David Sankoff
Biographic Data
| ID | 734456 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Sankoff |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Sankoff |
| SIGNATURE | SANKOFF D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Université de Montréal |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8415-5189 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 339 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Labov, William (1927–2024)
William Labov was the dominant figure in sociolinguistics from its emergence in the mid-1960s until the current era.Having studied with Uriel Weinreich at Columbia, he also taught there until 1970 before founding the sociolinguistics program at the University of Pennsylvania, which has become the mecca for the discipline.Through Weinreich, Labov was exposed to the most progressive view of language extant in classical linguistics, its variability …
Social Interest, Linguistic Indifférence
Based on the human interests underlying sociolinguistic description and interpretation, the author traces the epistemological imperatives of the study of syntactic variation through data and method to the theoretical preoccupation with form-function polyvalence. The ultimate locus of all syntactic or sociological claims of a theoretical or methodological nature derives from the communicative intentions of a speaker at the moment in dicourse where…
Transmission, Education and Integration in Projections of Language Shift in Valencia
The Valencian revival: Why usage lags behind competence
This study of bilingual competence, linguistic attitudes, and language choice among secondary students in Valencia explores the effects of linguistic normalization since the removal of Franco's repressive measures against the Valencian language variety. The introduction of Valencian into the educational system and other measures have substantially reversed the decline of levels of competence and expanded its domains of usage but have only margina…
Identity as the primary determinant of language choice in Valencia
Punctors: A pragmatic variable
Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the an…
The case of the nonce loan in Tamil
Nonce borrowings in the speech of bilinguals differ from established loanwords in that they are not necessarily recurrent, widespread, or recognized by host language monolinguals. With established loanwords, however, they share the characteristics of morphological and syntactic integration into the host language and consist of single content words or compounds. Furthermore, both types of loanwords differ from intrasentential code-switching — alte…
Statistical evidence for rule ordering
A set of ordered rules for generating variants of a variable determines (a) underlying/surface distinctions among some of the variants and (b) a hierarchical classification of the variants. In the analytical framework of variable rules, frequency data on variant occurrences in context bear only on (b) and not on (a). We provide a combinatorial characterization and enumeration of the set of classifications on n variants, the set of underlying/surf…
The emergent syntax of pre-sentential turn openings
Le discours mixte arabe/français: Emprunts ou alternances de langue
Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude empirique du discours mixte arabe marocain/français dont le but est de situer ce discours par rapport aux théories de l’emprunt et de l’alternance. Nous nous basons en grande partie sur l’analyse quantitative de la distribution des contextes syntaxiques où se juxtaposent des éléments des deux langues
The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation
This paper represents a comprehensive study of English loanword usage in five diverse francophone neighborhoods in the national capital region of Canada.Twenty thousand loan tokens extracted from informal conversations with 120 speakers are analyzedfor degree oflinguistic integration into French and social assimilation by the francophone community.Attestation histories of English forms in Canadian and European French are compared with current usa…
The Philadelphia Story in the Spanish Caribbean
THOUGH ESSENTIALLY MONOLINGUAL and Spanish-speaking, the Dominican Republic contains enclaves of native English speakers whose roots there go back to the early 1820s.1 The historical record shows that several regions of the country were settled by some 6,000 American ex-slaves or their descendants who immigrated there through arrangements between the Haitian rulers of Santo Domingo and American church and philanthropic agencies (Commission of Inq…
Delimiting the Sydney speech community
Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers by such sociological characteristics prior to quanti…
Diversity and diachrony
Code-Switching of Context-Free Grammars
Variation Omnibus
Borrowing: The Synchrony of Integration
The notion of loanword assimilation is operationalized in a number of \ndifferent ways, focusing on both linguistic and social aspects. The indices of \nintegration thus constructed are applied to a set of lexical data elicited from \nPuerto Rican children and adults from East Harlem, New York. The results \nof this survey are analyzed statistically using the method of principal \ncomponents. We interpret the output in terms of the social and lin…
The Universal Consistency Hypothesis and the Prediction of Word Order Acquisition Stages in the Speech of Bilingual Children
