Karen V Beaman | University of Tübingen (original) (raw)
Papers by Karen V Beaman
The Coherence of Linguistic Communities, 2022
The Coherence of Linguistic Communities, 2022
Dialectical changes observed across the course of individual lives are typically thought to refle... more Dialectical changes observed across the course of individual lives are typically thought to reflect the attritional influence of standard languages on local dialects. However, the distributional properties of natural languages, which guarantee that lexical knowledge continuously increases across the lifespan, suggest these changes might simply reflect the broadening and diversification of individual vocabularies, not the loss of dialect itself. Consistent with this proposal, speech analyses from 20 speakers of the southwestern German dialect Swabian, recorded in 1982 and again in 2017, reveal that across their lifetimes, rather than suffer a loss of dialect, these speakers gained a vast amount of non-dialectal vocabulary, a pattern of change promoted or constrained by local orientation and personal identity. The analyses show that dialect words were actually used with similar frequency across the two 1 Authors are presented in alphabetical order to represent the collaborative nature...
As Charles Handy observes in his book, The Age of Paradox, we are enter-ing the age of unreason.... more As Charles Handy observes in his book, The Age of Paradox, we are enter-ing the age of unreason. We are no longer in the position of being able to choose between various opposing busi-ness strategies; we have to develop mul-tiple strategic competencies that may at ...
The International Journal of Humanities, 2005
... Gregory R. Guy, Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, New York University Greg... more ... Gregory R. Guy, Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, New York University GregoryR. Guy works on sociolinguistics and dialectology, language variation and change, and linguistic diversity, and has conducted research on American and Australian English ...
Sourcing Strategies for the Transnational Organization' BY KAREN V. BEAMAN AND GREGORY R. GU... more Sourcing Strategies for the Transnational Organization' BY KAREN V. BEAMAN AND GREGORY R. GUY * "\ The\ most abundant, the least expensive, the most underutilized and constantly abused capacity in the world is human ingenuity. The source of that abuse is mechanistic, ...
Most companies are trying to pursue third-generation strategies, using secondgeneration organizat... more Most companies are trying to pursue third-generation strategies, using secondgeneration organizations, staffed with firstgeneration human resources" (Christopher Bartlett 1989).
In a thought-provoking article, Guy (2013:63) claims that “lectal coherence ... [implies] that va... more In a thought-provoking article, Guy (2013:63) claims that “lectal coherence ... [implies] that variables are correlated; if they are not, the cognitive and social reality of the ‘sociolect’ is problematic.” Considerable linguistic research has established that, for structural reasons, variables are correlated; however, structural correlation does not imply sociolectal coherence. Thus the question arises: do multiple variables cluster or correlate, loosely, tightly, or not at all, based on social factors, such as age, gender, community belonging, salience, prestige/stigma, or other external factors (Guy and Hinskens 2016)? This paper explores the unresolved question of cognitive sociolectal coherence by investigating a panel of 20 speakers of Swabian, a dialect spoken in southwestern Germany, across a 35-year lifespan. The corpus consists of Labovian-style sociolinguistic interviews, and the data comprise 20 phonological and morphosyntactic linguistic features, coded for a binary dis...
International Journal for the Humanities
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Language Variation and Language Change Across the Lifespan: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives from Panel Studies, In: K. V. Beaman and I. Buchstaller (eds.), 2021
The dialectical changes seen across the course of individual lives are typically thought to refle... more The dialectical changes seen across the course of individual lives are typically thought to reflect the attritional influence of standard languages on native dialects. However, the distributional properties of natural languages, which guarantee that lexical knowledge continuously increases across the lifespan, suggest these changes might simply reflect the broadening and diversification of individual vocabularies, not the loss of dialect itself. Consistent with this proposal, speech analyses from 20 speakers of the southwestern German dialect Swabian, recorded in 1982 and again in 2017, reveal that across their lifetimes, these speakers did not suffer a significant loss of dialect, but rather gained a vast amount of non-dialectal vocabulary, a pattern of change that was promoted or constrained by local orientation and personal identity. The analyses show that dialect words were actually used with similar frequencies across the two recording periods, indicating that speakers’ dialectal knowledge remains largely intact, while in the later recordings low-frequency words from the standard language were used at increased rates, reflecting gains in non-dialectal vocabulary across the lifespan. These results suggest an alternative account of the changes in individual speech patterns in which the changes observed in lexical choice across the lifespan primarily reflect the increased influence of later acquired, usually non-dialect, lexical knowledge, and not necessarily the “loss” of dialect itself.
The Coherence of Linguistic Communities, 2022
The Coherence of Linguistic Communities, 2022
Dialectical changes observed across the course of individual lives are typically thought to refle... more Dialectical changes observed across the course of individual lives are typically thought to reflect the attritional influence of standard languages on local dialects. However, the distributional properties of natural languages, which guarantee that lexical knowledge continuously increases across the lifespan, suggest these changes might simply reflect the broadening and diversification of individual vocabularies, not the loss of dialect itself. Consistent with this proposal, speech analyses from 20 speakers of the southwestern German dialect Swabian, recorded in 1982 and again in 2017, reveal that across their lifetimes, rather than suffer a loss of dialect, these speakers gained a vast amount of non-dialectal vocabulary, a pattern of change promoted or constrained by local orientation and personal identity. The analyses show that dialect words were actually used with similar frequency across the two 1 Authors are presented in alphabetical order to represent the collaborative nature...
