Isabelle Buchstaller
Biographic Data
| ID | 178594 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Isabelle Buchstaller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Isabelle |
| FAMILY NAME | Buchstaller |
| SIGNATURE | BUCHSTALLER I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Duisburg-Essen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9893-2011 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 267 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Tattooing the abject body: Asserting corporeal agency through transforming breast cancer scars into body art
This paper answers calls in Linguistic Landscape analysis to foreground corporeal landscapes ( Kitis & Milani, 2015 ; Peck & Stroud, 2015 ) by exploring the ways in which breast cancer survivors reappropriate their embodied selves with artistic tattoos, re-defining themselves as artified spatial agents. We report on a corpus of photography and audio/video interviews following the social networks of the second author, a tattoo artist providing pro…
Learning to be (un)hip in panel data: Exploring quotative be like across the adult life‐span
The quotative system is a highly dynamic domain characterised by competing traditional variants ( say, think ) and newcomers ( be all, be like ) ( Buchstaller 2013 ). Trend and apparent time studies have focused on be like , describing its expansion across the English-speaking world and reporting incrementation amongst the younger age-brackets ( D’Arcy & Tagliamonte 2003 ; Gardner et al. 2021 ). “Information on speakers’ loyalty to be like across…
Space-Time (Dis)continuities in the Linguistic Landscape: Studies in the Symbolic (Re-)appropriation of Public Space
From winding tower to Eiffel Tower (of the ruhr area): The symbolic economy of industrial signs
In the last few decades, the Ruhr Area in Germany has undergone a structural transformation that changed the landscapes of its towns and cities. Nowadays, the remnants of heavy industry are integral parts of urban semiotics articulating the cities’ industrial “soul” and heritage. In this paper, we illustrate how an analysis of residual industrial structures opens up ways of thinking about reinvented spaces that anchor cultural memory, regional id…
Commemorative city-texts: Spatio-temporal patterns in street names in Leipzig, East Germany and Poznań, Poland
This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two…
Towards a taxonomy of arguments for and against street renaming: Exploring the discursive embedding of street name changes in the Leipzig cityscape
In 2016, a special issue of the Linguistic Landscapes: An International Journal explored the nexus between LL and collective memory studies, calling for more research at the interface of these disciplines. Our analysis adds to recent studies by exploring the ways in which commemorative street renaming processes are discursively embedded. We build on research on memorialisation as well as critical toponymy to analyse media discourses that accompan…
Post-educator relaxation in the U-shaped curve: Evidence from a panel study of Tyneside (ing)
Age-grading—a cornerstone of sociolinguistic theorizing—is hypothesized to follow a U-shaped pattern. Vernacular forms peak in adolescence, abate in middle age, and increase again in retirement, forming a vernacular tail. A complete understanding of age-grading has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence across the entire adult trajectory and a relatively narrow understanding of speakers’ motivations to change. This paper presents data from…
Exploring age-related changes in the realisation of (t): Panel research from Tyneside
An understanding of linguistic heterogeneity in older speakers is crucial for the study of language variation and change. To date, intra-speaker malleability in older populations remains under-researched, in varieties of English and more generally. This paper contributes panel data to the question of how aging individuals engage with ongoing changes in the realisation of (t) in the Tyneside region in the North-East of England. We examine the vari…
Community cityscape: Modes of engagement and co-construction of the streetscape
This contribution explores the bottom-up processes via which a community – or indeed special interest groups within a community – can influence the semiotic choices in the street-scape around them. I start by discussing the question to which extent the decision-making processes about street naming in different locales are transparent and open to public involvement. I also explore the instruments used by city councils and other administrative agen…
Ideology in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach
Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticisations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change inf…
(H) in Marshallese English
This paper explores the sociolinguistic patterning of glottal choices in the English spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a variety that variationist research has thus far eschewed. The analysis suggests that the schooling background of the speaker is the most crucial determinant for both /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion. These findings are not surprising given the dramatic social inequalities regarding access to educational opport…
[In]stability in the use of a stable variable
