Exploring linguistic malleability across the life span: Age-specific patterns in quotative use

Abstract

This article explores the degree and kind of lability that occurs throughout the life span of the individual during ongoing rapid change in the quotative system. Two comparative analyses trace speakers' use of be like across a shorter and a longer time span. Trend data reveal that the robust change is arrested in the middle age brackets; speakers in their thirties seem to display ‘retrograde movement’ (Sankoff & Wagner 2006) away from the community-wide change. This finding could be interpreted as incipient age-grading. A small-scale panel sample collected forty-two years after the initial interview suggests that some older speakers participate in the trend, albeit at very low frequencies. This finding, while exploratory at the moment, might be interpreted as indicative of ‘life-span change’ (Sankoff 2005). A conception of the change in progress in the quotative system as monotonous would thus both under and overestimate the rate of change. (Change across the life span, age-grading, retrograde change, life-span change, quotation, style, language ideologies)*

Levelling across the life‐span?: Tracing the face vowel in panel data from the North East of England

“…Two individuals, Aidan and Fred, were upwardly mobile and thus embody the shift from traditional manufacturing to an ‘eds and meds’ economy (Beal 2004b). Nelly could be classified as middle class by a number of indicators including housing, attitudes and aspirations (Buchstaller , ). Anne, finally, was upper working class, starting out as a seamstress and being promoted to supervisory rank in the course of her career.…”

“…The extent to which individuals embrace or modulate away from ongoing changes across their life‐span has been shown to depend on a wealth of determinants, including individual factors, such as the speaker's contact with children, their cognitive disposition and processing style (Buchstaller ; Yu ), as well as their socio‐economic and educational background: changes towards the prescriptive standard tend to be adopted by a disproportionate number of middle‐class speakers (Sankoff and Blondeau ). Participation in community‐wide changes away from the standard has been mainly observed amongst speakers on the lower end of the socio‐economic spectrum (Buchstaller ; Yaeger‐Dror , ).…”

“…Our discussion will appeal to informants’ class and gender as well as their socio‐economic trajectory and aspirations during a period of demographic upheaval in the Tyneside community (see below). Following Rickford and Price (), we will also consider individuals’ interactional presentation of self, which we define here as speakers’ ‘relationship [with their] interlocutors, and/or [their] position […] with respect to wider social groups or societal values or norms’ (Schilling‐Estes : 973; see also Buchstaller ).…”

“…Indeed, while North American researchers have collected data on speakers’ (non)adjustment to ongoing changes in a range of phonetic and morphosyntactic variables (see Bowie ; MacKenzie and Sankoff ; Rickford and Price ; Sankoff and Blondeau ; Sankoff and Wagner ; Wagner 2012a), British sociolinguistics has only recently started to investigate the ‘relative stability of people's grammars in adult life’ (Sankoff 2013a: 261). Apart from research on individual celebrity speakers (see Harrington, Palethope and Watson ; Mackenzie ), and a small number of studies on morphosyntactic change (Buchstaller , ), sociolinguistic inquiry in the British Isles has not yet fully embraced the research paradigm of language change across the life‐span advocated by Sankoff and her colleagues (Sankoff , , ,b). This article considers the repercussions of community‐wide changes in the face vowel on individual speakers’ grammars by examining a small panel sample collected in the North East of England.…”

Old‐age language variation and change: Confronting variationist ageism

“…Particularly relevant to our discussion is the fact that this evidence derives largely from speakers entering young or middle adulthood (e.g., Rickford & Price, 2013), not old age. Currently available longitudinal research on older adults is limited to case studies of public figures (e.g., MacKenzie, 2017; Reubold & Harrington, 2017;Shapp, Lafave, & Singler, 2014) and to small reference groups in larger speaker samples (e.g., Buchstaller, 2015;Gregersen, Maegaard, & Pharao, 2009;Naro & Scherre, 2015;Sankoff & Blondeau, 2007;Wagner & Sankoff, 2011). In either case, there is the difficulty of generalizing over small numbers of speakers as well as a lack of detailed relevant biological, psychological and social information of the kind described in Section 2.…”