As Charles Handy observes in his book, The Age of Paradox, we are enter-ing the age of unreason.... more As Charles Handy observes in his book, The Age of Paradox, we are enter-ing the age of unreason. We are no longer in the position of being able to choose between various opposing busi-ness strategies; we have to develop mul-tiple strategic competencies that may at ...
The International Journal of Humanities, 2005
... Gregory R. Guy, Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, New York University Greg... more ... Gregory R. Guy, Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, New York University GregoryR. Guy works on sociolinguistics and dialectology, language variation and change, and linguistic diversity, and has conducted research on American and Australian English ...
Sourcing Strategies for the Transnational Organization' BY KAREN V. BEAMAN AND GREGORY R. GU... more Sourcing Strategies for the Transnational Organization' BY KAREN V. BEAMAN AND GREGORY R. GUY * "\ The\ most abundant, the least expensive, the most underutilized and constantly abused capacity in the world is human ingenuity. The source of that abuse is mechanistic, ...
Most companies are trying to pursue third-generation strategies, using secondgeneration organizat... more Most companies are trying to pursue third-generation strategies, using secondgeneration organizations, staffed with firstgeneration human resources" (Christopher Bartlett 1989).
In a thought-provoking article, Guy (2013:63) claims that “lectal coherence ... [implies] that va... more In a thought-provoking article, Guy (2013:63) claims that “lectal coherence ... [implies] that variables are correlated; if they are not, the cognitive and social reality of the ‘sociolect’ is problematic.” Considerable linguistic research has established that, for structural reasons, variables are correlated; however, structural correlation does not imply sociolectal coherence. Thus the question arises: do multiple variables cluster or correlate, loosely, tightly, or not at all, based on social factors, such as age, gender, community belonging, salience, prestige/stigma, or other external factors (Guy and Hinskens 2016)? This paper explores the unresolved question of cognitive sociolectal coherence by investigating a panel of 20 speakers of Swabian, a dialect spoken in southwestern Germany, across a 35-year lifespan. The corpus consists of Labovian-style sociolinguistic interviews, and the data comprise 20 phonological and morphosyntactic linguistic features, coded for a binary dis...
International Journal for the Humanities
Shopping Cart Your Cart. Log in. Description All publishers. ...
Language Variation and Language Change Across the Lifespan: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives from Panel Studies, In: K. V. Beaman and I. Buchstaller (eds.), 2021
The dialectical changes seen across the course of individual lives are typically thought to refle... more The dialectical changes seen across the course of individual lives are typically thought to reflect the attritional influence of standard languages on native dialects. However, the distributional properties of natural languages, which guarantee that lexical knowledge continuously increases across the lifespan, suggest these changes might simply reflect the broadening and diversification of individual vocabularies, not the loss of dialect itself. Consistent with this proposal, speech analyses from 20 speakers of the southwestern German dialect Swabian, recorded in 1982 and again in 2017, reveal that across their lifetimes, these speakers did not suffer a significant loss of dialect, but rather gained a vast amount of non-dialectal vocabulary, a pattern of change that was promoted or constrained by local orientation and personal identity. The analyses show that dialect words were actually used with similar frequencies across the two recording periods, indicating that speakers’ dialectal knowledge remains largely intact, while in the later recordings low-frequency words from the standard language were used at increased rates, reflecting gains in non-dialectal vocabulary across the lifespan. These results suggest an alternative account of the changes in individual speech patterns in which the changes observed in lexical choice across the lifespan primarily reflect the increased influence of later acquired, usually non-dialect, lexical knowledge, and not necessarily the “loss” of dialect itself.
Language Variation and Language Change Across the Lifespan, 2021
Baayen, R. H., K. V. Beaman, and M. Ramscar Dialectical changes observed across the course of ind... more Baayen, R. H., K. V. Beaman, and M. Ramscar
Dialectical changes observed across the course of individual lives are typically thought to reflect the attritional influence of standard languages on local dialects. However, the distributional properties of natural languages, which guarantee that lexical knowledge continuously increases across the lifespan, suggest these changes might simply reflect the broadening and diversification of individual vocabularies, not the loss of dialect itself. Consistent with this proposal, speech analyses from 20 speakers of the southwestern German dialect Swabian, recorded in 1982 and again in 2017, reveal that across their lifetimes, rather than suffer a loss of dialect, these speakers gained a vast amount of non-dialectal vocabulary, a pattern of change promoted or constrained by local orientation and personal identity. The analyses show that dialect words were actually used with similar frequency across the two recording periods, indicating that speakers' dialectal knowledge remains largely intact, while low-frequency words from the standard language were used at increased rates in the later recordings, reflecting gains in non-dialectal vocabulary across the lifespan. These results suggest an alternative account of the changes in individual speech patterns in which the changes observed in lexical choice across the lifespan primarily reflect the increased influence of later acquired, usually non-dialect, lexical knowledge, and not necessarily the loss of dialect itself.