The Coherence of Linguistic Communities: Orderly Heterogeneity and Social Meaning

This innovative collection brings together a range of perspectives on the notions of "orderly heterogeneity" and "social meaning", shedding light on how structured variation and indexicalities of social meaning "cohere" within linguistic communities. This book fills a gap in research on language variation by critically considering the position articulated by Weinrich, Labov, and Herzog in 1968 that linguistic diversity is systematically organized in ways that reflect and construct social order.

The volume investigates such key themes as

• covariation and co-occurrence restrictions;
• indexicality, perception and social meaning;
• coherence and language change;
• and the structure and measurement of coherence at different levels of analysis.

This collection advances our understanding of the coherence of linguistic communities through empirical investigations of larger and more diverse sets of variables, language varieties, speech styles, and communities, as afforded by the development and advancement of new methods and models in sociolinguistic research.

This book is of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and formal linguistics, as well as those interested in developments on research methods in linguistics.

Karen V. Beaman is a Lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests concern language variation, coherence and change, with particular focus on how factors of identity, mobility, and social networks drive or inhibit change.

Gregory R. Guy is Professor at New York University, USA. His research focuses on social, geographic, and diachronic diversity in language, and the implications of linguistic variation for the construction of linguistic theory in varieties of English, Spanish, and Portuguese.