Phonetic and grammatical variables in a project on real time change

Description

In this paper we report the results of a selected number of case studies from the vast corpus of sociolinguistic interviews and group conversations of the LANCHART project. We will examine the possible correlations of two levels of sociolinguistic variation: grammar and phonetics. In examining the relations, or lack thereof, between the use of different variants of phonological variables, e.g. front vowel raising and r-colouring, and grammatical variables e.g. pronouns and word order, we take into account the following external factors:

Time: The subjects were recorded in the 1970ies or 1980ies and again in 2005/06. By comparing the two recordings of each speaker we will answer the following question:

Does a change in the proportions of the different phonetic variants correlate with a change in the use of the different grammatical variants?

Situation: Two settings: sociolinguistic interview and peer group conversations are represented. This allows us to examine whether or not the uses of the different variants are alike in the two situations. If there is a difference, does a change in the proportions of phonetic variants correlate with a change in the proportions of grammatical variants?

Context: We examine the distribution of variants in the course of each conversation from beginning to end. This allows us to answer questions such as:

Do speakers "switch" in their proportions of grammatical variants at the same points in time as they "switch" their proportions of phonetic variants? If speakers converge or diverge in their use of new variants during the conversation, do they do this to the same extent on both levels?

Furthermore, the conversations are divided into passages of different categories of discourse context:

To what extent does the linguistic variation correlate with changes in discourse context, and if any correlations can be established, are they then similar for the two linguistic levels?

The answers to these questions will be viewed in the light of ongoing language changes in the Danish speech community uncovered in the macro investigations of the LANCHART project.