The relationship between community-wide change and patterns of variation and change within the individual is one of the cornerstones of variationist theorising. But while sociolinguistic theory makes clear and testable predictions regarding the use of stable vernacular features across the life-span of the individual, we lack real-time evidence on the age-graded nature of stable variability. Indeed, whereas apparent time research highlights the di…
The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford
Rickford Publications; PART I Introduction; 1 Introduction to the Volume; 2 The Makings of a Linguist: John R. Rickford's Education in His Native Guyana; PART II Exploring Language Contact From a Sociolinguistic and Sociohistorical Point of View; 3 Introduction; 4 In the Fisherman's Net: Language Contact in a Sociolinguistics Context; 5 African-Indian-American South and Caribbean Worlds: Connecting With John R. Rickford's Language Contact Researc…
Panel Studies of Variation and Change
Marshallese English: A first sketch
This article provides a first sketch of Marshallese English, a variety which developed through contact between speakers of English and the Marshallese language. Our objectives are two‐pronged: (i) we attempt to position the varieties of English spoken in the Marshall Islands with regard to Kachru's Three Circles model of world Englishes; and (ii) we provide a first linguistic sketch of Marshallese English. Both of these aims have obvious applicat…
Levelling across the life-span: Tracing the face vowel in panel data from the North East of England
Apparent time analysis has revealed that the Tyneside face vowel is the site of two intersecting trends: levelling towards the supra-northern monophthong as well as the gradual incursion of the southern standard closing diphthong. This article investigates the participation of individual speakers across their life-span in these ongoing changes in the face vowel. We report on a small-scale panel sample of six speakers who were recorded in 1971 and…
Investigating the Effect of Socio-Cognitive Salience and Speaker-Based Factors in Morpho-Syntactic Life-Span Change
This article explores changes across the life-span of the individual speaker. Three morpho-syntactic variables that operate at different levels of socio-cognitive salience-quotation, stative possession, and future temporal reference-are traced across longitudinal trend and panel data. The analysis of a panel corpus that spans forty-two years reveals that linguistic malleability is contingent on the variables' embedding in speakers' cognitive-eval…
Perception, cognition, and linguistic structure: The effect of linguistic modularity and cognitive style on sociolinguistic processing
The Interface Principle posits that morphosyntactic variation does not elicit the same kinds of perceptual reactions as phonetic variables because “members of the speech community evaluate the surface form of language but not more abstract structural features” (Labov, 1993:4). This article examines the effect of linguistic modularity on listeners' social evaluations. Our point of departure is the sociolinguistic monitor, a hypothesized cognitive …
Expanding the Circle to Learner English: Investigating Quotative Marking in a German Student Community
This article is concerned with the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, which is central to native speaker competence. It explores the acquisition of variable quotative marking within the local Learner English ecology in a cohort of German students. The data consist of 809 instances of quotation produced by 45 speakers, all of whom are currently completing their bachelor's and master's degrees and who have different exposure types to English…
Exploring linguistic malleability across the life span: Age-specific patterns in quotative use
This article explores the degree and kind of lability that occurs throughout the life span of the individual during ongoing rapid change in the quotative system. Two comparative analyses trace speakers' use ofbe likeacross a shorter and a longer time span. Trend data reveal that the robust change is arrested in the middle age brackets; speakers in their thirties seem to display 'retrograde movement' (Sankoff & Wagner 2006) away from the community…
The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data
This paper examines a short-lived innovation, quotative all , in real and apparent time. We used a two-pronged method to trace the trajectory of all over the past two decades: (i) Quantitative analyses of the quotative system of young Californians from different decades; this reveals a startling crossover pattern: in 1990/1994, all predominates, but by 2005, it has given way to like . (ii) Searches of Internet newsgroups; these confirm that after…
Intensifiers on Tyneside: Longitudinal developments and new trends
We report on longitudinal changes in the system of intensification in an innovative corpus that spans five decades of dialectal speech. Our analyses allow us — for the first time in a British context — to trace the quantitative development in the variable across four generations. Longitudinal analysis across real and apparent time determines the effect of extralinguistic and intralinguistic variables on intensification in Tyneside and tests to wh…
The Quantitative Analysis of Morphosyntactic Variation: Constructing and Quantifying the Denominator
