innovators and followers (was Fed Up)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Dec 22, 2003, at 7:20 PM, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote, in response to
me:

---------------------------------
> In a message dated 12/22/03 11:23:54 AM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
> writes:
>
>> (just to be clear, let me remind
>> everyone, again, that most speakers with an innovative form are not
>> themselves the innovators, but merely the vehicles of the form's
>> spread, so that it makes no sense to ask after the grammatical
>> rationale for their usage.  they're just repeating what they hear.)
--------------------------------

> >Yes, and even this is not complicated enough.

absolutely.  i cut my posting short, and ron here supplies important
additional substance.

>  >After all, if innovative forms
> >didn't make some linguistic sense, followers will not follow the
> innovators
> >(all other things being equal). So innovations of the "fed up
> with/fed up of"
> >variety are probably real options for most people--i.e., a number of
> people will
> >be inclined to innovate from time to time.

indeed.  the way i like to look at these things is that linguistic
elements have *intrinsic* values -- regularity/generality, clarity of
various sorts, ease of various sorts -- as well as social values, and
that innovations are guided mostly (but not entirely) by intrinsic
values, while complex interactions of intrinsic and social values guide
spread.  (this is not a particularly novel view, though the way i frame
it might be a bit novel.)

certain innovations are likely to be made again and again,
independently, because they are *improvements* on the existing elements
-- improvements in the sense that they are intrinsically more valuable.
  regularizations that eliminate straightforward anomalies are of this
sort.  it would scarcely make sense to ask where "hisself" for
"himself" and "theirselves" for "themselves" originated and how these
forms spread so as to become nonstandard variants all over the
english-speaking world, when they are being spontaneously invented
every week by children acquiring english.

> Moreover, innovations surely begin
> variably--sometimes one will say one thing, sometimes another...

yes, of course.  which means that for some time (maybe short, maybe
very very long) the innovative and older variants will be in
competition with each other.  at the very beginning, the innovative
variant might have the value -- both intrinsic and social -- of
*novelty* (and the older variant the value of *conservatism*), but very
quickly the history of these things becomes lost to speakers, who then
choose among variants on the basis of other intrinsic and social
values.  if one variant is the dominant one among the social groups you
identify strongly with, then you're probably going to go with that one,
intrinsic values be damned.  but if the choice isn't heavily determined
on social grounds, intrinsic values can promote the spread of the
innovation.  so the old "subjunctive" counterfactual ("if I/she
were...") was swamped by the simpler use of past forms in
counterfactuals ("if I/she was...", in which the verb BE is aligned
with all the other verbs in the language), and now the
WOULD-counterfactual ("if you would ask them, they would..."), which
has the virtue of clarity, is rapidly swamping the potentially
ambiguous past-for-counterfactual.

spread on the basis of intrinsic values leads to a situation in which
critics of language use who resist innovation are both baffled and
alarmed by the appearance of "nonstandard", "vulgar", "mistaken" etc.
variants in the speech and writing of presumably educated people,
people who ought to know better.  such critics are then inclined to
conclude that the educational system, indeed the whole social fabric,
is going to hell in a handbasket, or that the barbarians are taking
over the citadels, or both.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)