Linguistic SFB Meetup 2022: Alternatives, contexts and variation

Description

Language is characterized by alternation at all levels – e. g. sociophonetic and morphosyntactic variation, competition between alternatives underlying scalar implicatures, or multilingual speakers’ choice between their languages – and all dimensions, including phonetic realization, logical and social meanings, complexity, contributions to discourse relations, among many others. The choice between alternatives is conditioned by numerous aspects, both the narrower linguistic and discourse context and the broader situation of language use, leading to differences in prominence of variants. The principles guiding such contextually driven variation in the choice between alternatives are a part of linguistic knowledge, which must be acquired by language learners; such variation can be studied experimentally in language processing and investigated as a driver of language change. 

In this workshop, we invite work investigating the interplay of alternatives and context, and the variability that results, including theoretical, experimental, computational and historical perspectives.