Full Description
This collection engages with key questions in panel study research by exploring more deeply the interrelationship between the individual and the community and the impact on language change across the lifespan.
The book is organized around four broad themes, each followed by a forward-looking commentary that ties together the key findings from the individual chapters. The first section examines style and socio-indexicality with the goal of disentangling short-term style-shifting from long-term language change. The second section continues with a focus on style, examining audience design and socially meaningful variation in professional settings as an integral component of age- and role-appropriate behavior. The third section considers different language/dialect contact scenarios and the impact on changing social identities and behavioural norms which can fluctuate across the lifespan across different settings and life-stages and for different types of variables. The final section explores an agent-based model of lifespan and community change, targeting the practical challenges often encountered in panel research, such as data sparsity and the short duration of the human lifespan. A postscript underscores the importance of considering style and setting as integral aspects of panel research, rather than as afterthoughts, and of leveraging computational modeling to expand our understanding of the interdependencies between lifespan and community change.
This book will appeal to scholars interested in language variation and change, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and computational linguistics.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Towards an understanding of stylistic choices in change across the lifespan
Isabelle Buchstaller and Karen V. Beaman
PART I. Style and Socioindexicality
Ageing in style: Towards disentangling style-shifting and lifespan change
James Grama, Isabelle Buchstaller, Anne-Marie Moelders, Lea Bauernfeind and Mirjam Eiswith
Investigating age effects in the perception of (ing): A study on professionalism ratings from the North East of England
Johanna Mechler
Change in language attitudes in real-time: Results from the Ulrichsberg project in Austria
Lars Bülow, Philip C. Vergeiner, and Dominik Wallner
Commentary - Style and social meaning across the lifespan
Suzanne Evans Wagner
PART II. Style and Audience Design
Tracking stylistic variation over a very long lifespan
Laurel MacKenzie
Stability, change and reversal in public speech: A longitudinal case study
Josiane Riverin-Coutlée and Jonathan Harrington
Commentary - Exploring Stylistic Repertoires Across the Lifespan
Silvina Bongiovanni, Betsy Sneller, and Chantal Tetreault
PART III. Language Contact
Change and Stability: Intra- and inter-individual coherence across the linguistic architecture
Karen V. Beaman
Lifespan change and intragenerational norms in a diverse speech community: Australian English diphthongs
Elena Sheard
A panel study of language obsolescence: The fate of (ɡ) in a Pacific Japanese colonial koiné
Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain
Commentary - Complex contact scenarios in the context of individual lifespan change
Devyani Sharma
PART IV. Computational Modeling
Structured heterogeneity in language change as a result of inter-speaker heterogeneity
Gareth J. Baxter, Richard A. Blythe, and William Croft
Commentary - The past, present and future of language and aging research
David Bowie
Index
