Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 3

Cognitive and Cultural Factors

William Labov

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444351460
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Sociolinguistics

Written by the world-renowned pioneer in the field of modern sociolinguistics, this volume examines the cognitive and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change, tracing the life history of these developments, from triggering events to driving forces and endpoints.

• Explores the major insights obtained by combining sociolinguistics with the results of dialect geography on a large scale
• Examines the cognitive and cultural influences responsible for linguistic change
• Demonstrates under what conditions dialects diverge from one another
• Establishes an essential distinction between transmission within the community and diffusion across communities
• Completes Labov's seminal Principles of Linguistic Change trilogy

1

Introduction to Cognitive and Cultural Factors in Linguistic Change

This third volume of Principles of Linguistic Change (henceforth PLC) has a broader scope and a broader database than the first two. Volume 1 investigated the internal factors that control change, beginning with a review of completed changes in the historical record and continuing with studies of change in progress. It examined the regularity of sound change and reviewed the evidence for functional explanations of linguistic change. Volume 2 looked at the social factors governing linguistic change and searched for the social location of the leaders of change, largely through a detailed study of ten Philadelphia neighborhoods. That volume also proposed models for the transmission and incrementation of change.

In the interim, there has appeared the Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006: henceforth ANAE). The Atlas provided the first national (and continental) view of the phonology of English as spoken in North America, on the basis of a study of 332 North American cities. It expanded the previous views of change in progress to a panorama of changes in vowel systems on a vast scale – changes that drive neighboring regions in opposing directions.

The Atlas finding of steadily increasing regional divergence in North American English sets the problem for Volume 3: What are the consequences of this increasing divergence? What are its origins? And what are the forces which continue to drive divergence over time? To answer these questions, the present volume will explore more deeply the internal factors considered in Volume 1, focusing on the cognitive factors that determine the capacity of the linguistic system to transmit information. It will also expand the social factors considered in Volume 2, moving from the study of face-to-face interaction in local neighborhoods to the development of large-scale cultural patterns across vast regions and over a time span of several centuries.

1.1 Cognitive Factors

In its most general sense, cognition denotes any form of knowing. The most relevant OED definition of cognition is “the action or faculty of knowing taken in its widest sense, including sensation, perception, conception, etc., as distinguished from feeling and volition.” Cognitive factors will here be used in a more limited sense: as factors that influence the acquisition of the linguistic system that conveys information on states of affairs – on what is being said rather than on the manner or style of expression. The study of the cognitive effects of sound change calls for a measure of listeners’ abilities to identify the phonemes in the stream of speech and so to retrieve the words intended by the speaker. Chapters 2 to 4 of this volume will draw upon a series of observations and experiments that preceded and indeed motivated the Atlas. These chapters will examine the cognitive consequences of the sound changes that differentiate the dialects of the major cities of Philadelphia, Chicago and Birmingham.

Cognitive factors will be further explored in Chapter 6, which reviews the general principles governing chain shifts and mergers, along with the underlying mechanism of probability matching. The cognitive basis of phonemic categories will be the focus of Chapters 13 and 14. Chapter 13 uses the massive database of ANAE to address the question of the regularity of sound change and to determine whether the fundamental unit of sound change is the phoneme or the word. Chapter 14 examines the binding force that unites the allophones of a given phoneme and operates so as to counter the disruptive effects of coarticulation. Age differences in cognitive processing will be central to Chapters 15 and 16. These chapters distinguish the transmission of linguistic forms by children from the diffusion of forms by adults, and so distinguish the family-tree model from the wave model of change.

