Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introductory note
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition: forty years later
- I Problems and methods of analysis
- II Social differentiation
- 7 Class differentiation of the variables
- 8 Further analysis of the variables
- 9 Distribution of the variables in apparent time
- 10 Other linguistic variables
- III Social evaluation
- IV Synthesis
- Glossary of linguistic symbols and terminology
- Appendix A Questionnaire for the ALS Survey
- Appendix B Anonymous observations of casual speech
- Appendix C Analysis of losses through moving of the MFY sample population
- Appendix D Analysis of the non-respondents: the television interview
- Appendix E The out-of-town speakers
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Distribution of the variables in apparent time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introductory note
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition: forty years later
- I Problems and methods of analysis
- II Social differentiation
- 7 Class differentiation of the variables
- 8 Further analysis of the variables
- 9 Distribution of the variables in apparent time
- 10 Other linguistic variables
- III Social evaluation
- IV Synthesis
- Glossary of linguistic symbols and terminology
- Appendix A Questionnaire for the ALS Survey
- Appendix B Anonymous observations of casual speech
- Appendix C Analysis of losses through moving of the MFY sample population
- Appendix D Analysis of the non-respondents: the television interview
- Appendix E The out-of-town speakers
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[The first eight chapters of this book concern synchronic patterns of variation in the speech community, with the linguistic variable as the working tool of analysis. There have been hints about linguistic change in progress but it is not until this chapter that sociolinguistics takes on the study of change and variation as its central problem. The concept of apparent time, and its relations in real time, had been explored in the Martha's Vineyard study, but here it is analyzed and explored in much greater detail.
We now have much more information than we had at that time on the extent to which adults change their language as they grow older. It is important to note that from the outset, there was no assumption that they did not: the task is “to distinguish the effects of linguistic change from the invariant effects of aging and from the modifying effects of the present situation upon older speakers.”]
The study of small differences in language behavior is concentrated upon the variable elements in linguistic structure; this procedure brings us inevitably to indications of linguistic change. Variability itself is change: but some types of variation are themselves invariant from generation to generation.We are particularly interested in gradual alterations of the linguistic habits of a population through the course of time, which will be referred to here as linguistic change. The explanation of linguistic change on a large scale is one of the primary goals of linguistics, and in the present work we hope to contribute to that end by the close examination of linguistic change in progress.
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- The Social Stratification of English in New York City , pp. 199 - 240Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006