Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on codes and abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Data collection
- 3 The sociolinguistic interview
- 4 Data, data and more data
- 5 The linguistic variable
- 6 Formulating hypotheses/operationalising claims
- 7 The variable rule program: theory and practice
- 8 The how-to's of a variationist analysis
- 9 Distributional analysis
- 10 Multivariate analysis
- 11 Interpreting your results
- 12 Finding the story
- Glossary of terms
- References
- Index
8 - The how-to's of a variationist analysis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on codes and abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Data collection
- 3 The sociolinguistic interview
- 4 Data, data and more data
- 5 The linguistic variable
- 6 Formulating hypotheses/operationalising claims
- 7 The variable rule program: theory and practice
- 8 The how-to's of a variationist analysis
- 9 Distributional analysis
- 10 Multivariate analysis
- 11 Interpreting your results
- 12 Finding the story
- Glossary of terms
- References
- Index
Summary
How do you code the data? How do you write a condition file?
This chapter will detail the day-to-day steps of a variationist research project.
It will also show you how to troubleshoot your results.
Now that I have explained the history, development and nature of variable rules and the variable rule program, let us now work directly with the program. The prototype program, Varbrul 2 S, was written in Fortran by David Sankoff (1975). It was revised by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, including Don Hindle and Susan Pintzuk. Refinements to the program were also conducted by Pascale Rousseau at the University of Quebec in Montreal. When Goldvarb 2.0 was released in 1988, it was based on these versions of the program, but was partially reprogrammed in Pascal by David Rand (1990). Other versions of the program also exist, including MacVarb (Guy 1993) and R-Varb (Paolillo 2002). Goldvarb 2001 provides users with a Windows version of the original Macintosh application. Goldvarb X has been available since October 2005. It is an update of Goldvarb 2.1 for Macintosh or Windows in which the entire program has been translated into C++ (Sankoff et al. 2005).
In this chapter, I will abstract away from the various individual attributes of these different packages. Details of their workings can be found in the users manuals, documentation and online help menus which come with various applications.
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- Information
- Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation , pp. 158 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006