Studying change Flashcards
Dialect topography
Supported by questionnaire data, provides a macrolevel perspective on regional linguistic variation.
Advantages of questionnaires
- Easy to collect data on substantial numbers of targeted features.
- Results indicate broad linguistic trends.
- Can also be administered in person allowing for direct observation.
Disadvantages of questionnaires
- Rely on self-reports.
- May be a difference between what people claim they do and what they actually do.
- Metalinguistic tasks so they are suitable for superficial aspects of language.
- Ignores intra-speaker variability.
Sociolinguistic interview
Optimal tool in sociolinguistics for gathering natural spoken data.
- Records 2 hours of speech.
- Allow the speaker to lead in defining the topic of conversation.
- Elicit narratives of personal experience. (particular emotive topics)
Linguistic change
The manner in which phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic and other features or language arise, and others fall out of use.
Can include the addition of new lexical items and grammatical constructions.
Traditional approach to language change
Largely confined to the internal evolution of language without making reference to external factors.
Only internal causality interests linguists.
Working principles of historical linguistics
- Regularity Principle
- Principle of Continuous Internal Evolution
- Genetic Relationship Principle
- Uniformitarian Principle
Attitudes towards language change
Language change was socially undesirable.
Changes equate with sloppiness, decline and decay.
Feed into a ‘complaint tradition’ which stretches back to the history of English.
Innovation vs change
All changes arise from innovation.
The point of innovation is normally not observable.
Most innovations don’t catch on.
For a change to take root, it must spread and be accepted by a community of speakers.
