A sociolinguistic approach to semantic change

Robinson, Justyna A.; Allan, Kathryn

doi:10.1515/9783110252903.199

Cited by 11 publications

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“…However, our goal is to use distributional analyses to further our understanding of variation in an area of grammar rarely studied from a quantitative perspective. Indeed, in areas of the grammar such as this, where it is difficult, if not impossible, “to have direct access to speakers’ intuitions” (Sankoff et al 1978:25-26), observations of a distributional nature become extremely insightful (see also Robinson 2010, 2012) for a similar approach using elicitation techniques rather than naturally occurring spoken discourse). As the pioneering work of Sankoff et al (1978:26) demonstrated, “[a]mong a group of related words, there will be some syntactic context in which all [forms] may be used interchangeably.…”

Section: Adjectives As a Linguistic Variablementioning

confidence: 99%

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ACoolComparison: Adjectives of Positive Evaluation in Toronto, Canada and York, England

Tagliamonte

Pabst

2020

Journal of English Linguistics

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This paper examines variation and change in the adjectives used to express “highly positive evaluation” in the varieties of English spoken in Toronto, Canada, and York, England. Building on earlier work on another semantic field, “strangeness,” we analyze over 4800 tokens and thirty-four different types, as in “That’s great” and “She’s awesome.” Our results show both similarities and differences between these two semantic fields. While individual forms in both fields tend to be popular for a long time, many forms fall in and out of favor. In the case of adjectives of highly positive evaluation, the adjectival set is particularly rich. Distributional analysis and statistical modeling of constraints on the major forms and their underlying social and linguistic correlates reveals that these changes are not progressing in parallel across varieties of English. There are robust linguistic patterns that suggest a systemic underlying explanation. New additions to this field arise in predicative position and as stand-alones, and in a later stage extend to attributive position. Finally, consistent with earlier findings on adjectives and (intensifying) adverbs, there are notable links to social trends and popular culture, affirming the link between open class categories and their sociolinguistic embedding.

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Section: Adjectives As a Linguistic Variablementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 13. Robinson (2012) suggests that younger speakers might use conservative and dialectal variants more frequently when talking to older speakers. Thus, the choice of adjective may be mitigated by the relative age of interviewer and interviewee. …”

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confidence: 99%

ACoolComparison: Adjectives of Positive Evaluation in Toronto, Canada and York, England

Tagliamonte

Pabst

2020

Journal of English Linguistics

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“…The aim of this paper, then, is to investigate the extent and nature of individuality in how competing variable structures are functionally constrained or conditioned. To this end, we focus on the variable use of two different types of gerunds (i. e., deverbal nominalizations formed with the -ing suffix) that were competing over the same (grammatical) contexts in the seventeenth century, using two types of multifactorial models that have recently started to gain traction in variationist studies: random forests, and conditional inference trees (Tagliamonte and Baayen 2012; other applications in, e. g., Robinson 2011;Kerz and Wiechmann 2013;Claes 2016;Szmrecsanyi et al 2016). By means of these models, we were able to demonstrate that, while some evident constraints underlying the use of grammatical variants are indeed shared, there still appear to be some subtle, yet non-trivial differences between individuals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

Fonteyn

Nini

2020

Cognitive Linguistics

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AbstractThis study investigates the extent to which there is individuality in how structural variation is conditioned over time. Earlier research already classified the diachronically unstable gerund variation as involving a high fraction of mixed-usage speakers throughout the change, whereby the proportion of the conservative variant versus the progressive variant as observable in the linguistic output of individual language users superficially resembles the mean proportion as observable at the population level. However, this study sets out to show that there can still be heterogeneity within such a centralized population in terms of how each individual conditions the observed variation. A random forest and conditional inference tree analysis of over 14,000 gerunds uttered by nineteen seventeenth-century authors is presented to show that, while the most important language-internal factors conditioning the gerund variation are adopted by (and shared between) all authors, we can still attest inter-individual variation (i) at lower levels of variable importance, and (ii) in the breadth of the range of contexts individual authors employ to condition the attested variation.

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“…For example, Robinson (2012) found that in the particular Sheffield community she investigated in 2005, people of 60 years of age reported that they associated the word skinny primarily with being 'mean' ('stingy, ungenerous'). Predominantly identified as members of the local working-class community, they held to the local meaning of the term.…”

Section: Contingent Polysemy and Discursive Thresholds In Accounting mentioning

confidence: 99%

When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse

Fitzmaurice

2017

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

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The word native is a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain’s southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history of native as a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case of native, a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.

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A sociolinguistic approach to semantic change

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

ACoolComparison: Adjectives of Positive Evaluation in Toronto, Canada and York, England

ACoolComparison: Adjectives of Positive Evaluation in Toronto, Canada and York, England

Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse

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