'Critical' Age

[Aaron E. Drews]

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