Modeling Language Change in the St. Louis Corridor

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-106
Author(s):  
Jordan Kodner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Population Structure ◽  
Population Study ◽  
Population Model ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Modeling Language ◽  
Computational Simulations ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Complex Relationships

AbstractThe St. Louis Corridor extending from Chicago, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri has been described as a “breach” through the Midlands dialect region because of the presence of Inland North features there. Most notably, features associated with the Northern Cities Shift suddenly appeared in Corridor cities in the mid-twentieth century, but they have since largely retreated. Friedman's (2014) population study has uncovered complex relationships between the Corridor's geography and this pattern of advance and retreat, and this work elaborates on that investigation through computational simulations of the Corridor's population structure. Implementing a new network-analytic population model (Kodner & Cerezo Falco, 2018), I find support for Friedman's original hypothesis that migration into cities along Route 66 imported Inland North features into the Corridor first before it spread outward to communities farther away from the route and uncover questions about the Corridor's population that merit further study.

Escaping the Trap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-398
Author(s):  
Anja Thiel ◽  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Young People ◽  
Older People ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Time Change ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Small City ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Northern Cities

AbstractWe examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising of trap in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robust trap-raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 of trap—a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although older people raise trap more in wordlist reading than in spontaneous speech, younger people do the opposite. We infer that increasing negative evaluation of the feature led Ogdensburg speakers to collectively abandon raising trap between 2008 and 2016. This indicates a role for communal change in the transition of a dialect feature from an indicator to a marker.

scholarly journals How long was the nineteenth century?

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (spe) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
David LIGHTFOOT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Learning Procedure ◽  
The Way

This paper reviews the problems of the deterministic and predictive view of language change initiated by nineteenth century linguists and shows that such a view is still present in many analyses proposed by twentieth century linguists. As an alternative to such a view, the paper discusses an approach along the lines of Niyogi and Berwick (1997), which takes the explanation for long-term tendencies to be a function of the architecture of UG and the learning procedure and of the way in which populations of speakers behave.

scholarly journals Comparative variationism for the study of language change: five centuries of competition amongst Spanish deontic periphrases

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Blas Arroyo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Common Factor ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
Modal Verb ◽  
History Of

AbstractBased on a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mainly private letters from the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries (c. 1960), this paper analyses the results of a variationist study on the historical evolution undergone by the Spanish modal periphrases with three distinct auxiliary verbs (haber, tener, deber). Using the heuristic tools of the comparative method, the data show that variation has been constrained by a handful of common factor groups over almost five centuries. Nonetheless, with the odd exception, these factors have conditioned each verb in a different way. Moreover, the sense of this variation changes as time goes by, with especially relevant reorganisation in the first part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, there is a notable association between these constraints and the degree of markedness and the frequency of the conditioning contexts, giving support to a usage-based approach to language change in which cognitive processes such as entrenchment play a decisive role. These data also allow a particular profile to be traced for each modal verb in the history of Spanish, in which tener and haber finally undergo a complementary distribution, whereas deber follows a different pattern. After several centuries of stagnation, tener becomes the star in the deontic firmament of spontaneous communication, diffusing abruptly as a change from below in the twentieth century, and replacing haber, which had been the unmarked variant for centuries.

scholarly journals New -way(s) with -ward(s): lexicalization, splitting and sociolinguistic patterns

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-239
Author(s):  
Karlien Franco ◽  
Sali A. Tagliamonte
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Large Database ◽  
Phrasal Verbs ◽  
Morphological Variable

AbstractThis paper investigates the distribution of a morphological variable that has not gained much attention in the literature: adverbial -s versus -Ø. This morpheme predominantly occurs with adverbs ending in -ward(s), like forward(s), afterward(s), and inward(s), or -way(s), such as anyway(s) or halfway(s). Using a large database of sociolinguistic interviews of Ontario English and an apparent-time perspective, we show that the use of the variants changes over the twentieth century, with the adverbial suffixes -ward(s) and -way(s) behaving differently. -Ward(s) shows a trend towards -s, while most words in -way(s) increasingly take -Ø–splitting by adverbial suffix. Anyway(s) is an exception to this pattern, with a change from below towards -s, strongly conditioned by social standing. We also find evidence for lexicalization of forms without -s in phrasal verbs like to move forward. We explain these findings against the background of variationist sociolinguistic theory and principles of language change.

scholarly journals Secondary education as a group marker in St. Louis, Missouri

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Secondary Education ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Catholic High Schools ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Education Groups ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Larger Sample

ABSTRACT This article calls attention to the saliency of secondary education within the community and its utility in constructing social categories, in order to consider how it affects linguistic variation. Older St. Louisans draw on secondary education to construct a divide between those who attended Catholic high schools and those who attended public schools. I show that speakers in a sample of older St. Louisans differ in production of the thought vowel based on education type. This effect is weakened in apparent time when we consider a larger sample that includes both older and younger speakers. I draw on Brubaker's (2004) view of groups as events and actions to argue that these categories were indexed only while they had a high degree of groupness, and suggest that social changes that led to diminished groupness between Catholics and Publics also resulted in the loss of a linguistic distinction between the groups. (Education, groups, Northern Cities Shift, Catholicism)*

Language contact through translation

Target ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-455
Author(s):  
Shuangzi Pang ◽  
Kefei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Sample Points ◽  
Chinese Texts

Abstract This article investigates the role of translations from English in language change in Chinese. It employs a new corpus, the Chinese Diachronic Composite Corpus (CDCC), which incorporates a parallel corpus and comparable corpus in three sampling periods in the twentieth century, and a refe­rence corpus as a starting point in the timeframe. We examine whether explicitness in English–Chinese translations has exerted an impact on the target language, focusing on adversative conjunctions as a measure of explicitness. The results of the study demonstrate that: (1) translated Chinese texts have changed in step with original Chinese texts in the frequency of adversative conjunctions; (2) translated Chinese texts and original Chinese texts are interrelated throughout the three periods, but the correlation between them has changed perceptibly over the three sample points; and (3) source language interference found in translated Chinese texts increases over the three periods.

Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English: a real-time study based on matching text corpora

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Mair
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Standard English ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Text Corpora ◽  
Grammatical Variation ◽  
Changing Patterns ◽  
Infinitival Complements ◽  
Late Modern

The article looks at three instances of grammatical variation in present-day standard English: the use of bare and to-infinitives with the verb help, the presence or absence of the preposition/complementizer from before -ing-complements depending on prevent, and the choice between -ing- and infinitival complements after the verbs begin and start. In all three instances, current British and American usage will be shown to differ, and these differences need to be interpreted against diachronic changes affecting Late Modern English grammar as a whole. The description of twentieth-century developments is mainly based on data obtained from matching corpora of British and American standard English. Since in all three cases studied developments did not originate in the twentieth century, additional data from the quotation base of the OED were used to outline the long-term evolution of the relevant portions of the grammar since ca. 1600. In general/methodological terms, the article aims to show that an utterance-based model of language change, in combination with the exceptionally well-developed corpus-linguistic working environment available to the student of standard English, can lead to new discoveries even in a well-studied area such as the grammar of standard English.

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