The chapter focuses on two sets of items with hypocoristic function in Hungarian: 1. so-called embellished clippings, i.e. truncations that are subsequently furnished with one of the diminutive/endearment suffixes, such as Feri (Ferenc), Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló (Zoltán), Kata/Kati/Kató (Katalin); 2. reduplications, typically consisting of two identical CV syllables. These can be based on first names, surnames, or some common nouns referring to people, denoting kinship relationships, profession, or property, e.g., Zozó (Zoltán), Zsozsó (Zsófia), Kokó (Kovács). Except for reduplications that are based on surnames, for all the others there is also at least one parallel hypocoristic form of the former type, i.e. an embellished clipping: Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló – Zozó (Zoltán); Zsófi/Zsóca – Zsozsó (Zsófia). The goal of this chapter is to document the range of possibilities as well as to try to account for this peculiar distribution in the sense of which morphological processes interact with each other and in which order, but also in the sense of suggesting the factors that may have facilitated this state of affairs.

In this chapter we summarize the study’s key findings, and contribute to theory-building by discussing these findings against the backdrop of the various frameworks to which the book is relevant, including (Labovian) variationist sociolinguistics but also World Englishes, dialect typology and dialectometry, general usage, and experience-based linguistics.

The chapter provides a general overview of lexical reduplication in Finno-Ugric languages. The research data are taken from observations of everyday life and from various written sources for major languages of this family: Finnic (Finnish, Estonian), Saamic, Mordvinic (Erzya, Moksha), Mari, Permic (Komi, Udmurt), Ugric (Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty). Finno-Ugric reduplication is rich, because, on one hand, agglutinative properties of these languages favor mergeability and repetition of various stems; on the other hand, many onomatopoeias and descriptive words (ideophones) can function as various parts of speech, mainly as adverbs and adjectives, which are often repeated. They also sometimes complete nouns or verbs. Repetitive constructions can express various semantic shades, mainly intensification, iterativity, distributivity, multiplicity, frequency, or indefiniteness. Finno-Ugric reduplication is total or partial (which is more frequent). Reduplicative tendencies are more visible and productive in Hungarian, Komi, Udmurt, and Mari, than in Saamic, in which they barely exist.

This chapter surveys various types of reduplicative word formation in German and discusses their morpho-phonological regularities as well as their use conditions and the iconically-expressive meanings attributed to them. It is argued that the repetitive, formally redundant forms pose strict conditions on their use, making reduplication prone to familiar and non-standard language use. At the same time, reduplications are phonologically conspicuous markers for expressive meaning dimensions. Reduplication in German especially evokes semantic flavours related to smallness, playfulness, lack of seriousness, and jocular depreciation. The survey suggests that, in spite of the foregrounding of the expressive and poetic function, the various types of reduplication are morphologically quite regular. Previous accounts on reduplication in German that deem these words to be “extra-grammatical” are therefore rejected.

This chapter introduces the aims and structure of the book, familiarizes the reader with key concepts (variants and variables, probabilistic grammars, comparative sociolinguistics, regional variation, indigenization, etc.) and the various subfields of linguistics that are relevant, and sketches the design of the study.

This chapter interrogates corpus data to analyze the three alternations subject to study in this book one by one using a battery of state-of-the-art analysis techniques in addition to customary descriptive statistics, Conditional Random Forest (CRF) modeling and mixed-effects logistic regression analysis. The goal of the chapter is to uncover qualitative generalizations: for example, we see that while effect directions of constraints on variation are generally stable across varieties of English, effects strengths can be significantly different.

This chapter is inspired by work in comparative sociolinguistics and quantitative dialectometry. We use a corpus-based method (Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling – VADIS for short) to quantify the similarity between, and coherence across, the varieties of English under study as a function of the correspondence of the ways in which language users choose between different ways of saying the same thing. Key findings include the result that probabilistic grammars are remarkably stable across varieties but that coherence across alternations is not perfect.

The aim of this study is to investigate aspects of expressivity in Standard Modern Greek (hereafter SMG), specifically cases in which expressivity shares the characteristic [+negative] or pejorative, in the more technical sense adopted here. Our research is focused on the level of morphology, particularly on productive word formation, both through compounding (first compound constituents with pejorative meaning, as in vromokánalo ‘filthy TV channel’ and paʎoiós ‘old/damn virus’, among others) and derivation (derivational suffixes with pejorative functions, such as ipurʝéi ‘bad ministers’, ipalilákos ‘insignificant clerk’ and fititarjó ‘a student lot’, among others). It should be noted that although the particular SMG morphological phenomena/devices have been scatteringly studied in earlier Greek literature, negative expressive meaning, that is, pejoration, has not been systematically dealt with so far.

This chapter surveys the literature on variation in general and on grammatical variables (a.k.a. "alternations'') in particular. Next, we review well-known grammatical variables/alternations in English as well as previous comparative investigations of grammatical alternations in English. Last but not least, we discuss in detail previous variationist work on the three alternations subject to study in this book: the genitive alternation, the dative alternation, and the particle placement alternation.

This chapter includes a succinct review of World Englishes and dialect typology literature, with a focus on the main theoretical paradigms within this sphere (e.g. the Three Circles model and the Dynamic Model). We then introduce the nine regional varieties of English under study in the book: British English, Canadian English, Irish English, New Zealand English, Hong Kong English, Indian English, Jamaican English, Philippine English, and Singapore English. The discussion includes a brief summary of relevant aspects of these varieties’ sociohistories as well as their linguistic profiles.

The chapter analyses a small corpus of twelve Catalan folk tales voice-dramatised and radio broadcast in Majorca in 1959. Most of the lexical material studied here is elicited from the same source and from Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, a master work of 20th-century romance lexicography. The expressive resources used in the recordings can be analysed as actual resources in the language for they are shared by both speakers and listeners and they successfully convey a part of the meaning. Along with voice-attached resources as pitch, intensity, or speech rate, other more conventional means such as those preserved in writing (morphological, lexical, syntactic) are also analysed. The findings by Dingemanse and Akita (2017) on the (inverse) relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration are used. The chapter demonstrates the degree to which expressives can be marked by means of phonetic cues in Catalan, initially setting the border between ideophones and unconventional spoken iconicity. By comparing oral and written versions of the same tales it is proposed that fixability by writing is a good test of grammatical integration, at least a necessary condition.

Expressive and ideophonic constructions conveying ‘marked words that depict sensory imagery’ (Dingemanse 2012) are frequently found in the languages of all regions of the world, but their distribution, use and functioning across languages of the Caucasus has never been documented from a regional perspective. This chapter surveys the various kinds of expressive language present in the three autochthonous Caucasian families: Abkhaz-Adyghean, Kartvelian, and Nakh-Daghestanian. It also looks in depth at the specific morphological and syntactic peculiarities of expressives in Georgian, which exhibit exuberant consonant clusters, processes of reduplication uncharacteristic of the language as a whole, as well as specific morphosyntactic alignment splits between different classes of expressive. Expressives will be seen not to be one thing, but many.