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‘A Category Of Their Own’: Quantitative Methods In The Use Of Pile-Sort Data In Perceptual Dialectology, Zachary Ty Gill

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Mississippi Gulf Coast Creoles perceive language differences in their home area. A pile-sort task was carried out in which respondents were given stacks of cards with local communities written on them and instructed to stack together the regions where people “talk the same.” Once the piles were made, the fieldworker discussed their sortings with the respondents. The stacks were analyzed by means of a hierarchal agglomerative cluster analysis and non-parametric multidimensional scaling with k-means cluster analysis overlays to extract the perceived dialect areas. The groupings reveal that respondent strategies are based …