An Emmet's tale: The duality of social and lexical change

Abstract

Stockwell and Minkova (2001: 34) state that ‘the lexicon is the language layer most responsive to socio-political and cultural changes’. Despite this, lexis has been labelled as the ‘Cinderella of sociolinguistics’ (Beal 2010; Durkin 2012) due to the lack of focus on this level of linguistic structure by variationist sociolinguists. This article redresses the dearth of lexis-oriented sociolinguistic studies by considering the ways in which the lexicon is responsive to cultural changes in Cornwall, UK, by providing a case-study of the polysemous noun emmet (‘ant’ or ‘tourist’). From a study of 80 speakers from Cornwall, I consider the variation and change of emmet from the perspectives of semasiological and onomasiological usage as well as its social meaning. I conclude that this article provides support for Stockwell & Minkova’s (2001) claim and that lexical variation can provide unique insights to the sociolinguistic endeavour and enable sociolinguists to tell new stories about language and society.