"In most research on language change, the focus is on adults, and
children are usually ignored"
But maybe this is more methodology (access, largely), since I too was
always given to believe that young children were the absolute key, at
least for the type of change associated with "transmission"
("incrémentation", etc.). There's a great project starting up in
France under the direction of Jean-Pierre Chevrot, who is going to
study the spread of innovations in French by recording entire primary
school classes (for some hours each day, for a number of months?).
It's great to find ways to study language change right where we
believe much of it is happening!
As far as "awkward" ("is concerned", I would have _insisted_ on saying
20 years ago), I think I'm an adopter of the new sense, but as often
with newer slang, I sometimes wonder if I'm using it "wrong"
(differently from the kids). I would have said it's still different
from "weird" and still related to the earlier "awkward". But, even if
it "just means 'weird'", it could be part of a cultural and linguistic
turn towards the emotional and social, in speaking and in evaluating
language use. Here are a few examples of words and phrases on the rise
(omitting corpus-linguistic proof) that I feel [sic] represent this
trend:
I feel
awkward
offensive
inappropriate
call out on
And there must be positive examples too, which I may find myself less
often on the receiving end of... The idea (sorry I can't remember
where I read this) is that one is now tending to evaluate speech more
- or at least more so than previously - in terms of the emotional
reaction of the hearer, and the social consequences for the speaker,
rather than focusing on its "intellectual content". I think - or at
least feel - that much of "political correctness" and the debate
thereabout could be related to this "turn".
Dan
> Le 23 mars 2017 à 06:49, Troike, Rudolph C - (rtroike) <[log in to unmask]> a écrit :
>
> In most research on language change, the focus is on adults, and children are usually ignored
########################################################################
The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
[log in to unmask]
To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
|