1.2 Cultural Factors in Linguistic Change

Cognition is of course not limited to the content of what is being said, but is sensitive to systematic variation in the way in which the message is delivered, yielding information on the speakers’ social characteristics and relations to the addressee or audience. Volume 2 was concerned with such social factors in the study of linguistic change in ten Philadelphia neighborhoods from 1972 to 1979. The interviews, the narratives and the long-term ethnographic observations were focused on the effects of face-to-face interaction, as they are reflected in the studies of neighborhood effects in Chapter 7 and of social networks in Chapter 10. Cognitive aspects of that social variation were reported in Chapter 6 of Volume 2: they were the results of matched-guise experiments on the social values attributed to various stages of linguistic changes in progress. Philadelphians rarely referred to these vowel shifts when they talked about the city dialect, but showed greater sensitivity than expected to their social status in the matched-guise responses. Thus there was evidence of social cognition of linguistic change in Philadelphia – evidence which was parallel to the findings of field experiments in New York City (Labov 1966) – and this cognitive effect was partly responsible for the systematic differentiation of change by social class and gender. Section 10.4 of Volume 2 argued that the diffusion of linguistic change throughout the city followed the two-step model of influence of Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), and the leaders of linguistic change located in Chapter 12 were comparable to the opinion leaders defined in that model.

Volume 2 did not, however, resolve the problem of accounting for the uniform direction of sound change throughout the Philadelphia speech community, or for the uniformity of its structural base (Labov 1989b). Thus the raising of (æh) showed sharp stratification by social class, but no social differentiation at all as to which vowels were raised, as shown in the near-total agreement of Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Tensing and laxing of short a before /d/ in the spontaneous speech of 112 adults in the Philadelphia Neighborhood Study

	Tense	Lax
bad	143	0
mad	73	0
glad	18	1
sad	0	14
dad	0	10

The problem is to deduce what form of communication is responsible for the uniformity of this pattern. Our oldest upper-class speaker has the same short-a system as our oldest lower working-class speaker, and the chain of events that links them would be difficult to trace. At the time that Volume 2 was completed, enough evidence had emerged from ANAE to show that the problem was broader than Philadelphia, extending to the “extraordinary uniformity of the Northern Cities Shift throughout the Inland North, and the regional shifts of the South and Canada.” At the end of section 16.4 of Volume 2, the question was posed:

If the incrementation of these changes is driven by socially motivated projections, how can we explain the fact that they affect so many millions of people in widely separated cities who have no connection with each other? (p. 511)

Chapter 16 of Volume 2 developed the concept of “abstract polarities which may take the same form in many widely separated communities” (p. 514). The “abstract polarities” will here be termed cultural factors. In the terminology adopted here, cultural factors will be distinguished from other social factors in their generality and remoteness from simple acts of face-to-face communication. Thus neighborhood, ethnicity, social network and communities of practice can be considered social factors in linguistic change in the light of the transparency of the social processes responsible for the diffusion of change. At the same time, they are not as strongly correlated with change as the larger categories of gender and social class.

Throughout this volume, the term cognitive factors will be used to designate the processes of cognition in the limited sense defined in the preceding section: the ability to decode what is being said through the accurate identification of linguistic categories. The relationship between these factors and linguistic change will bear in both directions: the effect of linguistic change on cognitive factors, as in Chapters 2–4; and the effect of cognitive factors on linguistic change, as in Chapter 6. Social factors will designate the effects of linguistic interaction among members of specific social groups, including the recognition of these effects by members and nonmembers. Cultural factors will designate the association of linguistic change with broader social patterns that are partly, if not entirely, independent of face-to-face interaction. These must involve the cognitive processes that recognize such cultural patterns, though this volume has less to say about them.

In this terminology, are gender and social class to be categorized as social or as cultural factors? It depends on what we consider to be the main route in the diffusion of these traits. While children certainly learn gender roles from their parents, they also acquire a broader cultural construct of how men and women differ in their speech. Social class differences in language behavior are also more general and wide-ranging than any particular mechanism generated by face-to-face contact.¹

This volume will continue the line of thought developed in the final chapter of Volume 2, searching for the larger cultural factors responsible for the uniformity and continuity of linguistic change. Chapter 5 will examine the historical matrix in which current North American English sound changes originated, searching for their “triggering events.” Chapter 9 will review the various proposals for the social factors that motivate linguistic change, and conclude that the extent and uniformity of these changes must be accounted for by a cultural history that is at least in part independent of face-to-face interaction.

This uniformity represents only half of the deeper problem of explanation that emerges from the ANAE data. The other half concerns the divergence of neighboring regions which have been and remain in close contact. The sections to follow will outline the relevance of cognitive and cultural factors to our understanding of this most problematic aspect of linguistic change.

