Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 3 E-Book

William Labov

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Language in Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 748

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Written by the world-renowned pioneer in the field of modern sociolinguistics, this volume examines the cognitive and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change, tracing the life history of these developments, from triggering events to driving forces and endpoints.

• Explores the major insights obtained by combining sociolinguistics with the results of dialect geography on a large scale
• Examines the cognitive and cultural influences responsible for linguistic change
• Demonstrates under what conditions dialects diverge from one another
• Establishes an essential distinction between transmission within the community and diffusion across communities
• Completes Labov’s seminal Principles of Linguistic Change trilogy

Leseprobe

Contents

Copyright

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Preface

Abbreviations

1 Introduction to Cognitive and Cultural Factors in Linguistic Change

1.1 Cognitive Factors

1.2 Cultural Factors in Linguistic Change

1.3 Convergence and Divergence

1.4 The Darwinian Paradox Revisited

1.5 Divergence and the Central Dogma

1.6 The Community Orientation of Language Learning

1.7 The Argument of this Volume

1.8 The English Vowel System and the Major Chain Shifts of North American English

Part A: Cross-Dialectal Comprehension

2 Natural Misunderstandings

2.1 The Collection of Natural Misunderstandings

2.2 Modes of Correction

2.3 How Common Are Misunderstandings?

2.4 What Is the Role of Sound Change in Misunderstanding?

2.5 The Linguistic Focus of the Misunderstandings

2.6 The Effect of Mergers

2.7 Chain Shifts

2.8 Philadelphia Sound Changes

2.9 r-less vs r-ful Dialects

2.10 Sound Changes General to North America

2.11 An Overview of Natural Misunderstandings

3 A Controlled Experiment on Vowel Identification

3.1 The Peterson–Barney Experiment

3.2 Replicating the Peterson–Barney Experiment

3.3 Overall Success in Identification

3.4 Responses to the Chicago Speakers

3.5 Responses to the Birmingham Speakers

3.6 Responses to the Philadelphia Speakers

3.7 Overview

4 The Gating Experiments

4.1 Construction of the Gating Experiments

4.2 Overall Responses to the Gating Experiments

4.3 Comprehension of the Northern Cities Shift in Chicago

4.4 Recognition of Chicago Sound Changes in the Word Context

4.5 The Effect of Lexical Equivalence

4.6 Comprehension of Southern Sound Changes in Birmingham

4.7 Comprehension of Philadelphia Sound Changes

4.8 Overview of the Gating Experiments

Part B: The Life History of Linguistic Change

5 Triggering Events

5.1 Bends in the Chain of Causality

5.2 Causes of the Canadian Shift

5.3 Causes of the Pittsburgh Shift

5.4 Causes of the Low Back Merger

5.5 The Fronting of /uw/

5.6 The Northern Cities Shift

5.7 An Overview of Triggering Events

6 Governing Principles

6.1 The Constraints Problem

6.2 The (Ir)Reversibility of Mergers

6.3 The Geographic Expansion of Mergers in North America

6.4 Principles Governing Chain Shifts

6.5 Principles Governing Chain Shifting within Subsystems

6.6 How Well Do Governing Principles Govern?

7 Forks in the Road

7.1 The Concept of Forks in the Road

7.2 The Two-Stage Model of Dialect Divergence

7.3 The Fronting and Backing of Short a

7.4 Divergent Development of the /o/ ~ /oh/ Opposition

8 Divergence

8.1 Continuous and Discrete Boundaries

8.2 The North/Midland Boundary

8.3 Communication across the North/Midland Boundary

8.4 The Two-Step Mechanism of Divergence

8.5 Unidirectional Change: The Low Back Merger

8.6 Consequences of the Low Back Merger for the English Vowel System

8.7 Resistance to the Low Back Merger

8.8 Further Differentiation by Chain Shifts

8.9 A General View of Linguistic Divergence in North America

9 Driving Forces

9.1 The Importation of Norms

9.2 Locality

9.3 Social Networks and Communities of Practice

