The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (review)

This book is a welcome addition to Blackwell’s ‘Handbook’ series, which now covers not only the core areas of linguistics (Aronoff & Rees-Miller 2001), phonetics (Hardcastle & Laver 1996), phonology (Goldsmith 1995), morphology (Spencer & Zwicky 2002), syntax (Baltin & Collins 2001), and semantics (Lappin 1997), but also historical linguistics (Joseph & Janda 2003), language and gender (Holmes & Meyerhoff 2003), discourse analysis (Schiffrin et al. 2001), child language (Fletcher & MacWhinney 1996), second language acquisition (Doughty & Long 2003), and Japanese linguistics (Tsujimura 1999). The previously-released Handbook of sociolinguistics (Coulmas 1996) devoted only a chapter to variationist sociolinguistics (Milroy & Milroy 1997); here we are offered a massive tome (807 pages) covering (almost) all aspects of the study of language variation and change. In addition to a general introduction (1–2) by the editors, there are introductions to each section by one of the editors. In the first chapter, J. K. Chambers (‘Studying language variation: An informal epistemology’, 3–14) provides an outline of the development of the study of language variation and change and its place in the wider context of linguistics. The rest of the book is divided into five parts, dealing with methodology, linguistic structure, social factors, language contact, and language and societies.

The discussion of methodology begins with various issues in collecting data. Crawford Feagin (‘Entering the community: Fieldwork’, 20–39) discusses planning and implementing the initial stages of a sociolinguistic project. Dennis R. Preston (‘Language with an attitude’, 40–66) outlines methods in the study of language attitudes and perceptual dialectology. Edgar W. Schneider (‘Investigating variation and change in written documents’, 67–96) reviews the different types of written data available and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Similarly, Laurie Bauer (‘Inferring variation and change from public corpora’, 97–114) discusses the various corpora that are publicly available for study. The methodology of analysis and interpretation is the subject of the next three chapters: Robert Bayley (‘The quantitative paradigm’, 117–41) provides a cogent summary of the quantitative analysis of linguistic variation, including the use of VARBRUL and general logistic regression; John R. Rickford (‘Implicational scales’, 142–67) explains the use of implicational scales; and Erik R. Thomas (‘Instrumental phonetics’, 168–200) discusses the instrumental analysis of phonetic production and perception (largely of vowels).

The second part of the book considers the place of variation in the study of linguistic structure. Arto Anttila (‘Variation and phonological theory’, 206–43) provides a brief overview of the role of language-internal factors in the study of linguistic variation and explores the multiple-grammars model of variation and its alternatives via optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). Matthew J. Gordon (‘Investigating chain shifts and mergers’, 244–66) examines the restructuring of phonological systems (mostly vowels) through chain shifts and mergers. Noting that the study of variation has had little or no impact on the development of syntactic theory, Alison Henry (‘Variation and syntactic theory’, 267–82) proposes ways in which the two could be integrated. Ronald Macaulay (‘Discourse variation’, 283–305) discusses qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of variation in discourse-level features.

The third part of the book concerns the traditional ‘meat and potatoes’ of variationist sociolinguistics, the correlation of linguistic variation with social factors. The first three chapters deal with age: Guy Bailey (‘Real and apparent time’, 312–32) reviews the use of evidence from apparent time and real time in studying language change; Julie Roberts (‘Child language variation’, 333–48) examines variation in speech produced by and directed to children; and J. K. Chambers (‘Patterns of variation including change’, 349–74) demonstrates that language change is embedded in factors such as sex, age, and social class. Several chapters deal with issues of social organization and differentiation. Natalie...