitfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation shown by a particular concept, varies between concepts. For the concept drunk, for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated, and hammered. For the concept sober, however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items is available, like sober or abstinent. While earlier variation studies have revealed that meaning-related concept characteristics correlate with the amount of lexical variation, these studies were limited in scope, being restricted to one semantic field and to one dialect area, that of the Limburgish dialects of Dutch. In this paper, we investigate whether the impact of concept characteristics, viz. vagueness, lack of salience and proneness to affect, is manifest in a similar way in other dialects and other semantic fields. In particular, by extending the scope of the earlier studies to other carefully selected semantic fields, we investigate the generalizability of the impact of concept characteristics to the lexicon as a whole. The quantitative approach that we employ to measure concept characteristics and lexical diversity methodologically advances the study of linguistic variation. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the further development of Cognitive Sociolinguistics by showcasing how meaning can be a source of lexical diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate gender assignment to recently borrowed English loanwords in Dutch, introducing several innovations to the field of gender assignment to anglicisms. For example, we use multiple mixed-effects logistic regression to determine which factors underlie gender assignment in Dutch. This model indicates that there is variation in the degree of homogeneity in the speech community (that is, agreement among respondents) concerning the gender assigned to an anglicism; therefore, we analyze the contexts in which homogeneity is the lowest. Our analysis reveals that the degree of consensus does not solely depend on how established an anglicism is. In contrast to what has been argued in previous studies, gender assignment to anglicisms in Dutch is not a categorical process: Gender variation increases when respondents are faced with a conflict between the default article de and some factor that favors its neuter counterpart, het.* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whereas the alternation between the s-genitive (the New Year's message) and the of-genitive (the message of the New Year) is well documented, our study offers a more accountable analysis of genitive variation by including noun-noun (NN)-genitives (the New Year message). We consider four different variable contexts (s versus of, NN versus of, NN versus s, and NN versus s versus of ), which we analyze using regression analysis. The dataset consists of 10,054 variable genitives drawn from the Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. The material covers the period between 1650 and 2000, thus enabling us to track the evolution of variable genitive grammar in real time. We report that there is an overall drift toward the NN-genitive, which is preferred over other variants when constituent noun phrases are short, possessor constituents are inanimate, and possessum constituents are thematic. In addition to these substantive contributions, we showcase methods of dealing with a complex dataset covering nonbinary grammatical variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialectometry studies patterns of linguistic variation through correlations between geographic and aggregate measures of linguistic distance. However, aggregating smooths out the role of semantic characteristics, which have been shown to affect the distribution of lexical variants across dialects. Furthermore, although dialectologists have always been well-aware of other variables like population size, isolation and socio-demographic features, these characteristics are generally only included in dialectometric analyses afterwards for further interpretation of the results rather than as explanatory variables. This study showcases linear mixed-effects modelling as a method that is able to incorporate both language-external and language-internal factors as explanatory variables of linguistic variation in the Limburgish dialect continuum in Belgium and the Netherlands. Covering four semantic domains that vary in their degree of basic vs. cultural vocabulary and their degree of standardization, the study models linguistic distances using a combination of external (e.g., geographic distance, separation by water, population size) and internal (semantic density, salience) sources of variation. The results show that both external and internal factors contribute to variation, but that the exact role of each individual factor differs across semantic domains. These findings highlight the need to incorporate language-internal factors in studies on variation, as well as a need for more comprehensive analysis tools to help better understand its patterns., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Huisman, Franco and van Hout.)