9.4 Socioeconomic Classes

9.5 Acts of Identity

9.6 The Relation of Social Classes in Apparent Time

9.7 Gender as a Social Force

9.8 The Regional Dialect

9.9 Accounting for the Uniform Progress of the Northern Cities Shift

10 Yankee Cultural Imperialism and the Northern Cities Shift

10.1 The North/Midland Boundary

10.2 The History of the North/Midland Boundary

10.3 The Material Basis of the North/Midland Opposition

10.4 The Cultural Opposition of Yankees and Upland Southerners

10.5 Coincidence with Geographic Boundaries of Political Cultures

10.6 Red States, Blue States, and the Northern Dialect Region

10.7 Relation of Dialects to County Voting Patterns

10.8 The History of the Death Penalty

10.9 Ideological Oppositions in the North

10.10 The Geographic Transformation

11 Social Evaluation of the Northern Cities Shift

11.1 The North/Midland Experiment 1

11.2 Conclusion

12 Endpoints

12.1 Skewness as an Index of Approach to Endpoint

12.2 Social Characteristics of Endpoints

12.3 The Eckert Progression as the Product of Re-Analysis by Language Learners

Part C: The Unit of Linguistic Change

13 Words Floating on the Surface of Sound Change

13.1 The Issues Reviewed

13.2 The Fronting of /uw/

13.3 The Fronting of /ow/

13.4 Homonyms

13.5 The Raising and Fronting of /æ/ in the Inland North

13.6 Overview

13.7 Participation in Sound Change

13.8 The Modular Separation of Phonological and Social Factors

13.9 Conclusion

14 The Binding Force in Segmental

14.1 Is There Allophonic Chain Shifting before Nasals?

14.2 Allophonic Chain Shifting in the Southern Shift?

14.3 The Binding Force

Part D: Transmission and Diffusion

15 The Diffusion of Language from Place to Place

15.1 Family-Tree and Wave Models of Change

15.2 Defining Transmission and Diffusion

15.3 Structural Diffusion

15.4 Accounting for the Difference between Transmission and Diffusion

15.5 Diffusion in Dialect Geography

15.6 The Diffusion of the NYC Short-a System

15.7 The Transmission and Diffusion of Mergers and Splits

15.8 Diffusion of the Northern Cities Shift

15.9 The Social Context of Transmission and Diffusion

15.10 Prospectus

16 The Diffusion of Language from Group to Group

16.1 Diffusion to the AAVE Community

16.2 Influence of Surrounding Dialects on AAVE Pronunciation

16.3 The Diffusion of Constraints on -t, d Deletion to Children in Minority Communities

16.4 The Diffusion of Grammatical Variables to Adult Members of the African–American Community

16.5 Directions of Diffusion in the Latino Community

16.6 The Nature of Diffusion across Communal Boundaries

17 Conclusion

17.1 Summary of the Argument

17.2 The Relation of Linguistic Change to Animal Systems of Communication

17.3 More on the Functions of Language

17.4 Social Intelligence and Object-Oriented Intelligence

Notes

References

Index

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 William Labov

Figure 15.9 © 1949, reprinted by permission of the University of Michigan Press.

Kurath, Hans. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this book.

ISBN 978-1-4051-1215-4 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-4051-1214-7 (paperback)

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

1 2010

For Uriel Weinreich

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Tensing and laxing of short a before /d/ in the spontaneous speech of 112 adults in the Philadelphia Neighborhood Study

Table 2.1 How misunderstandings were detected

Table 2.2 Major contributors to the collection of natural misunderstandings

Table 2.3 Percent distribution of focus of misunderstanding for dialect-motivated errors and others

Table 2.4 Distribution of /o/ ~ /oh/ errors by speaker and hearer

Table 3.1 Percent correct vowel identifications by city of speakers and listeners in the Peterson–Barney replication

Table 3.2 Percent correct vowel identifications of Chicago speakers in the Peterson–Barney replication

Table 3.3 Percent correct vowel identifications of Birmingham speakers in the Peterson–Barney replication