At its inception, the sociolinguistic enterprise focused on research on phonological variability and only later broadened its remit to include ‘variability [that] occurs and can be dealt with at level of grammar above (and beyond) the phonological’ ( Sankoff 1972 :45). This extension, however, has not been without controversy and continues to fuel heated debates in the field. This article addresses some of the contentious issues that quantitative…
Localized globalization: A multi‐local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like 1
We conduct a multi‐local, multivariate analysis of be like in comparable datasets from three discontinuous geographic settings (the U.S.A., England, and New Zealand). Previously, comparative cross‐variety analysis of this form has been fundamentally hampered by key methodological differences. A methodologically coherent analysis reveals that the ‘classic factors’ ( Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007 : 203) grammatical person and content of the quote, as…
The localization of global linguistic variants
Globalization has been defined as the process whereby “events happening in one place ... impact upon many other places, often remote in time and space” (Urry 2003: 39). This paper examines the impact of two globally available linguistic resources — the quotatives be like and go — in two spatially discontinuous localities. The investigation of the local processes that are involved in the adoption and negotiation of these global newcomers provides …
Localized globalization: A multi‐local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like 1
We conduct a multi‐local, multivariate analysis of be like in comparable datasets from three discontinuous geographic settings (the U.S.A., England, and New Zealand). Previously, comparative cross‐variety analysis of this form has been fundamentally hampered by key methodological differences. A methodologically coherent analysis reveals that the ‘classic factors’ ( Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007 : 203) grammatical person and content of the quote, as…
Diagnostics of age-graded linguistic behaviour: The case of the quotative system1
This article presents a cross-variety investigation of quotatives be like and go in apparent and real time. Distributional and attitudinal evidence points to a change in progress as the underlying process for the distribution of be like. However, there is also evidence of life-span change (Sankoff to appear). The patterning of go across age is much less clear-cut. It could be interpreted as age grading or as a change in progress. This paper discu…
Intensive and Quotativeall: Something Old, Something New
This article presents a synchronic and diachronic investigation of the lexeme all in its intensifier and quotative functions. We delimit the new from the old functions of the lexeme and present a variationist account of all's external and internal constraints in various syntactic environments. our analysis is based on a variety of data sets, which include traditional sociolinguistic interviews as well as data culled from internet searches and a n…
Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the U.K. 1
This article investigates the attitudes of British respondents towards the quotatives be like and go . The results of a matched guise test and a social attitudes survey are presented and compared with the findings of studies on be like and go ‐perception in the U.S. It is found that the perceptual load of the two quotatives on both sides of the Atlantic is similar in some respects and different in others. This effectively means that, in cases of …
The localization of global linguistic variants
Globalization has been defined as the process whereby “events happening in one place ... impact upon many other places, often remote in time and space” (Urry 2003: 39). This paper examines the impact of two globally available linguistic resources — the quotatives be like and go — in two spatially discontinuous localities. The investigation of the local processes that are involved in the adoption and negotiation of these global newcomers provides …
Perception, cognition, and linguistic structure: The effect of linguistic modularity and cognitive style on sociolinguistic processing
The Interface Principle posits that morphosyntactic variation does not elicit the same kinds of perceptual reactions as phonetic variables because “members of the speech community evaluate the surface form of language but not more abstract structural features” (Labov, 1993:4). This article examines the effect of linguistic modularity on listeners' social evaluations. Our point of departure is the sociolinguistic monitor, a hypothesized cognitive …
Expanding the Circle to Learner English: Investigating Quotative Marking in a German Student Community
This article is concerned with the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, which is central to native speaker competence. It explores the acquisition of variable quotative marking within the local Learner English ecology in a cohort of German students. The data consist of 809 instances of quotation produced by 45 speakers, all of whom are currently completing their bachelor's and master's degrees and who have different exposure types to English…
Investigating the Effect of Socio-Cognitive Salience and Speaker-Based Factors in Morpho-Syntactic Life-Span Change
