Language variation-- European perspectives II : selected papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), Nicosia, June 2007

Introduction / Stavroula Tsiplakou, Marilena Karyolemou & Pavlos Pavlou -- Clefts in Cypriot Greek / Yoryia Agouraki -- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose? / Fabienne Baider -- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese / Silvia Regina Cavalcante & Maria Eugênia L. Duarte -- Modal verbs in long verb clusters: an innovation in early modern Dutch / Griet Coupé -- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch: transmission or diffusion? / Gunther De Vogelaer -- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology / Gaberell Drachman -- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing / Eva Eppler -- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects / Frans Hinskens & Marc van Oostendorp -- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect: the case of the Balkans and the drawing of linguistic boundaries / Brian D. Joseph -- Intonational variation in Swiss German / Adrian Leemann -- Morphological reduction in Aromanian / Maria Maglara -- Greek dialect variation: a co-grammar approach / Angeliki Malikouti-Drachman -- Using electronic corpora to study language variation: the problem of data sparsity / Hermann Moisl -- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation / Andreas Papapavlou & Andry Sophocleous -- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths / Charley Rowe-- New approaches to describing phonological change: the realisation of middle high German î in the Alemannic dialects of southwest Germany / Christian Schwarz & Tobias Streck -- Variation and grammaticisation: the emergence of an aspectual opposition / Rena Torres-Cacoullos -- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching: a corpus-based approach / Anastassia Zabrodskaja Introduction / Stavroula Tsiplakou, Marilena Karyolemou & Pavlos Pavlou -- Clefts in Cypriot Greek / Yoryia Agouraki -- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose? / Fabienne Baider -- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese / Silvia Regina Cavalcante & Maria Eugênia L. Duarte -- Modal verbs in long verb clusters: an innovation in early modern Dutch / Griet Coupé -- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch: transmission or diffusion? / Gunther De Vogelaer -- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology / Gaberell Drachman -- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing / Eva Eppler -- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects / Frans Hinskens & Marc van Oostendorp -- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect: the case of the Balkans and the drawing of linguistic boundaries / Brian D. Joseph -- Intonational variation in Swiss German / Adrian Leemann -- Morphological reduction in Aromanian / Maria Maglara -- Greek dialect variation: a co-grammar approach / Angeliki Malikouti-Drachman -- Using electronic corpora to study language variation: the problem of data sparsity / Hermann Moisl -- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation / Andreas Papapavlou & Andry Sophocleous -- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths / Charley Rowe-- New approaches to describing phonological change: the realisation of middle high German î in the Alemannic dialects of southwest Germany / Christian Schwarz & Tobias Streck -- Variation and grammaticisation: the emergence of an aspectual opposition / Rena Torres-Cacoullos -- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching: a corpus-based approach / Anastassia Zabrodskaja This volume contains a selection of papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), which was held at the University of Cyprus from June 17th-19th 2007. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives (from Generative Grammar, Word Grammar, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology to quantitative, Labovian and ethnographic approaches to variation and change, real and apparent time studies, phonetic analysis and metatheoretical papers on quantitative analysis), as well as the sheer number of linguistic varieties examined, attest both to the breadth and scope of the conference and to its status as a meeting-place for synchronic and diachronic linguistic description and theoretical exploration. One of the major themes running through the volume is the explicit concern with methodological refinement. Almost all the contributions address issues of methodology in various aspects of data collection and analysis, be they questionnaire surveys and interview data, spoken or written corpora, real- and apparent-time studies, dialect atlases and maps, statistical models or software. Alongside methodological issues, and especially with regard to the treatment of historical data, many of the papers in the volume explicitly address theoretical issues, for example the relative weighting of linguistic/systemic, cognitive and discourse factors in the exploration of language variation and change