Integration of linguistic resources in highly diverse urban settings: Stretching the limits of variability (A01)

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This project investigates the multilingual setting of an urban street market, where speakers routinely draw on a large range of linguistic resources. So far, research on such settings has focused on their characteristic diversity and fluidity. In contrast, our investigation will target stability; it will be led by the hypothesis that the observable and sometimes outwardly chaotic variability is not a matter of ‘anything goes’, but might rather be delimitated by systematic patterns and restrictions. In order to capture this great variability and its constraints, we combine ethnographical and sociolinguistic methods with grammatical analyses and theoretical linguistic modelling.