Methods in Dialectology

The Sixth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology was hosted by the Department of Linguistics in the University College of North Wales, August 3-7, 1987. The meeting was held jointly with that of the Summer meeting of the American Dialect Society. This volume contains a substantial selection of the papers presented. The papers are wide-ranging in their coverage, with a satisfying leaning towards the practical matters of survey and field-work methodology, to the application of statistical techniques in analysis of data, and to computational methodology in the presentation of results, particularly in atlas form. The conference was designed to reflect the current concerns of dialectologists, as they exploit these methodological tools in the twin contexts of insights which derive from sociology via sociolinguistics, and their awareness of the interplay between synchronic variation and linguistic change. The papers in this volume combine all these aspects of variation study, though the mix varies with the individual authors'concern. In all, these proceedings mirror the wide range of interests which characterise the practice of dialectology as a research discipline, and well illustrate the dilemma of the pedant who seeks an inviolate line of demarcation between'dialectology'and'sociolinguistics'. The defining criterion for dialectology, perhaps, is its central concern with variation in the spatial parameter, and with diffusion through space and time, in addition to refinement of the data by an enhanced awareness of the significance of factors of communal social structure.