Entrenchment in Cognitive Sociolinguistics

Variation and change in TH-Fronting in central Scotland

Lynn Clark and Graeme Trousdale

University of Edinburgh

Outline of presentation

� Theoretical overview: entrenchment in social and linguistic cognition

� Details of the corpus and the linguistic variation and change under discussion

� Synthesis

How usage-based is Cognitive Linguistics?

“it is impossible to take seriously the claim that Cognitive Linguistics is a usage-based approach and at the same time to neglect the social aspects of language use”(Geeraerts 2001: 53)

� New work on dialectology and sociolinguistics of English within various CL frameworks:� Word Grammar analysis of sociolinguistic variation in the

morphosyntax of Buckie Scots (Hudson 2007b)� Construction Grammar analysis of the linguistics of (in)alienable

possession in Lancashire English (Hollmann and Siewierska2007)

� Cognitive Grammar sketch of linguistic variation correlated withgender, sexuality and communities of practice (Watson 2006)

How theoretical is sociolinguistics?“if sociolinguistics is to progress from description to explanation…it is obviously in need of a theory linking the ‘linguistic’ to the ‘socio’.” (Cameron 1997:59)

� But again recent work on British English has tried to establish links between formal linguistic theory and sociolinguistic theory:� Trousdale (2002) on phonological variation and

sociolinguistic patterns in Tyneside English using principles of Lexical Phonology

� Adger and Smith (2005): a Minimalist analysis of morphosyntactic variation in Buckie Scots

On social and linguistic categorization (1)

� Exemplars and knowledge of sounds (e.g. Bermudez-Otero 2007, Docherty and Foulkes 2000, Foulkes 2007, Pierrehumbert 2006)

� Exemplars and social categorization (e.g. Rothbart and Lewis 1988)

� Critical issues are:� evidence that linguistic and social categories are formed using the

same cognitive methods (cf. Hudson 1996)� principle of multiple inheritance holds true for both linguistic and

non-linguistic category membership (cf. Hudson 2007a)� central and peripheral members of both social and linguistic

categories are established by principles of full and partial sanction (cf. Langacker 1987, 1991)

On social and linguistic categorization (2)

In relation to sociophonological theory: Mompeán-Gonzalez (2004: 442) and speakers’ procedural knowledge of phonetic variants and their sociolinguistic correlates:

“the phoneme category /t/, for example, could be conceived of as a category of sounds embedded in a wider network of knowledge structures from which the relevant attributes characterizing the category are drawn”

LC: wid ye say somehing like, wan eh the wans that iyewiz jumps oot at me is somehing like eh shree

S: is the magic number LC: ayeS: a never ever say shree likeLC: nuhE: three S: shree, threeLC: only ever three? S: ayeLC: would ye ever say free? S: noh cos then yer a mink LC: really? S: free, oh aye E: oh aye, tinkyLC: ye hear folk saying it though eh? S: free aye it just makes ye sound stupit

On the application of CG to linguistic and social categorization

� Entrenchmentfrequency; gradient; unit status� Schematicity� Full and partial sanction

The data

� 370,000 words

� Ethnographic technique of long-term participant observation (Eckert 2000)

� 38 hours of speech

� 54 speakers from West Fife High pipe band (WFHPB)

� Constellation of Communities of Practice (CofP) (Wenger 1998:216).

Motivations behind the spread of th-fronting

� Previous research on th-fronting has viewed this as a socially motivated change that is driven by working class adolescent males

� Difficult to explain variation

� Are there any ‘linguistic’ factors influencing this variation?

‘Social’ factor groups

� Individual speaker� Age of speaker� Sex of speaker� Community of practice

membership� Length of time in the pipe

band� Area of residence

‘Linguistic’ factor groups� Lexical frequency� Preceding phonological

context� Following phonological

context� Presence/absence of a

word boundary� Effect of a preceding [f] in

the word� Place of (th) in the syllable� Place of (th) in the word� Type of lexical item

Varbrul factor groups Goldvarb X (Sankoff et al (2005)

Multivariate analysis of the contribution of factors selected as significant to the probability of (th): [f]. Factor groups not selected as significant are not shown in this table.

