Language Variation and Change
Main Interests:
- dialectology
- discourse analysis
- forensic phonetics
- sociolinguistic theory
- sociophonetics
- syntactic annotation of historical corpora
- variation in child language acquisition
- Middle English
- Old English
The LVC Research Group's main focus is to identify and explain variation
in language and its role in accounting for linguistic change. We explore
the implications of variation and change for theories of language acquisition
and linguistic knowledge. We are also interested in the value of linguistic
variation for applied fields such as forensic speaker identification.
Our work involves the creation of language corpora and employs a variety
of empirical methods. We work on a wide range of languages and dialects,
different historical periods, and with data gathered from written texts
as well as audio recordings from adults and children. Our research investigates
all types of linguistic structure, including fine-grained phonetic detail,
segmental and suprasegmental phonology, morphosyntax, lexis, syntax and
discourse structure.
We host an interactive Sociolinguistics archive on which you can post papers that you have written and download papers written by us (and others). Please feel free to take advantage of this resource.
Researchers:
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Corpora:
- A child language acquisition database, which comprises longitudinal and cross-sectional data from over 60 children (aged 2-5) with their mothers in contexts of natural speech interaction.
- The York English Corpus, a 1.5 million word fully computerised corpus of spoken English language data from the indigenous population of the city of York. The corpus comprises 92 speakers, ranging in age from 15-91 years of age.
- The Phonological Variation and Change Corpus, a collection of recordings from 64 adults in Newcastle upon Tyne and Derby, digitised and transcribed.
- The York-Toronto-Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose, a parsed and tagged electronic corpus of 1.5 million words of prose drawn from the earliest period of the English language.
- The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry, a parsed and tagged electronic corpus of 71,490 words of Old English poetic text.
- The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a parsed and tagged electronic corpus of 2.2 million words drawn from Early Modern English letters.