A cognitive approach to quantitative sociolinguistic variation 315- One reviewer questioned the extent to which the friendship groups presented
in Table 2 could be said to cohere linguistically. The internal coherence of
friendship groups/communities of practice is an issue that deserves far greater
attention than we are at present able to provide, but see Wenger who warns
the analyst against imbuing the community of practice with “a concreteness
they do not actually possess” (Wenger 1998:61). - Hay et al. (2008) also employ local frequency counts in their analysis of fre-
quency effects, for the same reasons i.e. local lexical items and placenames
which are common in New Zealand appear with much higher frequency
counts in the ONZE corpus than in the CELEX lexical database. For further
discussion of frequency and TH-Fronting in this corpus, see Clark and Trous-
dale (2009). - This excludes the lexemes WITH, THINK and THING, and variants of
THINK and THING which were not variable in this corpus and, in fact,
seemed to be involved in a different sound change (see Clark and Trousdale
2009 for details of these exceptions). - See Tagliamonte 2006: 149-150 for details of how to compare the log likelih-
ood of different runs of the varbrul analysis to find the best ‘fit’. - The overlap between syllable position and word position was too great in the
analysis. Both produced a significant result but none more significant then
the other. It was therefore necessary to collapse these two factor groups to-
gether into a single factor group. - Although there have been attempts to explain frequency effects in the structu-
ralist tradition (e.g. Hammond 1999; Zuraw 2003), these have been made
possible by incorporating an awareness of the relationship between language
structure and language use. - The exact nature of the relationship between entrenchment and frequency of
use (particularly within a corpus) is perhaps less straightforward than origi-
nally suggested in Langacker (1987). See Schmid (2007) for further discus-
sion of this problem. - Stuart-Smith, Timmins, and Tweedie (2007) suggest a similar pattern for the
loss of the voiceless velar fricative in Glasgow i.e. certain speakers are una-
ware that this is a supra-local change affecting British English generally and
instead regard the change as wholly Glaswegian. - See the discussion of ‘bad Scots’ in Aitken (1982).
- Competing with the band is a rite of passage to full membership – until this is
achieved, it is very difficult to claim membership of the band.