Slide 1 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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

Slide 2 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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

Slide 3 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 Wardhaugh – Chapter 8 – CHANGE Labov, Martha’ Vineyard 1963  See  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!

Slide 4 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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

Slide 5 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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)

Slide 6 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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

Slide 7 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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

Slide 8 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 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 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

Slide 9 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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)

Slide 10 LING – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011 Wardhaugh Ch 8 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