WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students. The Faculty of English welcomes everyone to a lecture on Language Change Across the Lifespan by Prof. Dr. Isabelle Buchstaller from University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. The lecture will take place on April 26, 2018, at 6:30 p.m. in room C1, Collegium Novum.
by
Prof. Dr. Isabelle Buchstaller
This talk explores the question to which extent individual speakers change their linguistic behaviour across their lifespan. I explore a small panel sample of six speakers recorded in 1971 and again in 2013 in in the urban community of Tynesidein the North East of England. The analysis relies on two variables differentiated by the level of linguistic structure at which they are situated: The realisation of (t) as well as the expression of stative possession. The notion of what constitutes a change in speaker’s grammar is a contentious one and my talk explores the comparability of results yielded by different heuristics commonly employed in empirical linguistics. The results are complex yet consistent across the two variables: A sub-set of speakers participate in community wide patterns. But while the unstable behaviour of these speakers across their lifespan provides support that our internal grammar can and indeed does change across the lifespan (McKenzie 2014), ongoing work needs to model in more detail the factors that condition the extent to which speakers replicate patterns in the community that surrounds them. The kind of scaling up and down between individual and community grammars (Meyerhoff and Klaere 2017) addresses the important question of how variation in the individual is related to variation in the community (Guy 1980).
Prof. Dr. Isabelle Buchstaller is a Professor of English Linguistics and Language history at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Her main areas of expertise are language variation and change, corpus linguistics and models and methods for collecting and analyzing linguistic data. She is particularly interested in dialectal, morpho-syntactic and discourse phenomena. She has worked on a range of varieties of English, most notably on Hawaiian Creole, Tyneside English, Californian English and most recently on the variety of English spoken in the Marshall Islands. She is interested in global trends and contact-induced changes in the English language, which invariably brings up typological questions as regards the underlying causes of linguistic variability and change. She is the director of the newly created Sociolinguistics Lab in Essen.
