super-token

• supertoken, super token

Coined by Sali Tagliamonte in 2006.

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

super-token (plural super-tokens)

1. (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).