1.3 Convergence and Divergence

Efforts to understand human language over the past two centuries may be sharply divided into two distinct undertakings. Both spring from an acknowledgment that language, like the species that uses it, had a single origin. Given this perspective, one task is to discover those constant properties of language that reflect the innate biological endowment of the human species – the language faculty. The other, equally challenging, task is to discover the causes of the present diversity among the languages of the world. As part of a general redirection towards a historical perspective on the understanding of language, this volume will focus on the problem of divergence: how linguistic systems that were once the same have come to be different.

The mere fact of diversity is usually not a challenge to our understanding of the mechanisms of linguistic change, even when we cannot trace the exact historical paths leading to such divergence. When two groups of speakers become separated over time through migration to distant parts, and communication between them is drastically reduced, we expect their linguistic systems to diverge. The many sources of variation in vocabulary, grammar and phonology will inevitably lead them to drift apart. We are not surprised that the phonology of English, transplanted from continental Europe in the fifth century AD, is now much different from that of the West Germanic languages Frisian or Low German. One would not expect, for instance, that the same lexical replacements that operate at the rate of 15 percent per millennium, as predicted by glottochronology, would occur on both sides of the North Sea. The normal work of historical linguistics is then devoted to describing the divergence that follows from reduced contact and to extracting the general principles that determine what form and direction this divergence will take. When such distant relatives converge on parallel paths, we are surprised and puzzled. Trudgill’s studies of the convergence of postcolonial English dialects in the Southern Hemisphere (2004) are a case in point.

On the other hand, we are not surprised when neighboring dialects converge. The diffusion of linguistic features across dialects has been studied in considerable detail by Trudgill (1986) and more recently reviewed by Auer and Hinskens (1996). They show how the effects of dialect contact lead to the reduction of dialect diversity in the form of “dialect leveling” or, in more extreme cases, koineization: the formation of new patterns of an “historically mixed but synchronically stable” dialect (Trudgill 1986: 107). Bloomfield’s principle of accommodation leads us to expect such dialect leveling:

[1] Every speaker is constantly adapting his speech-habits to those of his interlocutors. (Bloomfield 1933: 476)

However, when two groups of speakers living side by side, in daily communication, begin to speak differently from one another, we encounter a type of divergence that calls for an explanation. To sum up,

[2a] When two speech communities are separated so that communication between them is reduced, then divergence is expected, and any degree of convergence requires an explanation.

[2b] When two speech communities are in continuous communication, linguistic convergence is expected, and any degree of divergence requires an explanation.

This volume will confront the problem of explanation for a number of changes of the type [2b], as they are described in ANAE.

1.4 The Darwinian Paradox Revisited

An inquiry into the causes of divergence returns us to the issue raised in Chapter 1 of the second volume of this series, the “Darwinian Paradox” – an issue repeated here as [3]:

[3] The evolution of species and the evolution of language are identical in form, although the fundamental mechanism of the former is absent in the latter.

The fundamental mechanism referred to here is natural selection. Darwin cited Max Müller’s argument that words become better (more fit) as they become shorter; but the vast majority of linguists have been skeptical of such claims. The position of Hermann Paul on the functionality of sound change is prototypical of that of the the many scholars cited in Chapter 1 of Volume 2:

[4] [T]he symmetry of any system of forms meets in sound change an incessant and aggressive foe. It is hard to realize how disconnected, confused, and unintelligible language would gradually become if it had patiently to endure all the devastations of sound change. (Paul 1970: 202)

Paul’s evaluation of sound change is based on its relation to the fundamental cognitive function of language: to convey information about states of affairs across temporal and spatial dimensions. One can indeed find many analogies between social variation and communicative acts among nonhuman species in the signaling of territoriality, of local and personal identity, and of accommodation in terms of domination and submission (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990, 2007). However, an understanding of human language demands an accounting of how linguistic change and diversity relate to the unique capacity of human language to convey truth-conditional information and thereby adapt successfully to real-world conditions. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 will report observations and experiments that evaluate the effect of the sound changes discussed in V...