To get Linguists to dance, play songs that are not in English. #macarena #NWAV41 http://t.co/tloJETYh
One parting shot from Dennis Preston: “it’s not hard to teach adjectives to Texans. Just ask if they can put ‘-ass’ after it.”#NWAV41
New Ways of Analyzing Variation 41 (NWAV) just wrapped up on Sunday. It attracted 852 tweets from 58 different Twitter users. This post offers a quick analysis of the tweets (you can search on Twitter for the time being; here’s a basic spreadsheet I made for archive purposes). It also links to various corpora that were mentioned at the conference.
Want to know what got tweeted? Here’s a word cloud of everything with an #nwav41 (excluding urls):
Of course, this doesn’t really reflect what’s going on around NWAV, just what was tweeted about. And that’s highly skewed since 80% of the tweets came from 7 users:
- @TSchnoebelen (uh, that’s me…I treated NWAV41 as an experiment in live tweeting)
- @NemaVeze
- @jessgrieser
- @pittprofdude
- @ebeuerle
- @Derek_Denis
- @NCSULinguistics
Here are the talks I had more than 12 tweets about:
- Sali Tagliamonte’s keynote on The elephant and the pendulum: Variationist perspectives 2012
- Kodi Weatherholz, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, & Florian Jaeger on Liberals, compromisers, and accented speakers: Social influences on syntactic alignment
- Erica Benson & Megan Risdal on
Variation in Language Attitudes: Sociolinguistic Receptivity and Acceptability of Linguistic Forms - M. Joelle Kirtley on The effects of Fundamental Frequency on the attractiveness of speakers
- Mary Kohn & Charlie Farrington on
A Tale of Two Cities: Community Density and African American English Vowels - Lauren Squires on The lady pond beyond “the lady pond”: Variation in circulation, from TV to Twitter
- Dennis Preston’s keynote, An Immodest Proposal
- Rania Habib on Identity, ideology, and attitude in child and adolescent speech
- Tyler Kendall, William Rivers & Robin Dodsworth on
Grouping speakers and assessing speaker groups: A case study of Chinese Americans in New York City - Walt Wolfram & Janneke Van Hofwegen on Composite Dialect Indexes Confront Variationism: The Case of AAE
- Laurel MacKenzie & Meredith Tamminga on Non-local conditioning of variation: Evidence and implications
- Robin Dodsworth on The inception of dialect contact: Social factors in an urban setting
The presentation I gave was based on Twitter data from over 9.2m tweets, over 14k users:
- Tyler Schnoebelen, David Bamman, & Jacob Eisenstein on Gender, styles, and social networks in Twitter.
Some corpora that got mentioned in various talks:
- The Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (150 hrs of transcribed speech, 1.6m words, 318 speakers, 49 neighborhoods in Philly, over 500k vowel tokens)
- The Fisher corpus (like Switchboard on steroids)
- Twitter–make your own with the TwitteR package for R (among other ways) or check out the HERMES corpus of tweets (Zappavigna 2012)
- For Spanish (including, say, the Spanish of native Basque speakers): Corpus Oral y Sonoro del España Rural
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