SCDoMC

Social-Cognitive Dimensions of Morphological Change: A psycho-sociolinguistic variationist study of Swabian

01/10/2021 to 30/09/2026

This work builds on Beaman (2020) by expanding the investigation of Swabian, an upper German dialect spoken in the southwest of the country, and focusing on the perceptual, prosodic, and lexical effects that constrain morphological variation and change. Taking a social-cognitive approach, combining state-of-the-art sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic theories and methods, the overall aim of this research is to investigate “the role of morphology in language use” (Plag, Dalton-Puffer, and Baayen 1999). Beaman (2020) demonstrated that the Swabian dialect is undergoing attrition, levelling with the standard language, and this change is occurring more rapidly with morphological and lexical variables than with phonological ones. This attrition, however, is not holistic, rather, individual variables are influenced by a complex set of intra- and extra-linguistic factors and interactions, such as lexical frequency, topic of discourse, notions of overt/covert prestige and stigma, and feelings of local belonging. Thus, the goal of this research is to examine four hitherto unstudied areas of Swabian morphology: (1) change in morphological complexity and productivity across time; (2) coherence in the perception and production of morphological features; (3) the role of prosody in morphological change; and (4) the effect of lexical frequency on morphological construction.