Corrected mean 0.52 Log Likelihood -

401.980 Total N 784 Factor

weight % of (th): [f]

N

Community of practice membership A “They act hard all the time”/ “fancy tune folk” 0.71 67 49 B “Tiny wee pipers” 0.95 93 56 C “The new folk” 0.89 85 59 D “Pipe band geeks”/ “Ex-Dream Valley” 0.10 7 27 E “comedians” /“Same dress sense, same music taste, same easy going attitude”

0.32 32 28

F “Fun/up for a laugh, not very serious” 0.75 75 24 G “that’s a fake ID son” 0.58 59 34 H “senior drummers”/”pipe band geeks” 0.09 9 76 I “one big happy family” 0.45 45 20 J “On the fringe” 0.21 23 57 K “13 goin on 30” 0.60 59 39 L “goths”/ “new lassie pipers” 0.51 55 87 M “Lazy PPl!” 0.31 30 78 O “Under agers” 0.48 44 32 P “Novice tenor section ‘WILD’!!” 0.79 78 45 Q No CofP affiliation 0.35 34 73 Range 86 Preceding [f] in the word Preceding [f] 0.81 68 22 No preceding [f] 0.49 48 762 Range 32 Syllable structure (th) in coda position 0.58 55 298 (th) in onset position 0.37 38 486 Range 21 Type of lexical item Place names and proper names 0.42 48 351 Ordinals 0.42 39 324 All other lexical items 0.61 53 109 Range 19 Frequency of lexical item Low frequency 0.41 39 242 Low-Mid frequency 0.47 57 148 High-Mid frequency 0.53 60 139 High frequency 0.58 48 255 Range 17

How much can a Cognitive analysis of the data ‘buy’ us?

Quantitative Cognitive Sociolinguistics� First step towards ‘cognitive

sociolinguistics’ – including ‘cognitive’factors in the multivariate analysis

� Necessary to also include aspects of usage-based models in order to explain the results of these cognitive factors

The social meaning of th-fronting

� What is the nature of the relationship between social meaning and linguistic variation or “how do variables mean?” (Eckert 2002:4)

� Media speculation: Scottish youngsters are being “influenced by Frank Butcher and other Cockneys in Eastenders” (Daily Record, 27th June 2000; cited in Stuart-Smith et al. 2007: 221).

� BUT: strong anti-English attitude, seems unlikely that th-fronting is the result of conscious accommodation toward an ‘English’ stereotype

Th-fronting = ‘local’?

� For those speakers who have conscious awareness of this change, they regard it as an entirely local feature:

LC: dae you associate it wi English folk? N: what thanks wi a-an f? LC: mmN: nuh a wid eh said it wiz em, nah more a Fife way eh saying it

Th-fronting = ‘youth norm’?

� Suggestions that th-fronting may be part of a new set of ‘youth norms’ that are associated with ‘trendy and hip London lifestyles’ and ‘youth culture’ (e.g. Docherty and Foulkes 1999: 15, Milroy and Gordon 2003: 134)

� But labelling this feature as a ‘youth norm’ tells us nothing about the type of youths who are driving this change.

Th-fronting = ‘rough’?

49670.71“They act hard all the time”/ “fancy tune folk”

45780.77“Novice tenor section ‘WILD’!!”

24750.77“Fun/up for a laugh, not very serious”

59850.88“The new folk”

56930.94“Tiny wee pipers”

N% of (th): [f]

Factor weight

CofPs which strongly favour (th): [f]

Young

“Tiny wee pipers”

“New folk”

Inexperienced/peripheral

“Novice tenor section”

“Fancy tune folk”

Experienced/centralRough

“Fun/up for a laugh”

Interpreting social meaning in a CG framework

� Speakers abstract over salient displays of style and then create schematic categories.

