Review of Labov (2001): Principles of Linguistic Change Social Factors

2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-330
Author(s):  
Manfred Görlach
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Linguistic Change

Social influence in the use of the present perfect in Bilbao

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Burgo
Keyword(s):  
Social Influence ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Social Variables ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Constraints ◽  
Peninsular Spanish ◽  
Semantic Domains

The Present Perfect (PP) in some Peninsular Spanish dialects is following the same path as other Romance languages; it is going through a grammaticalization process where the PP is usurping the semantic domains of the Preterite. This is the case of many Peninsular dialects such as Alicante (Schwenter, 1994) and Madrid (Serrano, 1994) among others as well as Bilbao (Kempas, 2005). He found that the frequencies of PPs in hodiernal contexts were higher than in other Spanish cities so these findings point out to a more advanced path of grammaticalization in this city. Previous studies have paid more attention to the linguistic constraints that favor the use of the PP instead of the Preterite rather than the social factors that influence this linguistic change. In this article, I focus on the study of three social variables (age, gender and class) to account for evidence of a change in progress in Bilbao Spanish.

Linguistic change in El Pont de Suert: The study of variation of /3/

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuria Alturo ◽  
Ma. Teresa Turell
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Geographic Factors

ABSTRACTCatalan sociolinguistics has investigated in depth the uses of Catalan and the attitudes toward it but has only analyzed very sporadically the mechanisms of linguistic change in this language. The study presented in this article is an attempt to describe an ongoing linguistic change that has been observed in a speech community (E1 Pont de Suert) of the Alta Ribagorça, a region in Catalonia (Spain) where the borderline between Catalan and Aragonese, a variety of Spanish, can be delimited. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, the article seeks to demonstrate that a gradual substitution of the autochthonous variant [t∫] by the normative [3] of the phoneme /3/ appears to be taking place in El Pont de Suert, and to determine, at the same time, the linguistic and social factors that favor this substitution. Second, its purpose is to analyze the variation of this phoneme in relation to not only geographic but also social and linguistic variables; this is because a study that considers only geographic factors would describe the characteristics that differentiate the Ribagorca speech from other Catalan speech varieties but would not account for the existing variation in the use of both the voiceless affricate and the voiced fricative.

Seeds of change

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina García
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Leading Change ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Hispanic Linguistics ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Physiological Differences

Abstract Intervocalic /s/ voicing is of much interest recently in Hispanic Linguistics for two principal reasons: this feature has been attested in diverse dialects of Spanish, and it has been shown to correlate in production and perception with social factors (Davidson 2014; Chappell 2016; García 2019; among others). One finding that often surfaces is that male speakers voice more than female speakers, and recent studies consider whether this may be due to physiological differences (File-Muriel, Brown, and Gradoville 2015; Chappell and García 2017). The present study examines the interaction of gender, age, and interspeaker variation in the voicing of intervocalic /s/ in the speech of 31 natives of Loja, Ecuador. While variationist studies overwhelmingly show women leading change in progress, I argue that young men are leading voicing in Lojano Spanish and that this study of a smaller, non-English speaking community further elucidates the intricacies of gender and linguistic change.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Holes
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Early History ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Early Occurrence

This chapter outlines the scholarly background of the study of Arabic historical dialectology, and addresses the following issues: the early history of Arabic: myth and reality; the definition and exemplification of ‘Middle Arabic’ and ‘Mixed Arabic through history’; evidence for the early occurrence of certain Arabic dialectal features; examples of substrates and borrowing in Arabic dialects; the dialect geography of Arabic and its typology, especially the ‘sedentary’ and ‘bedouin’ divide; how and why dialects have undergone change, large-scale and small-scale, and the causative social factors; a classification of the typology of internal linguistic change in Arabic; causes of the social indexicalization of dialectal features of Arabic; examples of the pidginization and creolization of Arabic, and the reasons for the apparent rarity of this phenomenon.

Linguistic change in endangered dialects: The case of alternation between avoir and être in Vermont French

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marijke Russo ◽  
Julie Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Language Death ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
Passe Compose

The present study examines the pattern of the variation of the auxiliary avoir and être in the passé composé tense in Vermont French in 22 adult speakers who migrated from Québec or are first-generation Franco-Americans. The purpose of the study is to determine if the process of replacement of être by avoir in progress in Canadian French is also taking place in Vermont and which linguistic and social constraints influence this linguistic change. Results of the study reveal that the process of replacement of être by avoir is also taking place in Vermont, and that it is significantly favored by the presence of a main verb that has a transitive homonym and by the presence of a low-frequency main verb. The fact that social factors do not significantly influence this replacement indicates a later stage of linguistic change, supporting patterns found in the literature of language death.

The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Labov
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Sexual Differentiation ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Social Awareness ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Initial Acceleration

ABSTRACTTwo general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous sociolinguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in linguistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of linguistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is independent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction develops gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an initial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-dominated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for the second highest status group.

Recent developments of the pragmatic markers kind of and sort of in spoken British English

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-580
Author(s):  
SUSAN REICHELT
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
British English ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pragmatic Markers ◽  
Time Patterns ◽  
Recent Developments

This study reports on recent changes in the use of the hedges kind of and sort of in spoken British English over the past twenty years. A quantitative analysis of these features within subsets of the original BNC 1994 (BNC Consortium 2007) and BNC 2014 (Love et al. 2017) suggests a systematic encroaching of kind of into contexts that are traditionally occupied by sort of. This is highlighted in apparent-time patterns in which younger speakers are leading in use as well as real-time patterns that show a significant increase in use between 1994 and 2014.The hedges sort of and kind of are often treated as semantically equivalent, yet show distributional differences across different varieties of English. This article reports on an ongoing shift in the use of kind of as well as a relatively stable use of sort of. Its main focus is a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of both variants, which, in addition to social factors involved, teases apart some of the linguistic aspects of this shift.In line with the theme of this special issue, the article draws attention to the usefulness of comparable, or comparably made, corpora that allow for focused studies of linguistic change across speakers, generations, registers and communities.

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