Perturbing the community grammar: Individual differences and community-level constraints on sociolinguistic variation

Laurel MacKenzie

    Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The traditional focus of variationist sociolinguistic research is the patterning of language variation at the level of the community, which individual language users are said to learn and reproduce (Labov 1972; 2012). In this paper, I observe that, although members of a speech community may all have learned the same grammar of a sociolinguistic variable, they may nonetheless produce that variable in ways which obscure this. This “perturbation,” I argue, is epiphenomenal, stemming from at least two possible sources: individual differences in mental representations, and individual differences in speech production planning. Moreover, I demonstrate that these differences are not only inter-individual; they can also be intra-individual, such that speakers may undergo age-grading which disrupts their patterning of a variable from how they previously produced it. I ask whether these individual differences may give rise to changes in constraints in the same way that individual differences can lead to sound change. The paper concludes with a call for more research that integrates sociolinguistic, formal, and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of language variation and change.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article number28
    JournalGlossa
    Volume4
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2019

    Keywords

    • Language change
    • Lifespan change
    • Mental representations
    • Production planning
    • Sociolinguistic variation

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Language and Linguistics
    • Linguistics and Language

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