This article explores changes across the life-span of the individual speaker. Three morpho-syntactic variables that operate at different levels of socio-cognitive salience-quotation, stative possession, and future temporal reference-are traced across longitudinal trend and panel data. The analysis of a panel corpus that spans forty-two years reveals that linguistic malleability is contingent on the variables' embedding in speakers' cognitive-eval…
Intensifiers on Tyneside: Longitudinal developments and new trends
We report on longitudinal changes in the system of intensification in an innovative corpus that spans five decades of dialectal speech. Our analyses allow us — for the first time in a British context — to trace the quantitative development in the variable across four generations. Longitudinal analysis across real and apparent time determines the effect of extralinguistic and intralinguistic variables on intensification in Tyneside and tests to wh…
The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data
This paper examines a short-lived innovation, quotative all , in real and apparent time. We used a two-pronged method to trace the trajectory of all over the past two decades: (i) Quantitative analyses of the quotative system of young Californians from different decades; this reveals a startling crossover pattern: in 1990/1994, all predominates, but by 2005, it has given way to like . (ii) Searches of Internet newsgroups; these confirm that after…
Exploring linguistic malleability across the life span: Age-specific patterns in quotative use
This article explores the degree and kind of lability that occurs throughout the life span of the individual during ongoing rapid change in the quotative system. Two comparative analyses trace speakers' use ofbe likeacross a shorter and a longer time span. Trend data reveal that the robust change is arrested in the middle age brackets; speakers in their thirties seem to display 'retrograde movement' (Sankoff & Wagner 2006) away from the community…
Ideology in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach
Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticisations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change inf…
Levelling across the life-span: Tracing the face vowel in panel data from the North East of England
Apparent time analysis has revealed that the Tyneside face vowel is the site of two intersecting trends: levelling towards the supra-northern monophthong as well as the gradual incursion of the southern standard closing diphthong. This article investigates the participation of individual speakers across their life-span in these ongoing changes in the face vowel. We report on a small-scale panel sample of six speakers who were recorded in 1971 and…
Commemorative city-texts: Spatio-temporal patterns in street names in Leipzig, East Germany and Poznań, Poland
This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two…
The Quantitative Analysis of Morphosyntactic Variation: Constructing and Quantifying the Denominator
At its inception, the sociolinguistic enterprise focused on research on phonological variability and only later broadened its remit to include ‘variability [that] occurs and can be dealt with at level of grammar above (and beyond) the phonological’ ( Sankoff 1972 :45). This extension, however, has not been without controversy and continues to fuel heated debates in the field. This article addresses some of the contentious issues that quantitative…
Post-educator relaxation in the U-shaped curve: Evidence from a panel study of Tyneside (ing)
Age-grading—a cornerstone of sociolinguistic theorizing—is hypothesized to follow a U-shaped pattern. Vernacular forms peak in adolescence, abate in middle age, and increase again in retirement, forming a vernacular tail. A complete understanding of age-grading has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence across the entire adult trajectory and a relatively narrow understanding of speakers’ motivations to change. This paper presents data from…
Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the U.K. 1
This article investigates the attitudes of British respondents towards the quotatives be like and go . The results of a matched guise test and a social attitudes survey are presented and compared with the findings of studies on be like and go ‐perception in the U.S. It is found that the perceptual load of the two quotatives on both sides of the Atlantic is similar in some respects and different in others. This effectively means that, in cases of …
Diagnostics of age-graded linguistic behaviour: The case of the quotative system1
This article presents a cross-variety investigation of quotatives be like and go in apparent and real time. Distributional and attitudinal evidence points to a change in progress as the underlying process for the distribution of be like. However, there is also evidence of life-span change (Sankoff to appear). The patterning of go across age is much less clear-cut. It could be interpreted as age grading or as a change in progress. This paper discu…
Intensive and Quotativeall: Something Old, Something New
This article presents a synchronic and diachronic investigation of the lexeme all in its intensifier and quotative functions. We delimit the new from the old functions of the lexeme and present a variationist account of all's external and internal constraints in various syntactic environments. our analysis is based on a variety of data sets, which include traditional sociolinguistic interviews as well as data culled from internet searches and a n…
