Dialectological and Folk Dialectological Concepts of Space by Hansen, Sandra; Schwarz, Christian; Stoeckle, Philipp;

Short description:

The linguae& litterae series, edited by Peter Auer, Gesa von Essen and Werner Frick, documents the research activities of the School of Languageand Literature of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). These research activities in literary studies and linguistics are characterized by an approach that is theoretically and methodologically "state of the art" and interdisciplinarily open.

In linguistics the accent is on the corpus-based, quantitative and qualitative investigation of language; in literary studies the focus is on the comparative, transdisciplinary analysis of literary phenomena in their cultural contexts. At the same time the series deals with the productive interfaces and synergies between modern linguistics and literary studies (as well as the humanities, social and natural sciences with which they interact). It seeks a new, contemporary reformulation of the humanities research curriculum and its problem and concept orientation for the future.

The series has a clear international orientation - each volume is multilingual, containing German, English and French contributions and, depending on the volume, articles in Italian or Spanish as well. Each individual volume is peer reviewed by an international editorial board.

Each year 2-4 volumes are published.

Long description:

In variational linguistics, the concept of space has always been a central issue. However, different research traditions considering space coexisted for a long time separately. Traditional dialectology focused primarily on the diatopic dimension of linguistic variation, whereas in sociolinguistic studies diastratic and diaphasic dimensions were considered. For a long time only very few linguistic investigations tried to combine both research traditions in a two-dimensional design – a desideratum which is meant to be compensated by the contributions of this volume. The articles present findings from empirical studies which take on these different concepts and examine how they relate to one another. Besides dialectological and sociolinguistic concepts also a lay perspective of linguistic space is considered, a paradigm that is often referred to as “folk dialectology”. Many of the studies in this volume make use of new computational possibilities of processing and cartographically representing large corpora of linguistic data. The empirical studies incorporate findings from different linguistic communities in Europe and pursue the objective to shed light on the inter-relationship between the different concepts of space and their relevance to variational linguistics.