Abstract
The traditional focus of variationist sociolinguistic research is the patterning of language variation at the level of the community, which individual language users are said to learn and reproduce (Labov 1972; 2012). In this paper, I observe that, although members of a speech community may all have learned the same grammar of a sociolinguistic variable, they may nonetheless produce that variable in ways which obscure this. This “perturbation,” I argue, is epiphenomenal, stemming from at least two possible sources: individual differences in mental representations, and individual differences in speech production planning. Moreover, I demonstrate that these differences are not only inter-individual; they can also be intra-individual, such that speakers may undergo age-grading which disrupts their patterning of a variable from how they previously produced it. I ask whether these individual differences may give rise to changes in constraints in the same way that individual differences can lead to sound change. The paper concludes with a call for more research that integrates sociolinguistic, formal, and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of language variation and change.
Highlights
A growing line of inquiry in the area of sound change research concerns whether and how individual differences play a role in actuating changes
In a review of the literature, Stevens & Harrington (2014) identify four types of individual differences that may initiate sound change: (i) articulatory differences in how speakers produce sounds; (ii) cognitive differences in how listeners perceive sounds; (iii) differences in how speakers link perception and production (Beddor 2009; 2012); and (iv) the extent to which individuals are sensitive to the range of variation they hear over their lifetimes
I demonstrate that we can find cases of covert representational variation in which a speaker’s having a different mental representation for some form causes them to produce the constraints on a sociolinguistic variable that affects that form in a community-divergent way
Summary
A growing line of inquiry in the area of sound change research concerns whether and how individual differences play a role in actuating changes. To give just a few examples, this has been documented for an effect of grammatical class on [iŋ]∼[in] variation across American, British, Australian, and New Zealand Englishes (Labov 1989a; Bell & Holmes 1992; Tagliamonte 2004; Forrest 2015); for an effect of following segment on variable coronal stop deletion in English word-final consonant clusters ( known as “t/d-deletion,” and “(TD)”; see Tamminga 2018 for a recent review of literature on varieties as diverse as American English, Singapore English, and Nigerian English); and for an effect of following segment on l-vocalization in Australian and New Zealand Englishes (Horvath & Horvath 2003) Some of these cases of cross-community uniformity are due to the shared constraint being grounded in universal principles of articulation: for instance, Tamminga (2018) attributes the widespreadness of the following segment effect on (TD) to a process of resyllabification that occurs when coronal stops appear in prevocalic position. I suggest that this situation sows the seeds for constraint change, eventually leading to community-level constraint divergence like we find in the cases cited above
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