Variation in Language and Language Use

Monika Reif works as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Koblenz-Landau. In 2010 she completed her PhD on tense/aspect teaching from a cognitive linguistics perspective. Her research interests include grammar theories, second language development, and the pragmatics of humour. Since 2010 she has been co-organizing the GAL theme session on «Grammar and Grammaticography».Justyna A. Robinson is a Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sussex (UK). Her research focuses on semantic variation and change, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and how these interact.Martin Pütz is Full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Koblenz-Landau. His main research interests involve the fields of applied cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and language policy/planning. Since the year 2000 he has been organizing the biennial International LAUD Symposia at Landau University.

• Contents: Robin Dodsworth/Mary Kohn: Dialect contact in a Southern U.S. city: Testing Trudgill’s model – Casilda García de la Maza: Variation, use and language change: The case of middles – Anna Ghimenton: Pathways to multilingual acquisition in Veneto: A usage-based perspective of code choices in the input and output in a language contact situation – María José Serrano/Miguel Ángel Aijón Oliva: Performing communicative style: Variation of usted/ustedes subjects and cognition in socio-situational interaction – Vaclav Brezina: Certainty and uncertainty in spoken language: In search of epistemic sociolect and idiolect – Johanna Vaattovaara: On the dynamics of non-linguists’ dialect perceptions - the perceived spatiality of /s/ variation in Finnish – Christina Cuonz: A socio-cognitive approach to evaluative folk metalanguage: The aesthetic value of German and French varieties in Switzerland – Tatiana Larina/Neelakshi Suryanarayan: Madam or aunty ji: Address forms in British and Indian English as a reflection of culture and cognition – Holger Schmitt: An empirical taxonomy of linguistic identities – Augusto Soares da Silva: Comparing objective and subjective linguistic distances between European and Brazilian Portuguese – Irmtraud Kaiser/Andrea Ender: Diglossia or dialect-standard continuum in speakers’ awareness and usage: On the categorisation of lectal variation in Austria – Ulrike Altendorf: «Estuary English», or «Where does the notion of ‘variety’ start and end?» - A proposal for a prototype approach to language variation – Henrik Hovmark: Backgrounded but not peripheral. On the use of Danish directional adverbs as contextualization cues – Sabine De Knop: A sociolinguistic analysis of the German alternation between bis an and bis zu constructions – Martin Thiering: Degrees of specificity in spatial semantics.