In this volume, contributors explore the factors influencing language variation and change, focusing on how to effectively account for these in data and metadata coding. As linguists enhance their ability to preserve and share data, they face challenges in comparing data from diverse speaker groups and contexts beyond traditional sociolinguistic interviews. Key questions arise regarding how corpus builders should model, elicit, encode, analyze, and archive such varied data to facilitate reuse and comparison across collections while ensuring long-term preservation. Addressing these questions necessitates a nuanced understanding of social influences on speech variation, as community and contextual differences can either enable or hinder comparisons. This work builds on insights from the sociolinguistics community, examining how specific social distinctions shape variation and change. The editors provide a comprehensive volume that encourages researchers to expand the variables considered in community studies and to categorize data effectively for cross-community comparisons. They discuss research planning, community modeling, subject selection, and the elicitation and coding of demographic, situational, and attitudinal factors, highlighting their impact on analysis and potential reuse.
Yaeger Dror Livres
