The Written Dialects of America

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The Written Dialects of America

• Discourse Measures
• A Preliminary Report
• Jack Grieve
• Northern Arizona University

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Research Questions

• What is the extent of regional variation in
  natural language?
• What are the regional dialects of written
  American English?
• Are there regional differences in the values of
  discourse based measurements across a regional
  corpus of modern American Letters to the Editor?

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The Corpus

• Total Cities 74
• Total Authors/Texts Approx. 40,000
• Total Words 9,079,605
• Register Letters to the Editor
• Era 2005-2006

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Register

• Published Letters to the Editor
• Published standard English from a variety of
  authors from a variety of regions.
• Letters to the Editor an example of Letter
  Writingperhaps the basic form of public written
  discourse.
• Letters to the Editor are freely and abundantly
  available online in machine readable form

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Corpus Analysis

• Discourse Measurements (Conjunction)
• Have not been looked at in dialect studies in the
  past.
• Possible to analyze because corpus is large and
  contains running text.
• Seem like they might be good sociolinguistic
  measurements, since they can be based on
  semantically-inert variation (i.e. they can be
  linguistic variable like).

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Discourse Measures

• All measurements made using Perl programs.
• Sentence Length.
• Conjunct (however, therefore,) relative
  frequency
• Conjunct sentence position initial vs. internal
• Initial conjunction (and, but).

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Southern American Writing

• New Hypothesis Is there a statistically
  significant difference in the values of certain
  discourse measurements in writing from the
  southern United States when compared to rest of
  the country?
• To test this hypothesis, independent sample
  t-tests (alpha .05) will be run to check for
  significant differences between the values of
  these measurements across these two groups.

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Results
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Conclusion

• Statistically significant regional differences
  have been found in discourse measurements in
  American writing.
• American South East letter writing is
  characterized by more sentence initial conjunct
  and shorter sentences than the rest of the US.
• This is the first time large-scale regional
  differences in American writing and in discourse
  measurements have been found.