Language & Society 2019

• identity is a spectrum
• identity is never constituted by just one factor

“Any given construction of identity may be

• in part deliberate and intentional,
• in part habitual and hence often less than fully conscious,
• in part an outcome of interactional negotiation and contestation,
• in part an outcome of others’ perceptions and representations, and
• in part an effect of larger ideological processes and material structures that may become relevant to interaction.
  
  It is therefore constantly shifting both as interaction unfolds and across discourse contexts” (B&H 606).

Are there constraints on how language features change?

Can a sound change into literally any other sound, or are there restrictions?

If so, what are these restrictions?

frequent in the language and in languages in general, acquired first in 1st language acquisition.

rarer in languages in general, acquired later in 1st language acquisition.

Tendency in language change to go from marked to unmarked.

• Possible examples: deletion of /h/; fronting of /θ/ and /ð/; /l/-vocalisation.
• Harris on what you can do to a /t/: lenition versus fortition

But these are just tendencies... And if languages only change from marked to unmarked, how did they become marked in the first place?

How does a linguistic feature move from one form to another: linguistically gradually or abruptly?

• Neogrammarian sound change
• Lexical diffusion

The vowel will move gradually across phonetic space moving ever further away from its original position and ever nearer its destination.

Characteristics:

• They are PHONETICALLY GRADUAL
• They AFFECT ALL WORDS AT THE SAME TIME (but not necessarily at the same speed)
• They are ONLY SHAPED DURING THE PROGRESS OF THE CHANGE BY PHONOLOGICAL FACTORS
• e.g. the fronting of /uː/ to [ʉː] (words like ‘goose’, ‘room’, ‘tube’, ‘hoof’, ‘shoot’, ‘zoom’)
• and the fronting of /ʊ/ to [ɨ] (words like ‘foot’, ‘wool’, ‘good’, ‘book’, ‘look’, ‘push’, ‘full’, ‘pull’, ‘shook’, ‘took’, ‘sugar’, ‘woman’) is more advanced before alveolar consonants (such as /s t d/) than before others (such as /m f k g).

These are the only sorts of constraints allowed by the Neogrammarian hypothesis. Grammatical or lexical constraints are not allowed

Analogy: changes that follow well-established common patterns

• e.g. in Early Modern English the plural of ‘cow’ changed from ‘kine’ to ‘cows’;

Taboo:

Sometimes words are deliberately changed to avoid pronouncing a taboo word; e.g.

• God – ‘gosh’ (but notice that ‘nod’ hasn’t changed to ‘nosh’ or ‘cod’ to ‘cosh’)
• Damn – ‘darn’ (but not ham – harn, or ram to rarn)
• Coney [ˈkʌni] – ‘bunny’ (but not ‘cup’ to ‘bup’ or ‘cull’ to ‘bull’)
  [hypothesis: to avoid [kʌn_]

Borrowings and contact: Sounds that are imported from borrowed words don’t count as evidence against the theory.

The vowel will move abruptly across phonetic space ‘jumping’ from its original position to its destination.

A group of Chinese linguists in the 1950s and 1960s found that many changes that had taken place in Chinese didn’t fit the Neogrammarian model at all.

• a sound will jumpfrom its original pronunciation to its new pronunciation without ever going through a stage where a phonetically intermediate pronunciation is used.

Characteristics

• They are PHONETICALLY ABRUPT
• They affect DIFFERENT WORDS AT DIFFERENT TIMES
• They do not change in a PHONOLOGICALLY PREDICTABLE OR TIDY ORDER
  Words like ‘bath’, ‘trap’, ‘after’, ‘band’, ‘dance’ all used to be pronounced with /a/:[a].
  A change began (17th C.) in some places, leading some of the words containing /a/ to lengthen [aː], and in some places move back [ɑː].
• They often NEVER REACH COMPLETION
  E.g.: /a/ becoming /a/ and /ɑː/ (cf TRAP v BATH) 

