to resemble those common to the group or groups with which he wishes from time to time to be identified". This hypothesis is strikingly similar to Giles & Powesland's (1975) proposals for applying accommodation theory to explain linguistic code-switching. Labov (I966) notes considerable variation within social groups defined on the basis of age, class, or sex, and he argues convincingly that studies of the "idiolect" are unlikely to reveal sociolinguistic structure as clearly as studies of the speech of whole social groups. The consistent patterns he himself uncovers are observable only on this basis; the size of Labov's sample in New York City, together with his method of aggregating data from all the individuals in the group, ensures that considerable variation between individual idiolects does not obscure more regular patterns of variation in the community as a whole. We should note here that Labov is not suggesting that individuals reveal only unstructured variations; he is showing specifically that the idiolect-based approach characteristic of earlier scholars (e.g. Bloch I 948;

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Vernacular language loyalty and social network

Socio-technical networks are ubiquitous and impact society on many dimensions. As individuals become socialized into those networks, they alternately internalize network behavior or transform network behavior through their participation. Frequently the functioning of networks involves communication within the network or processing of communication and information originating outside the network. Such communication and information data are often available as unstructured, natural language text data. Often in prior work, text data are analyzed separately from relational data, or are reduced to the fact and frequency of the flow of information between nodes. The latter approach acknowledges that information exchange has taken place, but disregards the content of the text data. However, we know that by not considering the substance of communication and information, we are limited in our ability to understand the effects of language use in networks, including the interplay and co-evolution of information and network structure and behavior. Thus, we expect that in bringing together text data and relational data, we will be able to make substantial advances in network analysis. A complicating factor is that sometimes the structure and behavior of networks are encoded in the text data itself. In these cases, network data needs to be extracted from text data. I propose to develop, apply and evaluate a set of computational methods that facilitate the joint analysis of relational data and the content of text data. In working towards this goal, I use an interdisciplinary and computationally rigorous approach that combines theory and models from social science and socio-linguistics with methods from natural language processing and machine learning that are based on probabilistic graphical models. The datasets used for this work are the Enron email data, data about research funding, and a dataset about the Sudan. The anticipated contributions include: 
- Provide and evaluate methods that will be integrated into the publicly available software products AutoMap and ORA. 
- Clean and normalize public datasets that contain relational data and text data in order to ensure that each node represents one unique social entity and no entity is represented by more than one node. 
The overall goal with this thesis is to provide methods that support users in collecting rich network data that allow for meaningful and actionable analysis.

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Uncovering and managing the impact of methodological choices for the computational construction of socio-technical networks from texts

Estimating size, scope, and membership of the speech/sign communities of undocumented indigenous/village sign languages: The Ban Khor case study

(1982). Language and group identity. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development: Vol. 3, Language and Ethnicity, pp. 207-216.

Language and group identity

Strategies of language ‘assimilation and dissimilation’ (Bourdieu, 1991) are inevitably and unavoidably linked to the more general strategies of social reproduction adopted by groups and individuals (i.e. the strategies by which each generation endeavours to transmit to the following generation the advantages it holds). Thus strategies of social mobility that involve, for example, education, changes of occupation, changes of residence or migration, are all likely to have linguistic consequences. The very anticipation of such strategies may, in fact, carry implications for language behaviour in advance of the actual move itself. However, to examine the linguistic consequences of strategies of social reproduction, the strategies themselves have to be ‘situated’ (Giddens, 1984) in space and time, i.e. located with regard to the territorial organisation of the local community and the relationship of this to the wider national and international economy. The territorial organisation of communities incl...

John J. Gumperz

Papers

Discourse strategies: Social network and language shift