The localization of global linguistic variants
Globalization has been defined as the process whereby “events happening in one place ... impact upon many other places, often remote in time and space” (Urry 2003: 39). This paper examines the impact of two globally available linguistic resources — the quotatives be like and go — in two spatially discontinuous localities. The investigation of the local processes that are involved in the adoption and negotiation of these global newcomers provides …
The Quantitative Analysis of Morphosyntactic Variation: Constructing and Quantifying the Denominator
At its inception, the sociolinguistic enterprise focused on research on phonological variability and only later broadened its remit to include ‘variability [that] occurs and can be dealt with at level of grammar above (and beyond) the phonological’ ( Sankoff 1972 :45). This extension, however, has not been without controversy and continues to fuel heated debates in the field. This article addresses some of the contentious issues that quantitative…
Localized globalization: A multi‐local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like 1
We conduct a multi‐local, multivariate analysis of be like in comparable datasets from three discontinuous geographic settings (the U.S.A., England, and New Zealand). Previously, comparative cross‐variety analysis of this form has been fundamentally hampered by key methodological differences. A methodologically coherent analysis reveals that the ‘classic factors’ ( Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007 : 203) grammatical person and content of the quote, as…
The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data
This paper examines a short-lived innovation, quotative all , in real and apparent time. We used a two-pronged method to trace the trajectory of all over the past two decades: (i) Quantitative analyses of the quotative system of young Californians from different decades; this reveals a startling crossover pattern: in 1990/1994, all predominates, but by 2005, it has given way to like . (ii) Searches of Internet newsgroups; these confirm that after…
Intensifiers on Tyneside: Longitudinal developments and new trends
We report on longitudinal changes in the system of intensification in an innovative corpus that spans five decades of dialectal speech. Our analyses allow us — for the first time in a British context — to trace the quantitative development in the variable across four generations. Longitudinal analysis across real and apparent time determines the effect of extralinguistic and intralinguistic variables on intensification in Tyneside and tests to wh…
Perception, cognition, and linguistic structure: The effect of linguistic modularity and cognitive style on sociolinguistic processing
The Interface Principle posits that morphosyntactic variation does not elicit the same kinds of perceptual reactions as phonetic variables because “members of the speech community evaluate the surface form of language but not more abstract structural features” (Labov, 1993:4). This article examines the effect of linguistic modularity on listeners' social evaluations. Our point of departure is the sociolinguistic monitor, a hypothesized cognitive …
Expanding the Circle to Learner English: Investigating Quotative Marking in a German Student Community
This article is concerned with the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, which is central to native speaker competence. It explores the acquisition of variable quotative marking within the local Learner English ecology in a cohort of German students. The data consist of 809 instances of quotation produced by 45 speakers, all of whom are currently completing their bachelor's and master's degrees and who have different exposure types to English…
Exploring linguistic malleability across the life span: Age-specific patterns in quotative use
This article explores the degree and kind of lability that occurs throughout the life span of the individual during ongoing rapid change in the quotative system. Two comparative analyses trace speakers' use ofbe likeacross a shorter and a longer time span. Trend data reveal that the robust change is arrested in the middle age brackets; speakers in their thirties seem to display 'retrograde movement' (Sankoff & Wagner 2006) away from the community…
Investigating the Effect of Socio-Cognitive Salience and Speaker-Based Factors in Morpho-Syntactic Life-Span Change
This article explores changes across the life-span of the individual speaker. Three morpho-syntactic variables that operate at different levels of socio-cognitive salience-quotation, stative possession, and future temporal reference-are traced across longitudinal trend and panel data. The analysis of a panel corpus that spans forty-two years reveals that linguistic malleability is contingent on the variables' embedding in speakers' cognitive-eval…
Panel Studies of Variation and Change
Marshallese English: A first sketch
This article provides a first sketch of Marshallese English, a variety which developed through contact between speakers of English and the Marshallese language. Our objectives are two‐pronged: (i) we attempt to position the varieties of English spoken in the Marshall Islands with regard to Kachru's Three Circles model of world Englishes; and (ii) we provide a first linguistic sketch of Marshallese English. Both of these aims have obvious applicat…
