Join the Department of English for the faculty speaker series featuring professor Robin Dodsworth and associate professor Rebecca Walsh. The talk will focus on ego network conditions facilitating the spread of under-the-radar linguistic changes.

Ego network conditions facilitating the spread of under-the-radar linguistic changes

One of the most interesting things about language, at least to a sociolinguist, is that it changes in complex ways without anyone noticing. While some ongoing linguistic changes attract public awareness and critique, most linguistic changes progress from one generation to the next, and diffuse within and between communities, under the radar. Remarkably, as linguistic changes travel through time and space, they carry ‘complex internal factors’ that are embedded in the grammar; this is important because it means that acquisition of the change requires repeated exposure. Recent sociological work on non-linguistic ‘complex contagions’ similarly finds that they spread between people only in the context of rich exposure, which is facilitated by certain social network conditions.

My long-term research project on language change in Raleigh has investigated the relationship between social network structures and linguistic changes. The most recent phase of this research focuses on under-the-radar linguistic changes and tests 3 hypotheses about the ego network characteristics of speakers who do and don’t participate in the changes. I will show data from the Raleigh corpus revealing the progression of the linguistic changes through time, as well as linguistic and social network data from a pilot study of the newest phase of the project. I will conclude with some observations about interdisciplinary work and grant proposal writing.

Bio:

Robin Dodsworth is Professor of English in the Linguistics program at NC State. Her research focuses on the relationship between linguistic variation and social structure, especially social network characteristics. Her publications include the book Language Variation and Change in Social Networks: A Bipartite Approach, co-authored with sociologist Richard Benton.

[Rebecca Walsh's abstract to come.]