Various Variation Aggregates in the LAMSAS South
John A. Nerbonne · University of Alabama Press eBooks · 2015
Techniques for analyzing variation in the aggregate have improved considerably over the past several years, but we still have no techniques which allow one to extract linguistic structure from aggregate comparison.1 The present paper explores one means of comparing aggregate analyses and linguistically motivated restrictions, essentially the technique of aggregating over a restricted input set. Using the Southern states data which Guy Lowman collected as part of the LAMSAS, we compare aggregate analyses restricted to vowel differences to those using the complete data set.