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

这个项目调查了城市街头市场的多语言环境，说话者经常使用大量的语言资源。到目前为止，对这类背景的研究主要集中在它们的特点多样性和流动性上。相比之下，我们的调查将以稳定性为目标；它将以这样一种假设为主导，即可观察到的、有时表面上看起来混乱的变异性不是‘任何事情都会发生’的问题，而可能是由系统模式和限制来界定的。为了捕捉这种巨大的变异性及其制约因素，我们将民族志和社会语言学方法与语法分析和理论语言模型相结合。

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.