'Critical' Age

[Dennis R. Preston]

Aaron,

A never-ending problem for us sociolinguists (who usually work with
apparent-time rather than real-time data). How do we distinguish between
age-grading (the fact that one age group uses one form, another another)
and language change (in which the younger age-groups' forms are the "wave
of the future")? Indeed, quite a lot of work has been done on just this
problem. For a good start, read pp. 76-81 in Chambers and Trudgill's
"Dialectology," 2nd ed., Cambridge , 1998.

dInIs (who certainly fits one of the "age-grading" patterns. The closer I
get to my dotage, the more I sound like the Louisville teenager I once was.)

>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


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736