Table 3.4 Percent correct vowel identifications of Philadelphia speakers in the Peterson–Barney replication

Table 4.1 Overall percent correct in comprehension of Gating items

Table 4.2 Regression coefficients for all responses to Chicago speakers

Table 4.3 Percent correct identification of Birmingham steel in the word context of the Gating Experiment by city and school

Table 4.4 Percent correct identification of Birmingham spoiled in the word context of the Gating Experiment by city and school

Table 4.5 Local advantage for Birmingham sound changes in word context

Table 4.6 Significance by chi-square of advantage of Philadelphia vs other listeners in percent correct identification of Philadelphia speakers

Table 5.1 Distribution of /o/ and /oh/ contrasts

Table 5.2 Regression coefficients for F2 of /uw/ and /ow/ for all of North American English (vowels before /l/ excluded)

Table 5.3 Regression analyses of F2 of /uw/ not before /l/ by region

Table 5.4 Age coefficients for five elements of the NCS in regression analysis by vowel tokens for Inland North speakers

Table 6.1 Regression coefficients for the merger of /i/ and /iy/, /u/ and /uw/ before /l/ in ANAE minimal pair data

Table 6.2 Significant regression coefficients for minimal pair responses to /o ~ oh/ opposition by region

Table 6.3 Mean ratings on minimal pair test in area of Figure 6.12

Table 6.4 Metropolitan statistical areas and city population for seven cities

Table 9.1 Regression coefficients for age, gender and education in Telsur speakers of the Inland North for four measures of the Northern Cities Shift

Table 10.1 Migration patterns of Yankees and upland Southerners

Table 10.2 Democratic vs Republican county vote by dialect in the 2004 presidential election

Table 10.3 Regression analyses of percent county vote for Kerry in 2004 presidential election by dialect groups, with and without total votes as an independent variable

Table 10.4 Regression analysis of percent county vote for Obama in 2008 presidential election by dialect

Table 10.5 States with no death penalty, 1846–2008

Table 10.6 Signers of Liberty Party 1841 Call for Abolition of Slavery in Cortland County by religious orientation

Table 10.7 Percentage of popular vote for the Republican Party in Indiana by county type and Yankee origin, 1880–96

Table 10.8 Presidential elections by four state groups of the Eastern US

Table 10.9 Votes on original House of Representatives version of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Table 11.1 Cities of origin assigned to the two speakers by student listeners at University of Indiana, Bloomington

Table 11.2 Mean responses on political opinions attributed to Detroit and Indianapolis speakers by University of Indiana subjects

Table 11.3 Regression coefficients for differences in degrees of affirmative action support for the NCS and the Midland speaker

Table 13.1 Significant regression coefficients (p < .01) of F2 of /uw/ in ANAE data

Table 13.2 Significant regression coefficients (p < .01) of F2 of /ow/ in the Southeastern superregion

Table 13.3 Frequencies of thirty-two /ow/ stems entered into regression analysis in Run 3 of Table 13.2 for all ANAE data and the Southeastern superregion

Table 13.4 Comparison of F2 for two homonymous pairs in all ANAE data

Table 13.5 Significant regression coefficients (p < .01) of the raising of /æ/ along the front diagonal in the Inland North

Table 13.6 Frequencies of 25 /æ/ stems entered into regression analysis of Run 3 in Table 13.5 for all ANAE data and Inland North region

Table 13.7 Regression analysis of all tokens of /ow/ in the Southeastern superregion before /l/ and other

Table 13.8 Mean F1 and F2 values of /ow/ words with onset /h/ and coda /m/

Table 13.9 Progressive addition of phonological factors for /ow/ for the Southeastern superregion, with social factors included

Table 14.1 North American English vowels in the ANAE notation

Table 14.2 The subsystem Vhr in North American English

Table 14.3 Hypothetical subsystem VN of short vowels before nasals

Table 14.4 Mean values for prenasal and other /æ/and /o/ for Libby R.

