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

地理学家和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使用和发音的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。传统的定量空间分析方法已被发现是不适合分析语言地图集的中，南大西洋国家（LAMSAS）的数据库积累了几十年的广泛的实地工作。因此，该项目将采用一种称为自组织映射（SOM）的神经网络模型，该模型从未用于分析语言数据，该研究将测试SOM在地理问题上的鲁棒性。以下具体的语言和方言问题将得到解决：1。语言特征（无论是单词、语法结构、发音，还是后者的组合）在地理区域上的分布，如果不是以相对统一的互补分布模式的话，是如何分布的？2.道路网的布局和密度是否是方言地区形成和形成的关键因素？3.由于个别语言特征可以被证明在地理空间中有特定的分布，是否有一些相对较小的语言特征组，可以被视为最"显着"的地区差异的识别？ 4.传统的，主观的方法为简单的语言特征（词汇，发音，或语法）和“模糊”的多维集群来自自组织记忆体之间的一致性是什么？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？该项目是对北美最大的语言特征数字数据库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，有这样的事情，作为区域方言，他们只需要找到诊断语言特征，以证明方言区的存在和边界。 传统方言学家的主要工具是等音词，它被认为代表了某些语言特征出现的地理界限;在大约同一个地方出现的一捆等音词被认为是方言边界。最近，定量方法表明，语言变异要复杂得多。该项目将依赖于数据压缩的新计算技术，以进一步了解语言在地域和社会维度上特征分布的数学基础。由于没有从语言和方言的系统性假设开始，生成论者和传统的方言学家和社会语言学家都有这样的假设（即所有使用一种语言或方言的人基本上都有相同的语言特征规则和清单），这项研究有可能建立一个多维的文化模式，在这个模式中，语言并没有作为一个独立的系统从社会中消失，而是很好地-与其他区域和社会特征相结合。

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.