Variable Properties in Language

"In 1972, Georgetown University held the first meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) where formal and quantitative linguists convened to study language variation and change. Years of divergence followed but in the 45th anniversary year of NWAV, Georgetown was again the site of connection, with the focus on language acquisition: equipped with the structural constraints on language and the general principles of learning, how do children cope with the inherently variable data especially in the situation of variation and change? The contributors include leading experts in our discipline and more importantly, promising young researchers who now synthesize results and methods from previously disjointed research traditions. This collection of outstanding scholarly work will set the agenda for the integrated study of language in the years to come. "

This edited volume, based on papers presented at the 2017 Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics (GURT), approaches the study of language variation from a variety of angles. Language variation research asks broad questions such as, "Why are languages' grammatical structures different from one another?" as well as more specific word-level questions such as, "Why are words that are pronounced differently still recognized to be the same words?" Too often, research on variation has been siloed based on the particular question—sociolinguists do not talk to historical linguists, who do not talk to phoneticians, and so on. This edited volume seeks to bring discussions from different subfields of linguistics together to explore language variation in a broader sense and acknowledge the complexity and interwoven nature of variation itself.