Investigating the Effect of Socio-Cognitive Salience and Speaker-Based Factors in Morpho-Syntactic Life-Span Change

Abstract

This article explores changes across the life-span of the individual speaker. Three morpho-syntactic variables that operate at different levels of socio-cognitive salience—quotation, stative possession, and future temporal reference—are traced across longitudinal trend and panel data. The analysis of a panel corpus that spans forty-two years reveals that linguistic malleability is contingent on the variables’ embedding in speakers’ cognitive-evaluative structures but also on a range of speaker-based factors, such as the speakers’ socio-economic trajectory, personality profile, as well as their type and intensity of contact with children and younger speakers. The study thus supports research that has shown that the adaptive behavior across the life-span results in complex outcomes that cannot be characterized by wholesale convergence or divergence.