Table 14.5 The Southern Shift across the Vy and h subsystems

Table 14.6 Means and standard deviations for F1 and F2 of /ay/ and /ey/ before voiceless consonants and elsewhere for the South and the North

Table 15.1 Stages of the Northern Cities Shift found in nine speakers from Northern Illinois and in nine speakers from the St Louis corridor

Table 16.1 Indices of dominance for five ethnic groups in Philadelphia, from 1850 to 1970

Table 16.2 Tensing of short a for whites and African–Americans in Philadelphia

Table 16.3 Numbers of tokens of (t, d) clusters by language/ethnic group and grammatical status in the coded transcriptions of 397 UMRP subjects

Table 16.4 Analysis by logistic regression of (t, d) deletion in the spontaneous speech of 397 UMRP subjects by language/ethnic groups

Table 16.5 Pearson correlations for effect of preceding segments by communal group

Table 16.6 Absence of attributive possessive -s for Latino groups

Foreword

This third volume of Principles of Linguistic Change, dealing with Cognitive and Cultural Factors, appears a decade after the second, and some accounting for the delay might be in order. The first volume, on Internal Factors, in 1994 was followed by the second one, on Social Factors, in 2001. The next five years were largely occupied with the publication of the Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The Atlas radically transformed our view of linguistic change in progress in North America, and much of the present volume is devoted to understanding the impact of its findings. ANAE built upon the solid and reliable work of Kurath and McDavid in the Eastern United States, and many chapters of this volume will show how strongly their fundamental insights are confirmed. But that traditional base was not embedded in a systematic analysis of linguistic structure. It did not employ the approach to structural change generated by Martinet, Weinreich and Moulton, nor the principles of accountability used in the study of change and variation. Prior to the Telsur study that is the basis of ANAE, those tools had been applied in the study of a relatively small number of speech communities: Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, Detroit, Panama City, Norwich, Montreal, Philadelphia, and in exploratory studies of a few dozen cities in England and America as reported in Labov, Yaeger and Steiner in 1972. The selection of those cities was the result of a series of historical accidents stemming from the personal history of the researchers. The larger linguistic landscape of North America, outside of the Eastern United States, was left in darkness until ANAE appeared.

Three major findings were surprising both to linguists and to the general public. (1) It was found that dialect diversity is not diminishing: the larger regional dialects, each defined by active changes in progress, are becoming increasingly more different from each other. (2) Several of these regions, especially the Inland North, display an extraordinary homogeneity across great distances and across large populations. (3) The boundaries separating many of these communities are sharply defined by the coincidence of many phonological and lexical isoglosses. In the four years since the publication of the Atlas, I have pursued many paths towards the explanation of these phenomena. Various chapters of this volume are engaged with the effort to account for them by settlement histories, cultural patterns and general principles of linguistic change. I am more than ever indebted to my co-authors of the ANAE, Sherry Ash and Charles Boberg, for their help in constructing the solid foundation on which the current volume is built.

The second to fourth chapters set the stage for the investigation by demonstrating that the cognitive consequences of linguistic change are a serious reduction in intelligibility within and across dialects. Here too I am indebted to Sherry Ash, my partner in the experimental studies of cross-dialectal comprehension, which date from the 1980s.

The seventeen chapters of this volume were given the most intensive scrutiny by two reviewers. I have spent the last five months in radical revisions in response to their comments, corrections and suggestions. Gregory Guy and Ronald Kim have allowed me to name them and to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to them for this effort. I have footnoted only a few of their contributions, which are found literally on every page.

In this volume I have built upon the recent research of Maciej Baranowski, Jeffrey Conn, Aaron Dinkin, Keelan Evanini, Joseph Fruehwald, Matt Gordon, Kirk Hazen, Daniel Johnson, Jamila Jones, Paul Kerswill, Dennis Preston, Gillian Sankoff, and Tonya Wolford. The work of Peter Trudgill on language change and diffusion is a point of reference throughout the volume. The insights of Penelope Eckert on the social meaning of variation are fundamental to this volume. Much of my effort is devoted to the challenge of applying her findings in the Detroit area to a wider context, and each exchange with her has led to an advance in my own thinking.

