Collaborative Research on the Geography of English Dialect Features by Self-Organizing Maps

自组织映射的英语方言特征地理协同研究

• 批准号: 9975657
• 负责人: William Kretzschmar
• 金额: $ 3.61万
• 依托单位: University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-08-15 至 2002-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9975657&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Geography; English; Dialect

This collaborative project between a geographer and a linguist will provide a thorough spatio-linguistic analysis of the variations of word usage and pronunciation in the Middle and South Atlantic States. It is intended as a contribution to linguistic geography, empirical dialectology, and computational geography. Conventional methods of quantitative spatial analysis have been found to be ill-suited to analyze the Linguistic Atlas of Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS) databases accumulated over several decades of extensive field work. Thus, the project will employ a neural network model, called Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), which has never been used to analyze linguistic data, and the study will be a test of the robustness of SOM on geographic problems. The following specific linguistic and dialectologic questions will be addressed:1. How are linguistic features (whether words, grammatical constructions, pronunciations, or combinations of the latter) distributed over geographic areas, if not in relatively uniform patterns of complementary distribution?2. Are the configuration and density of the road network critical elements of the creation and shaping of dialectal regions?3. Since individual linguistic features can be shown to have specific distributions in geographic space, are there some relatively small group of linguistic features that can be perceived as most "salient" in the identification of regional differences? 4. What is the congruence between isoglosses posited by traditional, subjective methods for simple linguistic features (lexical, pronunciation, or grammatical) and the "fuzzy" multidimensional clusters derived from SOMs?5. What is the interaction of personal/social variables such as sex, age, ethnicity, occupation, and education, with geographic variables such as location and community type (urban/rural)?The project is an empirical study of language variation across geographic areas and socio-demographic groups conducted on the largest digital database of language features in North America. Traditional dialectologists have assumed that there were such things as regional dialects and that they only needed to find diagnostic linguistic features to demonstrate the presence and boundaries of the dialect areas. The primary tool of traditional dialectologists was the isogloss, which was supposed to represent the geographical limit of occurrence of some linguistic feature; bundles of isoglosses that ran in about the same place were taken to be dialect boundaries. Recently, quantitative approaches have indicated that linguistic variations are considerably more complex. This project will rely on novel computational techniques of data compression to further our understanding of the mathematical underpinnings of language in the distribution of features across territory and social dimensions. By not starting with the assumption of the systematicity of language and dialect that generativists and traditional dialectologists and sociolinguists share (i.e. that all speakers of a language or dialect share essentially the same rules and inventories of linguistic features), this research has the potential to build a multidimensional cultural model in which language is not removed from society as an independent system but instead is well-integrated with other regional and social characteristics.

一名地理学家和一名语言学家之间的这一合作项目将对中大西洋和南大西洋国家的词语用法和发音变化进行彻底的空间-语言分析。它旨在为语言地理学、经验方言学和计算地理学做出贡献。人们发现，传统的定量空间分析方法不适合分析几十年来广泛的实地工作积累的中南大西洋国家语言地图集数据库。因此，该项目将采用一种名为自组织映射(SOM)的神经网络模型，该模型从未被用于分析语言数据，而这项研究将测试SOM在地理问题上的稳健性。以下具体的语言学和方言学问题将被讨论：1.如果不是以相对统一的互补分布模式，语言特征(无论是单词、语法结构、发音还是后者的组合)是如何在地理区域内分布的？2.道路网络的结构和密度是方言区域创建和形成的关键因素吗？3.由于单个语言特征在地理空间中可以被证明具有特定的分布，在识别区域差异时，是否有一些相对较小的语言特征组可以被认为是最显著的？4.传统的、简单的语言特征(词汇、发音或语法)的主观方法以及由自组织结构模型得出的“模糊”多维簇？5.个人/社会变量(如性别、年龄、种族、职业和教育)与地理变量(如位置和社区类型(城市/农村))之间的相互作用是什么？该项目是在北美最大的语言特征数字数据库上进行的跨地理区域和社会人口群体的语言差异的实证研究。传统的方言学家认为存在地区方言这样的东西，他们只需要找到诊断性的语言特征来证明方言地区的存在和边界。传统方言学家的主要工具是等音线，它被认为代表了某些语言特征出现的地理界限；大约在同一地点运行的等音线束被认为是方言的边界。最近，量化方法表明，语言变异要复杂得多。这个项目将依靠新颖的数据压缩计算技术，以加深我们对语言在跨领土和社会维度的特征分布中的数学基础的理解。本研究不是从生成学家、传统方言学家和社会语言学家所认同的语言和方言的系统性假设出发(即，一种语言或方言的所有说话者基本上拥有相同的语言特征规则和清单)，本研究有可能建立一个多维文化模式，在该模式中，语言不是作为一个独立的系统脱离社会，而是与其他地区和社会特征很好地结合在一起。