Language and Space: Theories and Methods: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation, Volume 1

The dimensions of time and space fundamentally cause and shape the variability of all human language. To reduce investigation of this insight to manageable proportions, researchers have traditionally concentrated on the 'deepest' dialects. But it is increasingly apparent that, although most people still speak with a distinct regional coloring, the new mobility of speakers in recently industrialized and postindustrial societies and the efflorescence of communication technologies cannot be ignored.

This book shows how schools can--and must--develop expertise in "learning variation" (understanding how different kinds of minds learn) and apply this knowledge to classroom instruction in order to address the chronic learning challenges and achievement gap faced by millions of students. Barringer shows how using what we know about learning variation with a focus on discovering learning strengths, not just deficits, can help schools create plans for success for those students who often find it elusive.

Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison

The book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in the author’s ground-breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing, and adds for the first time a diachronic dimension. In it he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. Striking similarities as well as differences emerge, allowing to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation.

Brian Richards examines variation in children's early language development, with special emphasis on the auxiliary verb. He identifies significant variation both in the age and in the stage of emergence of auxiliaries, and in the rate, style and sequence of subsequent development. He relates some of these aspects to a tendency to acquire the auxiliary holistically, and others to the quality of interaction with the child's partners in conversation. This book will be valuable to all those interested in language acquisition, whether linguists, psychologists, or speech therapists.

This volume brings together recent work on the formal and interpretational properties of determiners across a variety of typologically and geographically unrelated languages. It seeks to answer the core question of modern linguistic theory: Which properties of languages are universal and which are variable? In recent theorizing, much of language variation is argued to stem from differences in the properties of features associated with functional heads. As such, this volume can be viewed as a case study of one such category: the determiner (D).