Levelling across the life-span: Tracing the face vowel in panel data from the North East of England
Apparent time analysis has revealed that the Tyneside face vowel is the site of two intersecting trends: levelling towards the supra-northern monophthong as well as the gradual incursion of the southern standard closing diphthong. This article investigates the participation of individual speakers across their life-span in these ongoing changes in the face vowel. We report on a small-scale panel sample of six speakers who were recorded in 1971 and…
[In]stability in the use of a stable variable
The relationship between community-wide change and patterns of variation and change within the individual is one of the cornerstones of variationist theorising. But while sociolinguistic theory makes clear and testable predictions regarding the use of stable vernacular features across the life-span of the individual, we lack real-time evidence on the age-graded nature of stable variability. Indeed, whereas apparent time research highlights the di…
The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford
Rickford Publications; PART I Introduction; 1 Introduction to the Volume; 2 The Makings of a Linguist: John R. Rickford's Education in His Native Guyana; PART II Exploring Language Contact From a Sociolinguistic and Sociohistorical Point of View; 3 Introduction; 4 In the Fisherman's Net: Language Contact in a Sociolinguistics Context; 5 African-Indian-American South and Caribbean Worlds: Connecting With John R. Rickford's Language Contact Researc…
(H) in Marshallese English
This paper explores the sociolinguistic patterning of glottal choices in the English spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a variety that variationist research has thus far eschewed. The analysis suggests that the schooling background of the speaker is the most crucial determinant for both /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion. These findings are not surprising given the dramatic social inequalities regarding access to educational opport…
Community cityscape: Modes of engagement and co-construction of the streetscape
This contribution explores the bottom-up processes via which a community – or indeed special interest groups within a community – can influence the semiotic choices in the street-scape around them. I start by discussing the question to which extent the decision-making processes about street naming in different locales are transparent and open to public involvement. I also explore the instruments used by city councils and other administrative agen…
Ideology in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach
Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticisations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change inf…
Exploring age-related changes in the realisation of (t): Panel research from Tyneside
An understanding of linguistic heterogeneity in older speakers is crucial for the study of language variation and change. To date, intra-speaker malleability in older populations remains under-researched, in varieties of English and more generally. This paper contributes panel data to the question of how aging individuals engage with ongoing changes in the realisation of (t) in the Tyneside region in the North-East of England. We examine the vari…
Towards a taxonomy of arguments for and against street renaming: Exploring the discursive embedding of street name changes in the Leipzig cityscape
In 2016, a special issue of the Linguistic Landscapes: An International Journal explored the nexus between LL and collective memory studies, calling for more research at the interface of these disciplines. Our analysis adds to recent studies by exploring the ways in which commemorative street renaming processes are discursively embedded. We build on research on memorialisation as well as critical toponymy to analyse media discourses that accompan…
Post-educator relaxation in the U-shaped curve: Evidence from a panel study of Tyneside (ing)
Age-grading—a cornerstone of sociolinguistic theorizing—is hypothesized to follow a U-shaped pattern. Vernacular forms peak in adolescence, abate in middle age, and increase again in retirement, forming a vernacular tail. A complete understanding of age-grading has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence across the entire adult trajectory and a relatively narrow understanding of speakers’ motivations to change. This paper presents data from…
Space-Time (Dis)continuities in the Linguistic Landscape: Studies in the Symbolic (Re-)appropriation of Public Space
From winding tower to Eiffel Tower (of the ruhr area): The symbolic economy of industrial signs
In the last few decades, the Ruhr Area in Germany has undergone a structural transformation that changed the landscapes of its towns and cities. Nowadays, the remnants of heavy industry are integral parts of urban semiotics articulating the cities’ industrial “soul” and heritage. In this paper, we illustrate how an analysis of residual industrial structures opens up ways of thinking about reinvented spaces that anchor cultural memory, regional id…
Linguistics (19 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (18 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · History (15 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (12 works) · History (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)