Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE

1. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE Language Change • Not all variation that shows a relationship with age of speaker is change - age grading (when a certain group adopts a ling form but drops it later in life) • Age grading hard to distinguish from change • Need real time data = trend study resamples the same community at 2 different points in time (What I did with Labov’s Philadelphia study) • Panel study re-interviews the same subjects later in life to see if they have changed from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~gillian/PAPERS/Sankoff.Age,AT,RT.pdf

2. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE Language Change • Apparent time = an analysis of the data that proposes lingusitic variation which shows a relationship with age projects that this is change. That is, if younger speakers are using more of a variant than older speakers, this represents change. Presupposes stability of individual’s ling systems (an 80 year old speaker represents how people spoke when he/she acquired the dialect roughly 60 years earlier) from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~gillian/PAPERS/Sankoff.Age,AT,RT.pdf

3. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE Labov, Martha’ Vineyard 1963 • See http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/~ttrippel/labov/node5.html • 2 variables (ay) and (aw) as in high and how • Finds that there is change in progress - backs this up with previous data from LANE • Findings show that there is not a monotonic relationship with age (higher use of variant increases as age of speaker decreases) • It is the middle-aged speakers with highest centralization • Also, the fishing-related areas highest centralization • Finally, directly shows that attitude toward the island is the reason behind use of a ling form that symbolically links them to the island - strong connection between ling variation and identity!

4. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE Labov • Connects prestige with the LMC and use of hypercorrection • Also with women (being socially the second highest social group with respect to gender) • Changes are related to prestige • Change from above the level of consciousness vs. below are different • There are many connections between gender, class and change

5. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE Trudgill, Norwich • Shows connections between working class forms and non-standard use • Women use more overt prestige forms • In self-reports, men overreport their non-standard use and women under-report • Trudgill’s restudy of Norwich shows that real time trend study shows things not predicted by previous study (1988)

6. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE Milroys • Show that network strength keeps change from affecting tight networks • Looser networks show more use of outside forms • Linguistic marketplace - different interactions based on jobs will affect person’s position in language change situation

7. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE The Process of Change • Change from below - led by interior social classes (LMC and UWC) and by women • Labov’s Philadelphia study support this - different systems for black and white speakers • Eckert’s study of Jocks and Burnouts - girls range was wider than boys; burnouts associated with Detroit so more advanced in Northern Cities Shift

8. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE The Process of Change • Lexical Diffusion - sound change spreads 1 word at a time - S-shaped curve in time - see p. 220 - every word has its own history • Lexical diffusion and wave theory similar - how change spreads through language/community (wave theory shown by changes in different geographic space in England - (r) versus (STRUT) p. 140) • Some sound change is regular and all sounds are changing in every phonetic environment • Some sound change has exceptions - mad, bad, glad and swam, ran and began in Philly

9. Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE The Process of Change • Lexical diffusion versus regular (Neogrammarian) sound change • Two types of sound change: 1 is that it is phonetically regular and predictable - although certain environments may promote/inhibit the change • Lexical diffusion states that each word that contains the sound change is affected individually • Reality is that the more common sound change is regular, while lexical diffusion does also play a factor (plaid) • New theories about word frequency shows that there is more to this than originally thought - Exemplar theory (Joan Bybee)

10. Conn 2005 The Process of Change • I replicated Labov’s Philadelphia study to test his ideas about language variation and change • Let’s look at NWAV presentations