When sounds are switched around within words

• e.g. bryde [bridɛ] > bird [bird > bɜrd > bɜːd] • e.g. frist > first
• e.g. thridde > third

-> Example of lexical diffusion

When sounds are added

• e.g. Latin ‘spata’ (sword) > Spanish ‘espada’, French ‘épée’;
• e.g. NZE epenthetic schwa in –own past participles (e.g grown, mown [grʌʊən];
• e.g. Old English ‘thunrian’ > thundrian > thunder;

Changes in place of articulation:

• /t/: [t] > [ʔ]: butter: [bʌtə] – [bʌʔə]

-> Example of lexical diffusion

Neogrammarian Sound Change is typically found for:

• Sound changes with ‘unconditioned shifts of the phonetic target of a phoneme’ (Labov 1994: 526);
• Changes with simple and exceptionless conditioning
• movements such as raising, lowering, fronting, backing, rounding, unrounding, nasalization
• Vocalisations of liquids and approximants

Lexical diffusion is often found in examples of:

• Lengthening and shortening
• Diphthongisation of mid and low vowels
• Consonant changes in place of articulation 
• Metathesis

How is the language change embedded in the LANGUAGE and in the SPEECH COMMUNITY in which the language is being spoken?

• Observe how changes spread through the language: do changes begin in some linguistic contexts and then spread to others?

/t/-glottalisation: V_#C > C_#C > V_#V > V_V ‘get by’ > ‘built by’ > ‘get out’ > ‘butter’

• Observe how changes spread throughout the speech community: in which social groups do changes begin? How do linguistic changes spread geographically across the country?
• Early Labovian observations vs. present-day ‘identity’- based approaches

What are the social responses and attitudes to language change? How do these relate to notions of correctness? How do these affect the progress of changes?

• Reactions to language change differ;
• Mergers could be seen as dysfunctional, but they are more common than splits...
  
  à/ ɪə-ɛə/ (beer –bear) merger in NZE, /aʊ - ɛə / (cow – care) merger in Fens.
   
• Different changing features trigger different amounts of social commentary and ‘stigmatisation’: 
  
  /h/ dropping; non- standard past tense forms; fewer – less; have got to – have to; the use of coda-less 'as far as‘; /ʊ/-unrounding.
   
• Impact of ‘correctness’ and literacy on pronunciation: spelling pronunciations.

Probably the most important question:

'Why do changes in a structural feature take place in a particular language at a given time, but not in other languages with the same feature, or in the same language at other times?' (WL&H: 102).

• We can guess at why certain changes occur at certain times and not others (social changes).
• We can only sometimes guess at why changes affect certain features and not others

Impoverished data:

• Documents from the past survive by chance not by design: the selection available is the product of historical accidents
• Only written forms of the language are available, not spoken 
• There was no written norm in earlier forms of the language 

a) people will write more like they speak, or

b) the lack of conventions may mean that similar sounds are transcribed in a different way.

• Literacy was low and contact between literates and the majority illiterates low. 
•  language used by the scribes representative?
• We know little about the social positions of the scribes and even less about the social structures of the communities of the masses.
• Only provides positive evidence of what existed: we don't know that certain structures/sounds etc. DIDN'T exist, because of holes in data.

• Historical linguists believed it was impossible to study language change in progress
• now we have the facilities and means

The task of the historical linguist is to explain the difference between past and present. But we have no way of knowing how different the past was from the present

'The factors that produced changes in human speech five thousand or ten thousand years ago cannot have been essentially different from those which are operating to transform living languages' (Whitney 1897).

• simulating diachrony
• Tracks variation in language use across different age levels.
• If a feature A is not used (or used less) by the old, used somewhat more by the middle aged and used most by the young, we could assume that this is a sign of language change in progress.
• It signals the lack of existence of a feature when the old were acquiring language, but the emergence of that feature among later generations.

1. Very few variationist studies include very very old speakers

• Labov 1994 puts this down to the physical deterioration of speech among old (loss of teeth, articulatory lapses etc.)

