[Corpora-List] Call for participation for Production, Perception, Attitude

[Leen Impe]

Call for participation for

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

Hosted by the University of Leuven, April 2-3, 2009

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

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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