� Non-modularity allows connections to be made in the mind between social and linguistic knowledge in cognition.

� Repeated co-activation and, entrenchment of particular nodes and links in the cognitive network enables the individual to associate social knowledge with particular linguistic variants and for these variants, in turn, to take on social meaning.

� ‘Th-fronting’ does not have the same social meaning for everyone :“The bottom line is that more than one group of speakers can use the same variable – but differences in the practices of these speakers will imbue that same variable with different meanings.”(Moore 2003: 11).

� This is entirely predictable in a usage-based model with multiple inheritance

Summary and conclusion� We outlined main theoretical assumptions of our

approach to ‘cognitive sociolinguistics’

� We analysed th-fronting using varbrul and showed that a synthesis between sociolinguistics and CL is beneficial in a number of ways:

� Include ‘cognitive’ factor groups and usage-based theory in the analysis of variation

� Through usage-based approaches we can understand the existence of variation in social meaning within a community

� Through non-modularist approaches to knowledge we can understand how social meaning is ‘attached’ to language

ReferencesAdger, D. & J. Smith (2005). Variation and the Minimalist Program. In Cornips, L. & K.

Corrigan (eds.) Syntax and variation: reconciling the biological and the social.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 149-178.

Bybee, Joan (2007) Frequency of use and the organization of language. Oxford: OUP.Cameron, Deborah (1997) ‘Demythologizing sociolinguistics’. In Coupland, Nikolas

and Adam Jaworski (eds.) Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. 55-68.

Docherty, G. and P. Foulkes. (2000). ‘Speaker, speech and knowledge of sounds’. in Burton-Roberts, N., Carr, P. & Docherty, G.J. (eds.) Phonological knowledge: conceptual and empirical issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 105-129.

Eckert, Penelope (2000) Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity at Belten High. (Language in Society 27.) Oxford: Blackwell.

Foulkes, P(2007). Phonological variation: a global perspective. In Aarts, B. & McMahon, A.M.S. (eds.) Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Geeraerts, Dirk (2001). ‘On measuring lexical convergence’. In Augusto Soares da Silva (ed.), Linguagem e Cognição. A Perspectiva da Linguística Cognitiva 51-61. Braga: Associação Portuguesa de Linguística

Hollmann, W. and A. Siewierska (2007). ‘A construction grammar account of possessive constructions in Lancashire dialect: some advantages and challenges’. English Language and Linguistics 11.

Hudson, R.A (2007a) Language networks: the new Word Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hudson, R. (2007b).’English dialect syntax in Word Grammar’. English Language and Linguistics 11.

Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar volume 1. Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: University of Stanford Press.

Mompeán-Gonzalez, J (2004). ‘Category overlap and neutralization: the importance of speakers’ classifications in phonology’. Cognitive Linguistics 15: 429-469.

Pierrehumbert, J. (2002) ‘Word-specific phonetics’. In Gussenhoven, C. and N. Warner (eds.) Laboratory Phonology 7. Berlin: Mouton, 117-139.

Sankoff, D., Tagliamonte, S., Smith, E. (2005). Goldvarb X: A variable rule application for Macintosh and Windows. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto. http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Goldvarb/GV_index.htm.

Stuart-Smith, Jane and Timmins, Claire (2006) ‘The role of the lexicon in TH-fronting in Glaswegian’. Costerus. The Power of Words: Essays in Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics. No. 163. 171-184.

Stuart-Smith, Jane; Timmins, Claire and Fiona Tweedie (2007). ‘ “Talkin’Jockney?” Variation and change in Glaswegian accent’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11 (2): 221-260.

Trousdale, G. (2002). ‘Variable ambisyllabicity’. English Language and Linguistics 6Watson, K. 2006. 'Language & gender meets theoretical phonology: bridging the

pedagogic gap?' Paper presented at the BAAL Special Interest Group on Issues in teaching Language, Gender and Sexuality in Further and Higher Education. Liverpool Hope University.

Wenger, Etienne (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.