Quechua-speaking children in Peru speak Spanish with variable word order in the VP and the NP; the alternative patterns stem from Quechua and Spanish. The younger the child, the more predominant are the V-final and N-final phrases, as in Quechua. Here we investigate whether the newly acquired Spanish V-medial clause and N-initial phrase patterns are learned in a sequence predicted by a theory of linguistic change. Several plausible alternatives t…
Competing influences on gender assignment: Variable process, stable outcome
A formal grammar for code‐switching 1
Code‐switching in situations of language contact has been studied largely from the point of view of its social determinants. This paper will propose formal means for describing the syntax of code‐switching with examples from Puerto Rican Spanish and English
El principio de consistencia universal en el habla de los niños bilingües peruanos
El artículo no presenta resumen
Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods
On the uses of variable rules
The introduction of variable rules ten years ago has provoked a variety of critical reactions; among these Kay & McDaniel's (1979) review appears as a clear and penetrating study of many issues neglected or unresolved in earlier discussions. It is refreshing to observe an approach to the problems of variation and sociolinguistics relatively free from the ideological constraints that other critiques have inherited from formal linguistics (e.g. Bic…
Probability and linguistic variation
The Dimensionality of Grammatical Variation
Recent approaches to variability have focused on the rank ordering of linguistic objects (e.g. noun-phrase transformations, environments of phonological reduction rules) or sociolinguistic objects (e.g. speakers, speech communities). These one-dimensional orderings can take various forms, such as implicational scales, squishes, or the ranking of variable constraints. It is suggested here that sometimes a higher dimensional configuration might bet…
The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation
This paper represents a comprehensive study of English loanword usage in five diverse francophone neighborhoods in the national capital region of Canada.Twenty thousand loan tokens extracted from informal conversations with 120 speakers are analyzedfor degree oflinguistic integration into French and social assimilation by the francophone community.Attestation histories of English forms in Canadian and European French are compared with current usa…
Variable Rules: Performance as a Statistical Reflection of Competence
Speech performances are here considered as statistical samples drawn from a probabilistic language competence. This competence is modeled in conventional generative terms, except that optional rules are assigned application probabilities as functions of the structure of the input strings, possibly depending on the extralinguistic environment as well. We develop the mathematical background for these variable rules, which were introduced by Labov, …
The Philadelphia Story in the Spanish Caribbean
THOUGH ESSENTIALLY MONOLINGUAL and Spanish-speaking, the Dominican Republic contains enclaves of native English speakers whose roots there go back to the early 1820s.1 The historical record shows that several regions of the country were settled by some 6,000 American ex-slaves or their descendants who immigrated there through arrangements between the Haitian rulers of Santo Domingo and American church and philanthropic agencies (Commission of Inq…
The case of the nonce loan in Tamil
Nonce borrowings in the speech of bilinguals differ from established loanwords in that they are not necessarily recurrent, widespread, or recognized by host language monolinguals. With established loanwords, however, they share the characteristics of morphological and syntactic integration into the host language and consist of single content words or compounds. Furthermore, both types of loanwords differ from intrasentential code-switching — alte…
On the uses of variable rules
The introduction of variable rules ten years ago has provoked a variety of critical reactions; among these Kay & McDaniel's (1979) review appears as a clear and penetrating study of many issues neglected or unresolved in earlier discussions. It is refreshing to observe an approach to the problems of variation and sociolinguistics relatively free from the ideological constraints that other critiques have inherited from formal linguistics (e.g. Bic…
Competing influences on gender assignment: Variable process, stable outcome
The Swing Ratio and Game Theory
We propose a simple game-theory model of single-member plurality electoral systems, two parties with unequal resources being the players. Strategies consist of allocations of resources among the n contests, and a party's payoff is the number of contests to which it has assigned more resources than the other party. Mixed strategies exist which are asymptotically optimal as n increases. Identifying a party's proportion of total resources with its t…
Punctors: A pragmatic variable
Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the an…
Delimiting the Sydney speech community
Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers by such sociological characteristics prior to quanti…
Borrowing: The Synchrony of Integration
The notion of loanword assimilation is operationalized in a number of \ndifferent ways, focusing on both linguistic and social aspects. The indices of \nintegration thus constructed are applied to a set of lexical data elicited from \nPuerto Rican children and adults from East Harlem, New York. The results \nof this survey are analyzed statistically using the method of principal \ncomponents. We interpret the output in terms of the social and lin…
