Investigating indexicality of regional morphological variation and change

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Abstract

This chapter reports on an indexicality study of standard and regional forms of the past participle of strong verbs in western Denmark (Jutland). The last decades have seen a strong standardisation process with respect to language use, and we test the hypothesis that this is driven by the social meanings associated with this morphological variation. We conducted an online matched guise experiment with controlled variation of the participle suffix using recordings with speakers from Eastern Jutland. 262 respondents evaluated the speakers on scales related to personality traits, social background and standardness. The results show that the most regional variant leads to a lower score in perceived standardness but, for younger respondents, a higher score in how “nice” the speaker seems.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMorphologische und syntaktische Variation in den deutschen Regionalsprachen : Impulse für die Erforschung der sprachlichen Vertikale
EditorsHanna Fischer, Stefan Rabanus
Place of PublicationHildesheim/Zürich/New York
PublisherGeorg Olms Verlag
Publication date2023
Pages241-272
ISBN (Print)978-3-487-16336-9
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-487-42342-5
Publication statusPublished - 2023
EventVeronese Workshop on Morphological and Syntactic Variation along the Dialect-Standard Axis - Università di Verona (via Zoom), Verona, Italy
Duration: 9 Apr 20219 Apr 2021
Conference number: 2021

Workshop

WorkshopVeronese Workshop on Morphological and Syntactic Variation along the Dialect-Standard Axis
Number2021
LocationUniversità di Verona (via Zoom)
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityVerona
Period09/04/202109/04/2021
SeriesGermanistische Linguistik
Volume258-259
ISSN0072-1492

Keywords

  • Faculty of Humanities
  • Indexicality
  • language variation and change
  • Danish
  • Morphology
  • Language attitudes
  • Social meaning
  • standardisation
  • regional variation

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