This innovative collection brings together a range of perspectives on the notions of "orderly heterogeneity" and "social meaning", shedding light on how structured variation and indexicalities of social meaning "cohere" within linguistic communities. This book fills a gap in research on language variation by critically considering the position articulated by Weinrich, Labov, and Herzog in 1968 that linguistic diversity is systematically organized in ways that reflect and construct social order. The volume investigates such key themes as covariation and co-occurrence restrictions; indexicality, perception and social meaning; coherence and language change; and the structure and measurement of coherence at different levels of analysis. This collection advances our understanding of the coherence of linguistic communities through empirical investigations of larger and more diverse sets of variables, language varieties, speech styles, and communities, as afforded by the development and advancement of new methods and models in sociolinguistic research. This book is of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and formal linguistics, as well as those interested in developments on research methods in linguistics.

This innovative collection brings together a range of perspectives on the notions of "orderly heterogeneity" and "social meaning", shedding light on how structured variation and indexicalities of social meaning "cohere" within linguistic communities. This book fills a gap in research on language variation by critically considering the position articulated by Weinrich, Labov, and Herzog in 1968 that linguistic diversity is systematically organized in ways that reflect and construct social order. The volume investigates such key themes as covariation and co-occurrence restrictions; indexicality, perception and social meaning; coherence and language change; and the structure and measurement of coherence at different levels of analysis. This collection advances our understanding of the coherence of linguistic communities through empirical investigations of larger and more diverse sets of variables, language varieties, speech styles, and communities, as afforded by the development and advancement of new methods and models in sociolinguistic research. This book is of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and formal linguistics, as well as those interested in developments on research methods in linguistics.

This book makes the case for the value of a combined panel and trend study approach in studying real- and apparent-time language change to reconcile conspicuous disparities between the individual and the community. Through an examination of the Swabian dialect in southwestern Germany in two speech communities over four decades, this volume resolves critical methodological challenges in investigating lifespan and community change. This work affirms the importance of the speech community in shaping change and demonstrating how speakers’ notions of local identity and community belonging inform their choice of linguistic variants. Drawing on a comprehensive, integrated methodology, this research brings together diverse approaches for measuring changing social constructs and analyzing linguistic structures using state-of-the-art statistical methods bolstered by participant-observer and ethnographic observations. Beaman explores indexicalities of identity, accommodation, and geographic mobility to investigate how predictable sociolinguistic patterns promote variation and influence language change. Empirically, this volume documents processes of dialect leveling and supraregionalization and the emergence of a “Swabian Renaissance” among younger, well-educated urban speakers who leverage the social indexical status of certain linguistic variables to convey social meanings of local prestige and community belonging. Methodologically, this book offers best practices from a combined panel and trend study, demonstrating the compatibility and complementarity of real- and apparent-time analyses in uncovering the nature, rate, and dispersion of linguistic change. Theoretically, this work links intraspeaker lifespan change and interspeaker community change into a holistic approach, pushing forward our understanding of the role that “orderly heterogeneity” plays in language variation and change. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, dialectology, and historical linguistics.

The contributions to this volume investigate relations of cohesion and coherence as well as instantiations of discourse phenomena and their interaction with information structure in multilingual contexts. Some contributions concentrate on procedures to analyze cohesion and coherence from a corpus-linguistic perspective. Others have a particular focus on textual cohesion in parallel corpora that include both originals and translated texts. Additionally, the papers in the volume discuss the nature of cohesion and coherence with implications for human and machine translation. The contributors are experts on discourse phenomena and textuality who address these issues from an empirical perspective. The chapters in this volume are grounded in the latest research making this book useful to both experts of discourse studies and computational linguistics, as well as advanced students with an interest in these disciplines. We hope that this volume will serve as a catalyst to other researchers and will facilitate further advances in the development of cost-effective annotation procedures, the application of statistical techniques for the analysis of linguistic phenomena and the elaboration of new methods for data interpretation in multilingual corpus linguistics and machine translation.

The study of text cohesion and coherence has been a topic of heated discussion in Linguistics since the 1990s. Western linguists have developed two major theoretical frameworks to describe the relationship between the two concepts: one posits that cohesive devices are important means to ensure cohesion; the other argues that coherence does not rely on cohesion. Yet neither has complete explanatory power over reality; nor can they solve real-life problems. This title proposes a creative, concrete, and highly operational theoretical model that unites cohesion and coherence using authentic English or Chinese examples. The authors clarify the concepts of coherence and expand the scope of the research by focusing on a variety of internal and external factors, such as psycho-cognitive and socio-cultural factors. Moreover, the authors propose that the new theoretical paradigm can be applied to a range of other disciplines, including translation and foreign language teaching. This title has been one of the most cited works on cohesion and coherence in China. Students and scholars of discourse analysis, linguistics, and language education will find this an invaluable reference.

"This book makes the case for the value of a combined panel and trend study approach in studying real- and apparent-time language change to reconcile conspicuous disparities between the individual and the community. Through an examination of the Swabian dialect in southwestern Germany in two speech communities over four decades, this volume resolves critical methodological challenges in investigating lifespan and community change. This work affirms the importance of the speech community in shaping change and demonstrating how speakers' notions of local identity and community belonging inform their choice of linguistic variants. Drawing on a comprehensive, integrated methodology, this research brings together diverse approaches for measuring changing social constructs and analyzing linguistic structures using state-of-the-art statistical methods bolstered by participant-observer and ethnographic observations. Beaman explores indexicalities of identity, accommodation, and geographic mobility to investigate how predictable sociolinguistic patterns promote variation and influence language change. Empirically, this volume documents processes of dialect leveling and supraregionalization and the emergence of a "Swabian Renaissance" among younger, well-educated urban speakers who leverage the social indexical status of certain linguistic variables to convey social meanings of local prestige and community belonging. Methodologically, this book offers best practices from a combined panel and trend study, demonstrating the compatibility and complementarity of real- and apparent-time analyses in uncovering the nature, rate, and dispersion of linguistic change. Theoretically, this work links intraspeaker lifespan change and interspeaker community change into a holistic approach, pushing forward our understanding of the role that "orderly heterogeneity" plays in language variation and change. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, dialectology, and historical linguistics"--

Until very recently, coherence (unlike cohesion) was widely held to be a 'rather mystical notion'. However, taking account of new trends representing a considerable shift in orientation, this volume aims at helping relieve coherence of its mystifying aura. The general bibliography which concludes the book bears witness to this intriguing development and the rapidly changing scene in coherence research. Preceding this comprehensive up-to-date Bibliography on Coherence are 13 selected papers from the 1997 International Workshop on Coherence at the University of Augsburg, Germany. They share a number of theoretical and methodoligical assumptions and reflect a trend in text and discourse analysis to move away from reducing coherence to a product of (formally represented) cohesion and/or (semantically established) connectivity. Instead, they start from a user- and context-oriented interpretive understanding and rely on authentic data throughout in relating micro-linguistic to macro-linguistic issues. The first group of papers looks at the (re-)creation of coherence in, inter alia, reported speech, casual conversation, argumentative writing, news reports and conference contributions. The second group describes the negotation of coherence in oral examinations, text summaries and other situations that require special efforts on the part of the recipient to overcome misunderstandings and other disturbances. The third group discusses theoretical approaches to the description of coherence.