This was part of the original (overlong…) version of section 5 of the chapter I wrote for the new
Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Dialectology – ed. Ch. Boberg, D. Watt & J. Nerbonne.
The title of the chapter is ‘Dialectology and formal linguistic theory; the blind man and the cripple’
The exercise below is based on the material summarized in the Excel document ‘Content analysis two internat’l peer-reviewed journals’ - which can also be found here in Figshare.com
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The main outcomes of a content analysis of studies of instances of inter- or intra-systemic
(dialect) variation in volumes 2004 through 2014 of the journals Lingua (which is positioned in the domain of formal theory) and Language Variation and Change (quantitative approaches to sociolinguistic variation), with an eye on cross-fertilization, are summarized in Table 3 below. journal
Lingua
LVCh period
2004-2008
2009-2013
2004-2008
2009-2013 phonology
10
17
30
34 phon. deepening
1
2 some
9
1 some
4
2 some
2
4 some
(morpho-) syntax
23
16
28
25
(m-)synt. deepening
5
4 some
3
1 some
5
5 some
4
4 some
Table 3. The main outcomes from content analyses of ten volumes of the journals Lingua and
Language Variation and Change
1
Here deepening in the case of Lingua means, roughly, a significant degree of geographical and/or social detailing both of the relevant speech community through e.g. maps, tables or figures regarding social-geographic and/or ethnographic aspects and the like, and of the discussion of the findings. In the case of LVCh , deepening means a recognizable formal theoretical enrichment of the analyses and discussion of the findings of studies regarding variation in the production (not perception or evaluation) of certain phenomena. For LVCh , searching was largely confined to the abstracts, to the notational devices that are common in formal theory and to references to formal models and theories (particularly in the bibliographies to all contributions). For Lingua searching was largely confined to contributions with a title which referred to a specific language or dialect,
1 The correct count of relevant Lingua contributions for the period 2009-2013 is 32, but one particular paper equally discusses phonology and morphosyntax, with ethnographic deepening.

starting with the abstracts; keywords were ‘vari’ (variable, variant, variation, variety), ‘diale’
(dialect, dialectal) and ‘speaker’ (speaker, speakers).
The total number of Lingua contributions dealing with inter- or intra-systemic (dialect) variation is remarkably steady over the two five-year periods, but the number of contributions on phonological variation grew very strongly, while that of papers concerning (morpho-) syntactic phenomena dwindles. Proportionally, the deepening has grown very strongly for the phonological contributions,
2
but it has decreased for those on (morpho-) syntactic variation.
The Anglo-American bias (which is fairly outspoken in the references to the contributions) aside, for LVCh it can be established that in both five-year periods phonetic / phonological variation attracts more contributions than (morpho-) syntactic variation and over time the gap has grown.
However, proportionally, the cross-fertilization between dialectology and formal theory is considerably stronger in the study of (morpho-) syntactic variation than in contributions dealing with variation in the sound components.
Over time, the proportion of LVCh contributions which are clearly or somewhat marked by the cross-fertilization between dialectology and formal theory decreases for both (morpho-) syntax
(from 36% in the period 2004-2008 to 32% in the period 2009-2013) and phonology (from 20% to 18%). For the subset of Lingua contributions which zoom in on instances of (morpho-) syntactic variation this is also the case (from 39% to 25%), but for the sound components the development goes in the opposite direction (from 30% to 59%); but see note 35.
2 It should however be added that six out of the nine contributions with deepening appeared in a special issue on
Sociophonetic variation (vol. 122, issue 7, from May 2012), edited by Nanna Haug Hilton, Charlotte Gooskens,
Alexandra Lenz and Anja Schüppert.