Social variation in syntax

*Friedrich, Sarah, Frank Konietschke & Markus Pauly (2019). Resampling-based analysis of multivariate data and repeated measures designs with the R package MANOVA.RM. The R Journal, 11/2, 380–400.

*Goryczka, Pamela, Anja Wittibschlager, Katharina Korecky-Kröll & Alexandra N. Lenz (2023). Variation und Wandel adnominaler Possessivkonstruktionen im Deutschen. Horizontal-areale und vertikal-soziale Analysen zum österreichischen Sprachraum. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 90/1, 31–63.

*Hinskens, Fans (1998). Variation studies in dialectology and three types of sound change. Sociolinguistica, 12, 155–193.

*Kim, Agnes & Katharina Korecky-Kröll (2021). Prepositional phrases in German in Austria – identifying patterns of variation. Open Linguistics, 7/1, 476–510.

*Labov, William (2001). Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

*Vergeiner, Philip C. & Lars Bülow (2022). Der Konjunktiv II in den ruralen Basisdialekten Österreichs: quantitative und qualitative Befunde. Linguistik Online, 114/2, 3–42.

In variationist sociolinguistics, the analysis of (morpho-)syntactic variation has traditionally received less attention compared to other linguistic levels, like phonetics and phonology. This neglect can be attributed to methodological considerations but also the widespread – yet rarely tested – assumption that morphosyntactic variables display less social variation (Labov 2001: 28–29; Hinskens 1998: 160). This also accounts for research on Austrian dialects, where the investigation of social constraints on morphosyntactic variation remains a major desideratum. Only recently have some feature-based studies addressed social constraints on individual variables (e.g., Kim & Korecky-Kröll 2021; Vergeiner & Bülow 2022; Goryczka et al. 2023). To draw more general conclusions, however, multivariate studies taking more than one feature into account are needed.
In our paper, we adopt a multivariate approach to examine social variation within the Bavarian and Alemannic dialects of Austria, focusing on 18 variables encompassing different areas of (morpho-)syntax. The study focuses on the influence of age and gender as social factors. In addition, geographical factors are included to assess the relative importance of social variation in comparison to geographical variation, which has been the primary focus in prior research on Austrian dialects. Consequently, our paper addresses the following three research questions:

RQ1: What is the overall impact of age and gender as social variables on (morpho-)syntactic variation in the Bavarian and Alemannic dialects of Austria?
RQ2: How strong is the effect of these social factors compared to geographical factors?
RQ3: Do social constraints exert different effects on individual variables, and if so, why? To address these questions, we analyze dialect data comprising 21,272 tokens collected from 163 speakers in 40 different locations across Austria. For our statistical testing, we employ a semi-parametric (resampling-based) MANOVA design (Friedrich et al. in 2019).

Our findings reveal that, among the social factors considered, only age exerts a statistically significant effect on a global scale, whereas gender does not demonstrate a significant influence (RQ1). In comparison, however, geographical variation emerges as the more prominent factor (RQ2). Finally, our investigation reveals differences in the relevance of social factors, particularly age, among the variables (RQ3). While regional variation is significant for nearly all (morpho-)syntactic variables, eight variables exhibit significant age-related differences, and only one variable shows significant gender-related differences. Further analyses indicate that variables situated at the intersection of morphology and syntax exhibit higher susceptibility to social variation compared to purely syntactic variables. Remarkably, our results show that the social significance of individual variables does not appear to be influenced by factors like salience or frequency of usage.