Clay Riley
Undergraduate Category: Interdisciplinary Topics, Centers and Institutes Degree Level: BS Linguistics Abstract ID# 484
Background
Abstract
How, slash by whom: the sociolinguistics of a new coordinator
Coordinators, as a functional class of words, do not readily accept new members. However, in the last few decades a new one has appeared: slash, derived from the punctuation “/” used to separate alternatives in writing. The syntactic structures able to be coordinated are not fully agreed upon by all speakers, though; the process of lexicalization is ongoing. Some speakers show preferences for lexical categories or syntactic heads, while others are less restrictive. Despite this, not much research has gone into determining the syntactic contexts favored by this coordinator, or whether any social factors affect these contexts.
Method
Special thanks to Gretchen McCulloch and Erienne Weine.
Clay Riley
Data AUTHORS BY AGE 10
9
I.
A small corpus of WordPress blogs containing “slash” was collected from a two-week span. These were filtered to contain only those posts containing the coordinator slash. Public author data was collected as available, and used to draw descriptive conclusions about the social and syntactic correlates of slash.
8
7
6
APPROX (Range=20) APPROX (Range=15)
5
APPROX (Range=10) APPROX (Range=5) APPROX (Range=1)
4
KNOWN
II. A questionnaire was developed to ascertain the extent of syntactic contexts available for slash coordination, along with relevant social factors. All participants provided acceptability judgments for items containing all combinations of lexical and functional word categories and head and phrasal scopes.
3
2
1
0
18-22
23-27
28-32
II. Questionnaire - Scope and category are significant, especially within the Head scope and Functional category - Amount of communication conducted through text is highly significant in most areas
38-42
43-47
48-52
Years Old
Conclusion I. Corpus: - Mainly well-educated American women under 30 - Lexical heads and phrases preferred
33-37
Functional syntactic categories like determiners, coordinators and prepositions—the pieces of language that provide more structure than content—rarely accept new items into their ranks. Over the last fifteen years, however, a new coordinator has appeared in North American English:slash. Coordinators conjoin two syntactic or pragmatic items (its “coordinates”) of equivalent function in utterances. Although many linguists have noted its existence, a large body of rigorous study has yet to have been produced to document it. This absence is conspicuous in light of the fact that not every speaker agrees on how it can be used. While some research has been completed on its semantic properties, its syntax has not, even though this is specifically in contention among those who have observed it. This work seeks to fill that hole by looking at the status of slash in terms of its social dimensions and the types and scopes of the coordinates it accepts. A brief corpus was collected of blog posts containing slash to verify its existence as a productive coordinator and the range of its valid syntactic coordinates. Public biographical information was collected on the authors, and the makeup of this mini-corpus was then compared to that of WordPress users as a whole. Syntactic heads appeared more frequently than phrases for content classes, while the opposite held true for functional classes, with a significant preference for content coordination. Most authors who used slash were female and under 32. Future research will test these findings with speaker acceptability judgments.
COORDINATES A 12.8%
References •
DP 10.6%
•
NP 14.9%
V 8.5%
CP 2.1% Other 4.3%
•
•
VP 2.1%
•
•
N 48.9%
• • • •
American Heritage Dictionary Entry: slash. (n.d.). The American Heritage Dictionary Blog. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=slash&submit.x=0&submit.y=0 Choi, Jinny K. 2005. Bilingualism in Paraguay: forty years after Rubin’s study. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 26:233-248. Curzan, A. (2013, April 24). Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore. The Chronicle: Lingua Franca. Retrieved February 3, 2014, from http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/24/slash-not-just-a-punctuation-markanymore/ Lizasoain, A. (2013, June 12). The Use of 'Slash': A Descriptive Study. LINGUIST List 24.2409: Qs. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-2409.html McCulloch, G. (2013, April 26). Slash: A punctuation mark slash conjunction slash topic shifter. All Things Linguistic. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/48958591291/slash-a-punctuation-mark-slash-conjunctionslash-topic McWhorter, J. (2013, April 24). John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!. TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved February 2, 2014, from http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk.html Meyerhoff, M., & Schleef, E. (2010). The Routledge sociolinguistics reader. London: Routledge. Payne, T. E. (2006). Exploring language structure: a student's guide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Portner, P. (2005). What is meaning?: fundamentals of formal semantics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Pullum, G. (2010, August 27). Part-of-speech classification question. Language Log. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2584
Background
Abstract
How, slash by whom: the sociolinguistics of a new coordinator
Coordinators, as a functional class of words, do not readily accept new members. However, in the last few decades a new one has appeared: slash, derived from the punctuation “/” used to separate alternatives in writing. The syntactic structures able to be coordinated are not fully agreed upon by all speakers, though; the process of lexicalization is ongoing. Some speakers show preferences for lexical categories or syntactic heads, while others are less restrictive. Despite this, not much research has gone into determining the syntactic contexts favored by this coordinator, or whether any social factors affect these contexts.
