Held at the Linguistic Colloquim, University of Osnabrueck, June 5, 2007.

1. Quantitative Individuated Corpus Linguistics: A Speaker-Centric Approach to Variation Cornelius Puschmann Universität Osnabrück 5 Juni 2007

2. Preliminaries

3. A totalizing view of language competence performance production investigation but... whose competence? whose performance? social function learning cognitive basis cultural transmission

4. Variation or overlap? competence performance Speaker A competence performance Speaker B competence performance Speaker C Observations: 1. A contrastive comparison of performance should give us some insight into shared competence. 2. Speaker-level granularity is preferable to higher levels of segmentation (by gender, social class etc). 3. Instead of generalizing from the outset, we can reach general conclusions after observing the degree of variation or overlap in language production. So how do we do this?

8. Blogs as data sources

12. Granularity and natural segmentation of data in a blog-based corpus Modes of investigation: 1. Degree of internal variation among all posts by the same blogger 2. Variation between bloggers 3. Variation between groups (gender, age etc) What I had for breakfast this morning xxx xxx xx xxxx, xxx xxx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxx, xxx xxx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxx, xxx xxx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxx, xxx xxx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxx, xxx xxx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxx, xxx xxx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxx, xxx xxx xx posted 01/01/2007 by Jane Smith post 1 post 2 post 3 post 4 ...

14. Application

18. Individual variation: collocates preceding instances of believe

24. Observations

27. Thank you for listening!

28. Quantitative Individuated Corpus Linguistics: A Speaker-Centric Approach to Variation Cornelius Puschmann Universität Osnabrück 5 Juni 2007