super-token

English

Alternative forms

supertoken, super token

Etymology

Coined by Sali Tagliamonte in 2006.

Pronunciation

(Canada, US) IPA^(key): /ˈsupɚˌtoʊkən/

Noun

super-token (plural super-tokens)

(sociolinguistics) An instance of the same speaker/signer using two or more variants of a sociolinguistic variable in the same section of discourse.
- 2006, Sali A. Tagliamonte, Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 168:
  Another useful technique is to incorporate ‘super-tokens’ directly into the top of the token file so that they are readily found when needed; for example, writing an abstract or reporting preliminary results.
- 2010, Panayiotis A. Pappas, “A new sociolinguistic variable in Cypriot Greek”, in Angela Ralli, Brian D. Joseph, Mark Janse, Athanasios Karasimos, editors, Research on Greek Dialects: Institutions and Projects, →ISSN:
  In this corpus, the best example of a super token can be seen in the following excerpt (1), where an educated female speaker in her mid-twenties, who is recounting a recent trip to Sweden, switches between a palatal lateral and a palatal fricative in the middle of a noun phrase
- 2017, Luis Alberto Mendez, “The variant [ʃ] in the Spanish of Ciudad Juárez”, in Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, volume 6, number 1, →DOI, page 244:
  The following super token was extracted from one of the informants who participated in the sociolinguistic interview for this research.
- 2019, Nick Palfreyman, Variation in Indonesian Sign Language: A Typological and Sociolinguistic Analysis, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, →ISBN, page 143:
  Example (48) presents a supertoken where a Solonese signer uses SUDAH:4 and SUDAH:1 in consecutive clauses; these clauses have the same meaning, and hence are semantically equivalent (there are other examples where a variant form occurs in both pre-predicate and post-predicate slots without apparent difference in meaning, although more research is needed on this).