FW: lots of hyphenation here

[David Barnhart]

-----Original Message-----
From: Variationist List [mailto:VAR-L at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Dave
Sayers
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2013 2:58 AM
To: VAR-L at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: English Speakers Increasingly Use Self-Centered Words Like 'Get'
And 'Choose'

Hmmm.... not altogether sure about this research (news article here
http://goo.gl/XZvMiv; peer-reviewed paper here http://goo.gl/RbrCyK).

It seems to be a rather rough-and-ready form of content analysis -- where
you count up the instances of different words or phrases to weigh up
different themes. Content analysis gets short shrift from sociolinguists, as
a sort of training-wheels type of discourse analysis. It's had a great deal
more attention in health research though, e.g. in coding qualitative
interviews among HIV patients to establish patterns of infection.

Anyway... the research above seems to want to say something about culture
based on variation and change in (written) language -- which is, like, our
turf, right? Have we been blind-sided or this just methodologically shabby
fluff?

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK Visiting
Lecturer (2013-14), Dept English, University of Turku, Finland
dave.sayers at cantab.net http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers

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