1. Very few variationist studies include very young children, and most have post- adolescents as their youngest age group.

• Labov: ‘their deviations from the adult pattern are most likely developmental differences’ (1994: 47).
• Eckert: ‘Studies of children focus on socialisation, studies of adolescents and young adults on learning adult roles, and studies of the elderly focus on the loss of adult abilities, thus only the middle-aged life-stage is treated outside of a developmental perspective... a mature-use perspectiverecognizes that sociolinguistic competence is age- specific, and that the speech of members of an age group is fully appropriate to that life stage’ (1997: 157)

1. Most variationist studies rely on chronological age rather than ‘age-related place in society’ (cf ETIC v EMIC approaches)

• Sudbury: Falklands. People before the Argentina conflict vs. after

1. The model assumes that our speech doesn't change after childhood . It assumes that a 60 year old today is speaking the same way as s/he did 20, 40, 50 years ago.

According to Labov: yes

According to Howard Giles, Penny Eckert etc. : no

• Accommodation theory: we adjust our speech to reflect our attitudes and mark shared or non-shared identities with our interlocutors.

-> Consoir’s 7-Up research: language is ‘stable-ish’

Panel studies: a survey at time x, then at time y, (then at time z), with the same sample of informants.

• Ellen Prince's study of Sarah Gorby, a Yiddish folk singer;
• Consoir’s research on 7-Up.
• Harrington et al’s research on the Queen, comparing 1950 and 1980.

Problems:

• Possible unwillingness of sample to reparticipate.
• people leave the community: emigrate, die etc.
• takes too long to do

a survey at time x, then at time y, with a sample not of the same people, but with a similarly structured sample.

• The restudy of the New York Department Store research after 20 years (Labov 1994)
• Van de Velde's (1996) research looking at language change in live Dutch Royal and sports commentaries in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Problems:

• never sure how comparable the samples are takes too long to do?

Conduct a survey now, and search for recordings from previous times with which to compare the present survey:

• Labov's research on Martha's Vineyard in USA.
• Most variation studies?

Problems:

• there are few earlier studies
• often previous studies are non-sociolinguistic, and have been carried out without the methodological rigour usually associated with sociolinguistic research.
• previous records are often in the form of transcriptions not recordings: how reliable are they?

Sankoff and Blondeau’s (2007) trend and panel study of Montreal:

• Trend studies are better: “increases made by panel-study members were only a pale reflection of what was going on in the wider community”
• “apparent-time UNDERESTIMATES the rate of change”

“Change is dramatic in childhood, but it does not stop there. To understand the dynamics of change in the speech community, we must follow change across the lifespan”

AGE GRADING:

• Features associated with particular age groups: usually lexical
• words for "cool" 
• “Z” in Canada

STABLE VARIATION:

• Different generations use different amounts of the standard and non-standard forms but this pattern is repeated generation after generation. No linguistic feature finally replaces the other.
• (ing) in English speaking world; multiple negation?
• Causes of stable variation: linguistic marketplace?

1. The perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interests of a specific social or cultural group.
2. Ideologies are multiple.
3. Awareness of the ideological nature of these views differ.
4. Mediation between social structure and structure / forms of language.
   tools for revealing linguistic ideologies: Iconization, Fractal recursivity, Erasure.
5. Ideologies are productively used in the creation / representation of various social and cultural identities, such as nationalism and ethnicity.

• Linguistic isolationism
• Linguistic mundaneness
• The linguist as obstacle to linguistic authenticity
• The linguist as arbiter of authenticity

• The emergence principle
• The positionality principle
• The indexicality principle
• The relationality principle
  (Adequation, Distinction, Authentication, Denaturalisation, Authorisation, Illegitimation)
• The partialness principle

• Constraints problem (Markedness)
• Transition Problem (Neogrammarian sound change, Lexical diffusion)
• Embedding Problem
• Evaluation Problem
• Actuation Problem