학술논문
Quantifying lectal structure and change
Document Type
Chapter
Author
Geeraerts, Dirk, author; Speelman, Dirk, author; Heylen, Kris, author; Montes, Mariana, author; De Pascale, Stefano, author; Franco, Karlien, author; Lang, Michael, author
Source
Lexical Variation and Change : A Distributional Semantic Approach, 2023, ill.
Subject
Language
English
Abstract
Instead of treating polysemy or lexical variation as a variable dependent on lectal factors (as in the preceding chapters), this chapter switches the perspective: it treats variation in form-meaning pairings as an input variable for determining lectal structure. By focusing on formal onomasiological variation, lexical variation can be analysed as a sociolinguistic variable in the Labovian sense, and aggregating over such variables allows to find out how various lects relate to each other, both synchronically and diachronically. The chapter introduces various measures that flesh out such a lectometrical approach: measures of the uniformity between lects, measures of the internal homogeneity within a lect, and measures focusing on lexical diversity and success. An example shows how such measures can be used to analyse processes of standardization and informalization.