Investigating the Effect of Socio-Cognitive Salience and Speaker-Based Factors in Morpho-Syntactic Life-Span Change

Abstract

This article explores changes across the life-span of the individual speaker. Three morpho-syntactic variables that operate at different levels of socio-cognitive salience-quotation, stative possession, and future temporal reference-are traced across longitudinal trend and panel data. The analysis of a panel corpus that spans forty-two years reveals that linguistic malleability is contingent on the variables' embedding in speakers' cognitive-evaluative structures but also on a range of speakerbased factors, such as the speakers' socio-economic trajectory, personality profile, as well as their type and intensity of contact with children and younger speakers. The study thus supports research that has shown that the adaptive behavior across the life-span results in complex outcomes that cannot be characterized by wholesale convergence or divergence.

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

“…Given the observed regularities between the socio‐economic trajectory of the speaker and their linguistic habits (see also Buchstaller ; Sankoff and Blondeau ; Sankoff and Wagner ; Yaeger‐Dror , ), it seems surprising that Aidan, the other upwardly mobile speaker, increases his use of the stereotyped centring face ‐variant (from 36% to 53%, N=44 and N=164, Figure and Table ). Let us now examine his linguistic trajectory in more detail.…”

“…Having started out as a low‐level clerk, he was enrolled in a teacher training course at Durham University, and when we re‐interviewed him in 2013 he was a retired religious education teacher. During the 2013 interview, Fred commented on the degree to which he felt compelled to change his accent as a consequence of normative pressures (see Example 8; Buchstaller , ; Chambers ).…”

“…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 , ). Retrograde change, finally, has been reported for aspirational speakers or those in the higher socio‐economic brackets who correct towards variants that index learned and overtly prestigious values (De Decker ; Prichard and Tamminga ; Sankoff and Wagner ).…”

“…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.…”