LingLunch : S. Grondelaers

Stefan Grondelaers (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Why do we say them when we know it must be they? Twitter as a resource for the study of rapid linguistic diffusion

 In this talk I report two Twitter-based analyses to account for the rapid diffusion across The Netherlands of the stigmatized subject use of the object pronoun hun “them”. Twitter data were collected to obtain a sufficient number of non-standard tokens, but also to investigate the validity of two hypotheses, viz. (1) that subject-hun is a “vivid contrast” profiler which thrives in contexts of evaluation and qualification, and (2) that it is propelled by the cool prestige that has been confirmed as a social meaning correlate of many other diffusions.

If we want to demonstrate that the diffusion of hun is co-determined by cool prestige, it is essential that we can compare such social meaning propellers to grammar-internal predictors in one encompassing analysis. Such an integrated analysis presupposes that we can infer social meaning predictors from production data, in spite of the fact that they are almost always elicited experimentally. For this ambition too, Twitter fosters possibilities that standard corpora do not offer.

Against the backdrop of these advantages, we tackle a number of crucial concerns encountered when relying on tweets for linguistic analysis, viz. the typical shortness of tweets and the absence of running discourse, the impossibility to code for demographic predictors crucial to the sociolinguistics enterprise, and the “Great Exodus”, viz. the massive defection from 2014 of adolescent tweeters to Instagram.