Connecting the Individual and the Community in Sociolinguistic Panel Research by Buchstaller, Isabelle; Beaman, Karen V.;

Short description:

This collection, the third in a series of three volumes, 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.

Long 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 for different settings and life-stages and for different types of variables. The final section explores a computational, 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.

Table of Contents:

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

1. Towards an understanding of stylistic choices in change across the lifespan

Isabelle Buchstaller and Karen V. Beaman

PART I. Style and Socioindexicality

1. Ageing in style: Towards disentangling style-shifting and lifespan change

James Grama, Isabelle Buchstaller, Anne-Marie Moelders, Lea Bauernfeind and Mirjam Eiswith

1. Investigating age effects in the perception of (ing): A study on professionalism ratings from the North East of England

Johanna Mechler

1. Change in language attitudes in real-time: Results from the Ulrichsberg project in Austria

Lars Bülow, Philip C. Vergeiner, and Dominik Wallner

1. Commentary ? Style and social meaning across the lifespan

Suzanne Evans Wagner

PART II. Style and Audience Design

1. Tracking stylistic variation over a very long lifespan

Laurel MacKenzie

1. Stability, change and reversal in public speech: A longitudinal case study

Josiane Riverin-Coutlée and Jonathan Harrington

1. Commentary ? Exploring Stylistic Repertoires Across the Lifespan 

Silvina Bongiovanni, Betsy Sneller, and Chantal Tetreault

PART III. Language Contact

1. Change and Stability: Intra- and inter-individual coherence across the linguistic architecture

Karen V. Beaman

1. Lifespan change and intragenerational norms in a diverse speech community: Australian English diphthongs

Elena Sheard

1. A panel study of language obsolescence: The fate of (?) in a Pacific Japanese colonial koiné

Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain

1. Commentary ? Complex contact scenarios in the context of individual lifespan change

Devyani Sharma

PART IV. Computational Modeling

1. Structured heterogeneity in language change as a result of inter-speaker heterogeneity

Gareth J. Baxter, Richard A. Blythe, and William Croft

1. Commentary ? The past, present and future of language and aging research

David Bowie

Index