Joan Costa Carreras

Biography

My academic career covers two domains interrelated from the point of view of time, epistemology and methodology: corpus language planning and sociolinguistic description.
My current research is focused on the evaluation of the implantation of Catalan linguistic norm. To implement this research, I used to coordinate the Avalnorm team (http://avalnorm.wordpress.com/), which organized on 6 June 2013 the Ist Conference on the Analysis of the Implantation of Linguistic Norm (whose plenary conferences are available at http://avalnorm.wordpress.com/), and which is carrying out a longitudinal study on this issue. Publications of mine on this question are Costa (2013, 2016a). Besides all this, I supervised Aina Labèrnia’s doctoral thesis, which is a semilongitudinal study and to which Avalnorm’s one will be complementary. Moving to a more general outlook, I developed the concept of “Frame of favourable sociolinguistic conditions” (Vila & Nogué, 2007) in Costa (2016c, in press c, and in review a)
The immediate antecedent of this research was the Deladi project (Long distance grammatical dependences: theoretical and descriptive approaches), funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, between 2007 and 2010. In this study, in the frame of William Labov’s variationism, on a corpus of 26 life stories, 26 compositions, 52 grammatical exercises and 78 perception surveys, of 26 individuals, we aim to describe the stylistic distribution of Catalan relative pronouns. This work was presented, by invitation, to the Catalan language academy, the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) in 2010. Part of the results of this research were presented at the XVIIth International Colloquium on Catalan Language and Literature (Universitat de València, 7-10 July 2015), organized by the Departament de Filologia Catalana i l’Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana (to be published: Costa in press a) and other were be published in Costa (2016b) and Costa & Labèrnia (2014). At present, I am also addressing the issue about how language social variation should be managed by language corpus planning (in review b). And the relation between variation and prescriptivism is dealt with in (Costa in press b).
Previously, as normative grammar regulates language change and diversity and norm is in an unstable equilibrium, I decided to analyze which of Labov’s concepts were relevant to the normative grammar’s analysis. On this subject, I published Costa (2010a).
Together with the above, I investigated what the epistemological status of linguistic norm is in Costa (2000 and 2005).
Macrosociolinguistic description (language change, diversity and norm) was implemented to analyze the proposal of syntactic codification of Catalan carried out by Pompeu Fabra (1868-1948). This research can be read in Costa (2009 a and b).
My research on corpus language planning is completed, on the one hand, with 4 theoretical works (Costa 2007 a and b, 2008 and 2010b). On the other hand. I did applied research, as the second author of a usage guide (Mestres, Costa, Oliva and Fité; 4th edition, 2009), of 1,086 pages with a CDRom.
On April 20 2018 I have been awarded the prize Modest Reixach 2018 of the Catalan Society of Sociolinguistics for the work “Sobre el «marc de condicions sociolingüístiques favorables» per a la implantació de la normativa lingüística catalana” (http://ojsnew.uv.es:81/index.php/caplletra/article/viewFile/8451/8443).