Connecting the Individual and the Community in Sociolinguistic Panel Research

Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen V. Beaman (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

326 Seiten

2025
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-41308-2 (ISBN)

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This collection, the third in a series of three volumes, engages with key questions in panel study research by exploring more deeply the interrelationship between the individual and the community and the impact on language change across the lifespan.

This collection engages with key questions in panel study research by exploring more deeply the interrelationship between the individual and the community and the impact on language change across the lifespan.

The book is organized around four broad themes, each followed by a forward-looking commentary that ties together the key findings from the individual chapters. The first section examines style and socio-indexicality with the goal of disentangling short-term style-shifting from long-term language change. The second section continues with a focus on style, examining audience design and socially meaningful variation in professional settings as an integral component of age- and role-appropriate behavior. The third section considers different language/dialect contact scenarios and the impact on changing social identities and behavioural norms, which can fluctuate across the lifespan for different settings and life-stages and for different types of variables. The final section explores a computational, agent-based model of lifespan and community change, targeting the practical challenges often encountered in panel research, such as data sparsity and the short duration of the human lifespan. A postscript underscores the importance of considering style and setting as integral aspects of panel research rather than as afterthoughts and of leveraging computational modeling to expand our understanding of the interdependencies between lifespan and community change.

This book will appeal to scholars interested in language variation and change, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and computational linguistics.

Isabelle Buchstaller is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Karen V. Beaman is Lecturer in the Quantitative Linguistics department at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Towards an understanding of stylistic choices in change across the lifespan

Isabelle Buchstaller and Karen V. Beaman

PART I. Style and Socioindexicality

Ageing in style: Towards disentangling style-shifting and lifespan change

James Grama, Isabelle Buchstaller, Anne-Marie Moelders, Lea Bauernfeind and Mirjam Eiswith

Investigating age effects in the perception of (ing): A study on professionalism ratings from the North East of England

Johanna Mechler

Change in language attitudes in real-time: Results from the Ulrichsberg project in Austria

Lars Bülow, Philip C. Vergeiner, and Dominik Wallner

Commentary – Style and social meaning across the lifespan

Suzanne Evans Wagner

PART II. Style and Audience Design

Tracking stylistic variation over a very long lifespan

Laurel MacKenzie

Stability, change and reversal in public speech: A longitudinal case study

Josiane Riverin-Coutlée and Jonathan Harrington

Commentary – Exploring Stylistic Repertoires Across the Lifespan

Silvina Bongiovanni, Betsy Sneller, and Chantal Tetreault

PART III. Language Contact

Change and Stability: Intra- and inter-individual coherence across the linguistic architecture

Karen V. Beaman

Lifespan change and intragenerational norms in a diverse speech community: Australian English diphthongs

Elena Sheard

A panel study of language obsolescence: The fate of (ɡ) in a Pacific Japanese colonial koiné

Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain

Commentary – Complex contact scenarios in the context of individual lifespan change

Devyani Sharma

PART IV. Computational Modeling

Structured heterogeneity in language change as a result of inter-speaker heterogeneity

Gareth J. Baxter, Richard A. Blythe, and William Croft

Commentary – The past, present and future of language and aging research

David Bowie

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	31.10.2025
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Studies in Language Change
Zusatzinfo	33 Tables, black and white; 37 Line drawings, black and white; 2 Halftones, black and white; 57 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	810 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-032-41308-5 / 1032413085
ISBN-13	978-1-032-41308-2 / 9781032413082
Zustand	Neuware