Language and Linguistics Seminar Series: Dr Lauren Hall-Lew - When does a (sound) change stop progressing?

Further, I suggest that the theoretical contrast between social meaning as a motivating factor and social meaning as parasitic on change (Trudgill 2008) may be a distraction from understanding the “total linguistic fact” (Silverstein 1985).

While some have conducted close social analyses of linguistic innovators (e.g., Labov 2001), in this talk I review the current body of evidence on cases where speakers appear to be resisting sound change, and introduce some ideas from research outside of linguistics on reversals of social change.

Drawing particularly on vowel data from San Francisco’s Sunset District, I argue that cases of sound changes slowing, pausing, or reversing are a part of speakers’ responses to major social changes in their local community.

To make this argument, I suggest that a full understanding of sound change is not possible if we cleave to the dichotomies of automaticity and intentionality, positivism and interpretivism, ‘correlational’ and ‘interactional’ sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1972; Gal 2016:456), or one wave and another (Eckert 2012).

Rather, progress in the field of language variation and change will be made by taking advantage of the broad range of methodological and theoretical perspectives we now have access to, and applying them with equal respect and rigor to answering our core theoretical questions.

References

• Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87–100.
• Eckert, Penelope. 2016. Variation, meaning and social change. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 68–85.
• Gal, Susan. 2016. Labov in anthropology. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(4): 453–463.
• Gumperz, John J. 1972. Introduction. In John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt. 1–31.
• Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Language in Society, Vol 2. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
• Silverstein, Michael. 1985. Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of Structure, Usage, and Ideology. In Elizabeth Mertz and Richard Palmentiers (eds.), Semiotic Mediation.
• New York, NY: Academic Press. 219–259.
• Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Trudgill, Peter. 2008. Colonial dialect contact in the history of European languages: On the irrelevance of identity to new-dialect formation. Language in Society, 37(02): 241–254.