20.574, Confs: Sociolinguistics/Belgium

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LINGUIST List: Vol-20-574. Tue Feb 24 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.574, Confs: Sociolinguistics/Belgium

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1)
Date: 23-Feb-2009
From: Leen Impe < leen.impe at gmail.com >
Subject: Production, Perception, Attitude
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:51:19
From: Leen Impe [leen.impe at gmail.com]
Subject: Production, Perception, Attitude

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Production, Perception, Attitude 

Date: 02-Apr-2009 - 04-Apr-2009 
Location: Leuven, Belgium 
Contact: Leen Impe 
Contact Email: ppa at arts.kuleuven.be 
Meeting URL: http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/ppa 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics 

Meeting Description: 

Production, Perception, Attitude:
An interdisciplinary workshop on understanding and explaining linguistic variation.

Hosted by the University of Leuven, April 2-4, 2009

Organized by the Universities of Leuven, Nijmegen, and Groningen for the
VNC-research programme. The interaction between intelligibility, attitude, and
linguistic distance. 

Call for participation

Workshop website: http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/ppa/

The symposium focuses on and confronts work in variationist linguistics, 
perceptual dialectology, and language attitude research with a view to 
explaining linguistic variation. Although the latter has enjoyed an enormous 
amount of descriptive and theoretical attention, few reliable data are 
available on the origin of this variation and on how it can be accounted for. 
In order to explain language variation, the sociolinguistic correlates of 
phonetic, lexical, and morpho-syntactic variables "have to be traced back to a 
complex set of underlying criteria" (Knops & Van Hout 1988: 2). The 
identification of at least some of these criteria is the ambitious aim to which 
the present workshop is devoted.  

Up to now, linguistic variation has been investigated predominantly from the 
perspective of language production, i. e. in terms of the description of the 
linguistic distance observed between regional and stylistic varieties of Dutch 
(cf. Geeraerts, Grondelaers & Speelman 1999; Van Hout & Van de Velde 2001; 
Heeringa & Nerbonne 2001). In order, however, to move from merely describing 
linguistic variation to explaining variation, three extensions are needed. 

First, the production perspective on linguistic variation has to be refined 
theoretically and methodologically to chart hitherto unknown patterns and (more 
importantly) triggers of variation. Second, it is well-known that some language 
variation and change patterns are sustained by attitudinal factors 
(whereby "attitudes" are provisionally defined as the culturally and 
experientially acquired inclination to perceive and evaluate a variety as 
systematically negative or positive). Although the causal link between 
perception and production has recurrently been demonstrated (cf. Van Bezooijen 
2001), both define different disciplines in (socio)linguistics and social 
psychology which rarely interact. Attitude research is moreover hindered by a 
lack of reliable quantitative data (Grondelaers, Van Hout & Steegs: in press).

In addition to these two perspectives, the workshop also focuses on the (often 
missing) link between the production and the evaluative perception of language 
variation. Before language variation can be subjectively evaluated, it must 
first be recognized by the layman. Perceptual dialectology (Long & Preston 
1999) therefore investigates to what extent linguistic laymen recognize and 
understand other varieties, and where they situate the boundaries between their 
own and other varieties. Although this paradigm represents one of the oldest 
disciplines in sociolinguistics (pioneered in Weijnen 1946), its findings have 
rarely been systematically confronted with production and attitudinal 
perception data. Another crucial perspective which has largely been ignored in 
this respect is the mutual intelligibility between language varieties, a factor 
which is co-determined by attitudes and by linguistic distance (Gooskens 
2007).    

References

Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers & D. Speelman (1999). Convergentie en Divergentie 
in de Nederlandse Woordenschat: een Onderzoek naar kleding- en voetbalnamen. 
Amsterdam: Meertensinstituut.
Grondelaers, S., R. van Hout & M. Steegs. Non-circular scales and ecological 
stimuli. Measuring accent attitudes in the Dutch language area. To appear in 
the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.
Gooskens, Charlotte (2007): The contribution of linguistic factors to the 
intelligibility of closely related languages. Journal of Multilingual and 
multicultural development 28 (6), 445-467.
Heeringa, W. & J. Nerbonne (2002). Dialect areas and dialect continua. In David 
Sankoff, William Labov and Anthony Kroch (eds.), Language Variation and Change, 
375-400. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Long, D., D. R. Preston (Eds.). (1999). Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology. 
Volume 1. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Van Bezooijen, R. (2001). Poldernederlands. Hoe kijken vrouwen ertegenaan? 
Nederlandse Taalkunde 6, 257-271.
Van de Velde, H. & R. van Hout. R-atics. Sociolinguistic, Phonetic and 
Phonological Characteristics of /r/. Etudes & Travaux 4. Brussel: Editions 
Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Van Hout, R. & U. Knops (1988). Language Attitudes in the Dutch Language Area. 
Dordrecht: Foris         

Plenary Speakers

Dennis Preston (Michigan State University)
Janet Pierrehumbert (Northwestern University)
Roeland van Hout (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Programme & Local Committee

Dirk Speelman (University of Leuven)
Stefan Grondelaers (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Dirk Geeraerts (University of Leuven)
Roeland van Hout (Radboud University Nijmegen)
John Nerbonne (University of Groningen)
Charlotte Gooskens (University of Groningen)
Sebastian Kürschner (University of Groningen)
Leen Impe (University of Leuven)
Mieke Steegs (Radboud University Nijmegen)







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