The emergent syntax of pre-sentential turn openings
Statistical evidence for rule ordering
A set of ordered rules for generating variants of a variable determines (a) underlying/surface distinctions among some of the variants and (b) a hierarchical classification of the variants. In the analytical framework of variable rules, frequency data on variant occurrences in context bear only on (b) and not on (a). We provide a combinatorial characterization and enumeration of the set of classifications on n variants, the set of underlying/surf…
Probability and linguistic variation
The Valencian revival: Why usage lags behind competence
This study of bilingual competence, linguistic attitudes, and language choice among secondary students in Valencia explores the effects of linguistic normalization since the removal of Franco's repressive measures against the Valencian language variety. The introduction of Valencian into the educational system and other measures have substantially reversed the decline of levels of competence and expanded its domains of usage but have only margina…
The Universal Consistency Hypothesis and the Prediction of Word Order Acquisition Stages in the Speech of Bilingual Children
Quechua-speaking children in Peru speak Spanish with variable word order in the VP and the NP; the alternative patterns stem from Quechua and Spanish. The younger the child, the more predominant are the V-final and N-final phrases, as in Quechua. Here we investigate whether the newly acquired Spanish V-medial clause and N-initial phrase patterns are learned in a sequence predicted by a theory of linguistic change. Several plausible alternatives t…
The Dimensionality of Grammatical Variation
Recent approaches to variability have focused on the rank ordering of linguistic objects (e.g. noun-phrase transformations, environments of phonological reduction rules) or sociolinguistic objects (e.g. speakers, speech communities). These one-dimensional orderings can take various forms, such as implicational scales, squishes, or the ranking of variable constraints. It is suggested here that sometimes a higher dimensional configuration might bet…
Identity as the primary determinant of language choice in Valencia
La régionalisation électorale et l'amplification des proportions
In single-member constituency, simple plurality electoral systems, the disproportion between the popular vote polled by a party and the number of representatives it elects has stimulated much controversy. We review the mathematical and statistical models of two-party systems of this type which have been proposed by Kendall and Stuart, Theil, Lemieux, March, and the present authors. This leads to a detailed empirical study of series of elections i…
Labov, William (1927–2024)
William Labov was the dominant figure in sociolinguistics from its emergence in the mid-1960s until the current era.Having studied with Uriel Weinreich at Columbia, he also taught there until 1970 before founding the sociolinguistics program at the University of Pennsylvania, which has become the mecca for the discipline.Through Weinreich, Labov was exposed to the most progressive view of language extant in classical linguistics, its variability …
Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods
On the Rate of Replacement of Word-Meaning Relationships
A method is proposed for quantitatively comparing word-meaning lists in related languages, taking into account synonymous lexical representations. This is applied to the Indo-European languages to estimate rates of change of lexical representation for more than a thousand meanings documented by Buck. Comparisons between the distribution of rates for the lexicostatistic test list and other meanings, and between the distributions calculated from In…
The Swing Ratio and Game Theory
We propose a simple game-theory model of single-member plurality electoral systems, two parties with unequal resources being the players. Strategies consist of allocations of resources among the n contests, and a party's payoff is the number of contests to which it has assigned more resources than the other party. Mixed strategies exist which are asymptotically optimal as n increases. Identifying a party's proportion of total resources with its t…
La régionalisation électorale et l'amplification des proportions
In single-member constituency, simple plurality electoral systems, the disproportion between the popular vote polled by a party and the number of representatives it elects has stimulated much controversy. We review the mathematical and statistical models of two-party systems of this type which have been proposed by Kendall and Stuart, Theil, Lemieux, March, and the present authors. This leads to a detailed empirical study of series of elections i…
Variable Rules: Performance as a Statistical Reflection of Competence
Speech performances are here considered as statistical samples drawn from a probabilistic language competence. This competence is modeled in conventional generative terms, except that optional rules are assigned application probabilities as functions of the structure of the input strings, possibly depending on the extralinguistic environment as well. We develop the mathematical background for these variable rules, which were introduced by Labov, …
The Dimensionality of Grammatical Variation