For all these contributions, many thanks. I hope I have made good use of them.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above lists and in the text, and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Preface

Those of us associated with Blackwell’s Language in Society series over the thirty years of its existence have been delighted that we were able to publish so many titles which have been, and remain, highly significant and extremely influential in the development of linguistics. Many of them indeed have become classics in the field. But I am sure that few of the authors who have so far contributed to this series – and up till now we have published nearly forty different titles – would object to my saying that Labov’s now completed work is very likely to prove to be the most important of all. When the first volume of his trilogy was published in 1994, I wrote that without William Labov there would have been no Language in Society series. And most of the scholars who have published books in this series will, I am sure, readily acknowledge their own scholarly debt to him and his work.

Now, sixteen years later, the appearance of the long-awaited final part of William Labov’s massive trilogy can be seen in context for what it is: an event of immense importance for linguistics, and more especially, of course, for the study of linguistic change. We are now in a position to say that the three volumes of The Principles of Linguistic Change – devoted respectively to Internal Factors; Social Factors; and Cognitive and Cultural Factors – represent the product of an academic lifetime of outstanding accomplishment in our discipline which has few parallels: this really is a magnum opus. Labov’s is a remarkable achievement; not only did he initiate a whole new field of research, he has also subsequently remained at the very forefront of innovative research in the field, over a period spanning five decades. In particular, his empirical linguistic research into language as it is really used by real speakers in real situations has produced exciting insights into the intricate mechanisms that lie behind language change. Bill has truly succeeded, to use his own phrase, in employing the present to explain the past. Linguistic change has always been one of the most intriguing and little understood features of human language. After Bill Labov’s three-volume masterpiece, it still remains intriguing; but thanks to him it is now significantly better understood. Peter Trudgill

Abbreviations

AAVE African–American Vernacular English ACS animal communication systems ANAE Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006a) CDC Cross-Dialectal Comprehension DARE Dictionary of American Regional English IPA International Phonetic Alphabet JASA Journal of the Acoustical Society of America LANE Linguistic Atlas of New England (Kurath et al. 1931) LCV Project on Linguistic Change and Variation in Philadelphia, 1972–9 LSA Linguistic Society of America LVC Study of Linguistic Variation and Change in Philadelphia LYS Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972 MSA Metropolitan Statistical Area NBC National Broadcasting Company NCS Northern Cities Shift OH68 Telephone survey of low back merger in 1968 ONZE Project on Origins of New Zealand English PEAS Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Kurath and McDavid 1961) RP Received Pronunciation RWT Ringe, Warnow and Taylor 2002 TS Telsur number for ANAE subjects UMRP Urban Minorities Reading Project Criteria for the Northern Cities Shift and the North/Midland Boundary O2 Short o fronted: F2(o) > 1450 Hz AE1 Short a raised: F1(æ) < 700 Hz EQ Short a higher and fronter than short e: F1(æ) < F1(e) and F2(æ) > F2(e) ED Short e backed and short o fronted: F2(e) – F2(o) < 375 Hz UD Short u backed and short o fronted: F2(n) < F2(o) ON The word on is in the short o class in the North. Vowel subsystems V short vowels Vh long and ingliding vowels Vhr long and ingliding vowels before /r/ VN vowels before nasal consonants Vw back upgliding diphthongs Vy front upgliding diphthongs

1

Introduction to Cognitive and Cultural Factors in Linguistic Change

This third volume of Principles of Linguistic Change (henceforth PLC) has a broader scope and a broader database than the first two. Volume 1 investigated the internal factors that control change, beginning with a review of completed changes in the historical record and continuing with studies of change in progress. It examined the regularity of sound change and reviewed the evidence for functional explanations of linguistic change. Volume 2 looked at the social factors governing linguistic change and searched for the social location of the leaders of change, largely through a detailed study of ten Philadelphia neighborhoods. That volume also proposed models for the transmission and incrementation of change.