Method
Special thanks to Gretchen McCulloch and Erienne Weine.
Clay Riley
Data AUTHORS BY AGE 10
9
I.
A small corpus of WordPress blogs containing “slash” was collected from a two-week span. These were filtered to contain only those posts containing the coordinator slash. Public author data was collected as available, and used to draw descriptive conclusions about the social and syntactic correlates of slash.
8
7
6
APPROX (Range=20) APPROX (Range=15)
5
APPROX (Range=10) APPROX (Range=5) APPROX (Range=1)
4
KNOWN
II. A questionnaire was developed to ascertain the extent of syntactic contexts available for slash coordination, along with relevant social factors. All participants provided acceptability judgments for items containing all combinations of lexical and functional word categories and head and phrasal scopes.
3
2
1
0
18-22
23-27
28-32
II. Questionnaire - Scope and category are significant, especially within the Head scope and Functional category - Amount of communication conducted through text is highly significant in most areas
38-42
43-47
48-52
Years Old
Conclusion I. Corpus: - Mainly well-educated American women under 30 - Lexical heads and phrases preferred
33-37
Functional syntactic categories like determiners, coordinators and prepositions—the pieces of language that provide more structure than content—rarely accept new items into their ranks. Over the last fifteen years, however, a new coordinator has appeared in North American English:slash. Coordinators conjoin two syntactic or pragmatic items (its “coordinates”) of equivalent function in utterances. Although many linguists have noted its existence, a large body of rigorous study has yet to have been produced to document it. This absence is conspicuous in light of the fact that not every speaker agrees on how it can be used. While some research has been completed on its semantic properties, its syntax has not, even though this is specifically in contention among those who have observed it. This work seeks to fill that hole by looking at the status of slash in terms of its social dimensions and the types and scopes of the coordinates it accepts. A brief corpus was collected of blog posts containing slash to verify its existence as a productive coordinator and the range of its valid syntactic coordinates. Public biographical information was collected on the authors, and the makeup of this mini-corpus was then compared to that of WordPress users as a whole. Syntactic heads appeared more frequently than phrases for content classes, while the opposite held true for functional classes, with a significant preference for content coordination. Most authors who used slash were female and under 32. Future research will test these findings with speaker acceptability judgments.
COORDINATES A 12.8%
References •
DP 10.6%
•
NP 14.9%
V 8.5%
CP 2.1% Other 4.3%
•
•
VP 2.1%
•
•
N 48.9%
• • • •
American Heritage Dictionary Entry: slash. (n.d.). The American Heritage Dictionary Blog. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=slash&submit.x=0&submit.y=0 Choi, Jinny K. 2005. Bilingualism in Paraguay: forty years after Rubin’s study. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 26:233-248. Curzan, A. (2013, April 24). Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore. The Chronicle: Lingua Franca. Retrieved February 3, 2014, from http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/24/slash-not-just-a-punctuation-markanymore/ Lizasoain, A. (2013, June 12). The Use of 'Slash': A Descriptive Study. LINGUIST List 24.2409: Qs. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-2409.html McCulloch, G. (2013, April 26). Slash: A punctuation mark slash conjunction slash topic shifter. All Things Linguistic. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/48958591291/slash-a-punctuation-mark-slash-conjunctionslash-topic McWhorter, J. (2013, April 24). John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!. TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved February 2, 2014, from http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk.html Meyerhoff, M., & Schleef, E. (2010). The Routledge sociolinguistics reader. London: Routledge. Payne, T. E. (2006). Exploring language structure: a student's guide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Portner, P. (2005). What is meaning?: fundamentals of formal semantics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Pullum, G. (2010, August 27). Part-of-speech classification question. Language Log. Retrieved February 4, 2014, from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2584
