'Critical' Age

Anne Lambert annelamb at GNV.FDT.NET
Mon Mar 13 17:13:55 UTC 2000


I have noticed that my mother's slang usage stopped with the 40s (when she
was in her late 30s-early 40s) while mine stops with the late 60s-early 70s
(same age). Is this a critical point?
"Aaron E. Drews" wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>
> }my daughter, who has very few dialect characteristics from the
> }area where she spent the first 24 years of her life, uses the
> }construction too.  (presumably, she didn't learn that it *was*
> }a regional feature until so late that it was pretty much
> }automatic.)
>
> In my tutorial, we were discussing age-related (idio)language change and
> how that can relate to change in the community or even the standard.  I
> mentioned that young people almost always speak differently than old
> people, but that may not neccessarily be indicative of a change in the
> language ("language change" being on par with, say, the GVS or changing
> from "needs V-ed" to "needs V-ing").
>
> Then one of my students (at least in her mid 30s) asked "when do we start
> speaking differently from the 'young' people?"  I was stumped.  At what
> point/period do we stop following linguistic fashion and become linguistic
> conservatives?  Has anybody looked at this?  Or, do we lump it together
> with other difficult questions like "when do we become old?" and "how long
> is a piece of string?"
>
> --Aaron
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Aaron E. Drews                               The University of Edinburgh
> aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk                  Departments of English Language and
> http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron       Theoretical & Applied  Linguistics
>
> "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF"
>         --Death



More information about the Ads-l mailing list