Recent approaches to variability have focused on the rank ordering of linguistic objects (e.g. noun-phrase transformations, environments of phonological reduction rules) or sociolinguistic objects (e.g. speakers, speech communities). These one-dimensional orderings can take various forms, such as implicational scales, squishes, or the ranking of variable constraints. It is suggested here that sometimes a higher dimensional configuration might bet…
Probability and linguistic variation
On the uses of variable rules
The introduction of variable rules ten years ago has provoked a variety of critical reactions; among these Kay & McDaniel's (1979) review appears as a clear and penetrating study of many issues neglected or unresolved in earlier discussions. It is refreshing to observe an approach to the problems of variation and sociolinguistics relatively free from the ideological constraints that other critiques have inherited from formal linguistics (e.g. Bic…
Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods
A formal grammar for code‐switching 1
Code‐switching in situations of language contact has been studied largely from the point of view of its social determinants. This paper will propose formal means for describing the syntax of code‐switching with examples from Puerto Rican Spanish and English
El principio de consistencia universal en el habla de los niños bilingües peruanos
El artículo no presenta resumen
Competing influences on gender assignment: Variable process, stable outcome
Variation Omnibus
Borrowing: The Synchrony of Integration
The notion of loanword assimilation is operationalized in a number of \ndifferent ways, focusing on both linguistic and social aspects. The indices of \nintegration thus constructed are applied to a set of lexical data elicited from \nPuerto Rican children and adults from East Harlem, New York. The results \nof this survey are analyzed statistically using the method of principal \ncomponents. We interpret the output in terms of the social and lin…
The Universal Consistency Hypothesis and the Prediction of Word Order Acquisition Stages in the Speech of Bilingual Children
Quechua-speaking children in Peru speak Spanish with variable word order in the VP and the NP; the alternative patterns stem from Quechua and Spanish. The younger the child, the more predominant are the V-final and N-final phrases, as in Quechua. Here we investigate whether the newly acquired Spanish V-medial clause and N-initial phrase patterns are learned in a sequence predicted by a theory of linguistic change. Several plausible alternatives t…
Diversity and diachrony
Code-Switching of Context-Free Grammars
The Philadelphia Story in the Spanish Caribbean
THOUGH ESSENTIALLY MONOLINGUAL and Spanish-speaking, the Dominican Republic contains enclaves of native English speakers whose roots there go back to the early 1820s.1 The historical record shows that several regions of the country were settled by some 6,000 American ex-slaves or their descendants who immigrated there through arrangements between the Haitian rulers of Santo Domingo and American church and philanthropic agencies (Commission of Inq…
Delimiting the Sydney speech community
Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers by such sociological characteristics prior to quanti…
Le discours mixte arabe/français: Emprunts ou alternances de langue
Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude empirique du discours mixte arabe marocain/français dont le but est de situer ce discours par rapport aux théories de l’emprunt et de l’alternance. Nous nous basons en grande partie sur l’analyse quantitative de la distribution des contextes syntaxiques où se juxtaposent des éléments des deux langues
The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation
This paper represents a comprehensive study of English loanword usage in five diverse francophone neighborhoods in the national capital region of Canada.Twenty thousand loan tokens extracted from informal conversations with 120 speakers are analyzedfor degree oflinguistic integration into French and social assimilation by the francophone community.Attestation histories of English forms in Canadian and European French are compared with current usa…
Statistical evidence for rule ordering
A set of ordered rules for generating variants of a variable determines (a) underlying/surface distinctions among some of the variants and (b) a hierarchical classification of the variants. In the analytical framework of variable rules, frequency data on variant occurrences in context bear only on (b) and not on (a). We provide a combinatorial characterization and enumeration of the set of classifications on n variants, the set of underlying/surf…
The emergent syntax of pre-sentential turn openings
The case of the nonce loan in Tamil
Nonce borrowings in the speech of bilinguals differ from established loanwords in that they are not necessarily recurrent, widespread, or recognized by host language monolinguals. With established loanwords, however, they share the characteristics of morphological and syntactic integration into the host language and consist of single content words or compounds. Furthermore, both types of loanwords differ from intrasentential code-switching — alte…
Punctors: A pragmatic variable
Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the an…
Identity as the primary determinant of language choice in Valencia
Linguistics (20 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (15 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (9 works) · Mathematics (7 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (7 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (7 works)