Language Variation - European perspectives II -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- References -- Clefts in Cypriot Greek -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Aspects of Cypriot Greek clause structure -- 3. Description of the data -- 3.1. The clefted constituents -- 3.2 The cleft clause -- 3.3 The copula -- 4. The outline of an analysis -- 4.1 On the semantic interpretation of clefts -- 4.2 A syntactic analysis -- 4.3 Microvariation -- 5. Focusing strategies -- 6. Conclusions -- References -- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press -- 1. Electing women in politics, inscribing gender in language -- 2. To inscribe or not to inscribe morphological gender? -- 2.1 Gender congruency and linguistic parity -- 2.2 A successful lexical change -- 3. Linguistic representation -- 3.1 Assessing congruency in discourse -- 3.2 Social gender and leadership -- 4. Linguistic analysis and gender equity -- 4.1 Keep talking… -- 4.2 Syntactic and semantic functions -- 5. Conclusion -- Appendix 1. Recurrent semic features for verbs related to Sarkozy and Royal -- Appendix 2. Functions of the noun Sarkozy as found in the corpus (Le Monde 2006) -- Appendix 3. Functions of the noun Royal in corpus (Le Monde 2006) -- References -- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Changes affecting the re-setting of the Null Subject Parameter -- 3. Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses -- 4. Our analysis for contemporary spoken EP and BP -- 5. Concluding remarks -- References -- Modal verbs in long verb clusters -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Premodals in the Old Germanic languages -- 3. Innovation in Middle Dutch (1230-1400) -- 4. The spread of the construction in early Modern Dutch (1400-1600) -- 5. A semantic shift in the Dutch modal system.

6. Discussion and conclusion -- Corpus texts -- References -- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch -- 1. Investigating gender in East and West Flemish dialects -- 2. A hundred years of gender shifts -- 2.1. The overall stability of Flemish gender -- 2.2 Standardisation effects -- 2.3 Interdialectal influence: Brabantic expansion -- 2.4 Resemantisation? -- 3. Mechanisms of gender change: Diffusion vs. transmission -- 4. Conclusions -- References -- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The candidate accounts -- 3. How does it work? -- 4. Phases in morphology -- 5. Empirical coverage - Greek -- 5.1. The augmentative suffix -- 5.2 Diminutives and meaning variation -- 5.3 Resultatives and a semantic anomaly -- 5.4 The -able derivation -- 5.5 Incorporation in the present framework -- 5.6 Compounds -- 6. Derivational dependency -- 7. Meaning variation and change (in Greek compounds) -- 8. On 'original' meanings in Greek -- 8.1 Prepositions -- 8.2 Test dia- -- 8.3 δia- in modern Greek -- 9. Conclusions -- References -- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The 'Emigranto' data -- 3. Quantitative analysis of syntactic functions -- 3.1 Monolingual syntactic relations -- 3.2 Comparison of monolingual and mixed syntactic relations -- 3.3 Comparison of mixed syntactic relations -- 4. Conclusion -- References -- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Research questions, data and methods -- 3. Findings -- 3.1 Modifications -- 3.2 The transcribers -- 3.3 The corrections -- 3.4 Two diachronic factors -- 3.5 Two usage-related factors -- 3.6 All independent variables -- logistic regression analyses -- 4. Discussion and questions/desiderata for further research -- References -- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect.

1. Preliminaries -- 2. The study of phonology in the Balkans -- 3. Local convergences in the Balkans exemplified -- 4. Beyond bilingualism: the effects of familiarity -- 5. Familiarity (re)interpreted: ideology and loan phonology -- 6. One last example and some concluding thoughts on dialectology borders -- References -- Intonational variation in Swiss German -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Swiss German prosody -- 3. Methods -- 4. Results -- 4.1 Results I: Number of ACs produced -- 4.2 Results II: Word class, unstressed syllables, and schwa syllables -- 4.3 Results III: AC amplitude and PC magnitude -- 4.4 Results IV: WS declarative-final rise -- 5. Discussion and conclusion -- References -- Morphological reduction in Aromanian -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Language death -- 3. Methodology -- 4. Results and discussion -- 4.1 Suffixes for collective nouns -- 4.2 Augmentative suffixes -- 4.3 Suffixes signifying origin -- 4.4 Diminutive suffixes -- 5. Conclusions -- Appendix. List of suffixes elicited in the translation task -- References -- Greek dialect variation -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The problem of spontaneous gemination in south-eastern Greek dialects -- 2.1. Synchronic distribution of geminates -- 2.2 Sources of geminates -- 2.3 Earlier accounts of spontaneous gemination -- 3. A new proposal for spontaneous gemination in Cypriot Greek -- 3.1. The prosodic trochaic domain proposal -- 3.2 The case of word-initial onsetless syllables -- 3.3 Application of the above constraints -- 3.4 Gemination of the onset of the head -- 3.5 Summary of the constraints and a tentative ranking -- 3.6 Extension to other types of geminated forms -- 4. Spontaneous gemination in the dialect of Kos -- 4.1. Dialect variation under the trochee proposal -- 4.2 Neutralised directionality -- 4.3 Cases with active directionality -- 5. Summary -- References.

Using electronic corpora to study language variation -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Exploratory multivariate analysis in the study of language variation -- 2.1 The nature of exploratory multivariate analysis -- 2.2 Application to historical dialectology -- 3. The problem of data sparsity -- 4. Solutions -- 5. Conclusion -- References -- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Examining Greek Cypriots' language attitudes -- 3. The present study -- 4. Method -- 4.1. Preliminary survey -- 4.2 The structure of the focus groups -- 4.3 Speakers -- 4.4 Participants -- 5. Results -- 5.1. Agreement in the evaluations of the four register levels of GCD -- 5.2 Participants' evaluation of own speech -- 5.3 Linguistic variation and social status -- 6. Conclusion -- References -- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Fossilisation, salience and resilience -- 2.1. Fossilisation -- 2.2 Salience -- 2.3 Moribundity and resilience -- 3. Evidence from corporal data -- 3.1 Divn't -- 3.2 Di -- 3.3 Diz(n't) -- 4. Allophony/allomorphy of do(n't) and (in)to -- 5. Analysis -- 6. Local society and dialect revitalisation -- 7. Conclusion -- References -- New approaches to describing phonological change -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Objectives, methods and data -- 3. Identification of dialect change -- 4. The diphthongisation of Middle High German î -- 4.1. The first step: Real time comparison of a Wenker map and an SSA map -- 4.2 Second step: Apparent time comparison of spontaneous speech data with elicited data from the SSA -- 5. Conclusion -- References -- Variation and grammaticisation -- 1. Variation and grammaticisation of progressives -- 2. Data -- 3. Hypotheses and coding of tokens -- 4. Tracking the conditioning of variation over time -- 5. Stativity and progressivity.

6. Conclusion -- References -- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching -- 1. Introduction -- 2. A short overview of the bilingual situation in Estonia -- 3. Introducing the MLF model -- 4. On the applicability of the MLF model to Russian-Estonian CS -- 4.1 ML and EL islands in Russian-Estonian CS -- 4.2 The MLF model and double-marking -- 4.3 The ML in Russian-Estonian CS across sentence or clause boundaries -- 4.4 The ML in the Russian-Estonian constituent-internal or word-internal CS -- 5. Conclusions -- References -- Index -- The Studies in Language Variation Series.