Lecture 11: Language Variation
and Change
Last time:
 The Chomskyian approach to language


It’s not stimulus → response → reinforcement
conditioning
It’s a (non-mystical) faculty of the mind
This time:
 Implications of this idea for two sub-fields of
linguistics with a long history

Puts some of these questions in a new light and
forces one to think again about some traditional
questions and explanations
Introduction: I-language vs. E-language
 Chomsky – two conceptions of language

I-language (‘individual’, ‘internal’, a.o.)
 A mental system inside an individual person’s head
 These individual systems are enough the same to make
talking about ‘English’ or ‘Swahili’ appropriate for certain
kinds of discussions (cf. ‘the human heart’)

E-language (‘external’, a.o.)
 Out there in the word somewhere (texts/dictionaries/
grammar books, the community)
 Leonard Bloomfield – “the totality of utterances that can be
made in a speech community”

E-language assumptions v common in (nongenerative) variationist and historical contexts

Some general problems/issues wrt E-language


No issue of truth or falsity. Different theories/
methods for enumerating the set are equivalent.
‘Semi-grammatical’ sentences – are they in or out?
 If ‘in’, why aren’t they perfect?
 If ‘out’, why are they comprehensible?
 (Note: fuzzy sets aren’t the answer.)
1. Linguistic Variation
 On I-language conception:
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
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Nothing actually corresponds to English, Liverpool
English, different varieties of Tyneside English, etc.
There’s nothing but people and their brains
However, for certain questions we can (and do) treat
different groups as ‘the same’ (and it will vary,
depending on the question).

But on this view, many traditional
sociolinguistic questions/investigations are
irrelevant

Statistical facts about populations (e.g., a group of
100 speakers drop word-final /r/ on average 45% of
the time)
 These can’t be facts about individual speakers
 Or groups of speakers at some level of abstraction


If you seriously want to understand this fact,
probably going to end up being “the study of
everything”.
For Chomsky, variation is limited to
parameters of UG/functional categories
2. ‘Community’ Languages

Another problematic idea
(One kind of) variation shows
that language cannot be an
individual, I-language thing
Language exists independently
of any particular speaker
Sir Michael Dummett
(1925-2011)
An individual speaker has only
a partial (and sometimes wrong)
grasp of this ‘community
language’

Why would anybody think this?

A popular example: ‘elm’ vs. ‘beech’
I don’t know the difference between these, even
though one exists
 But there are experts, dictionaries, etc.
 These give me information about the ‘community
language’ of English that I don’t have as an
individual speaker


But I can be mistaken about my language, as
well as ignorant

What does ‘livid’ mean?

Chomsky sez: none of this threatens the Ilanguage perspective


People just have slightly different systems that
overlap, and people defer to experts about open
questions
Chomsky’s heuristic: would these facts be a problem
if they were about pronunciation?
3. Language Change
 Mark Hale (Concordia University): I-language
means we need to revisit certain questions and
issues in historical linguistics
 First what is language change?
(from Hale (1998: Figure 1))

But then what about the historical record?


Looks like many individual grammars share a
particular innovation
Only two logical possibilities:

One is that a large number of speakers made
identical ‘mistakes’ in acquiring their language at the
same time
 So the same innovation independently and simultaneously
arises in enough speakers to be reflected in the
historical record
 This seems implausible

The alternative: a particular change, on the
part of a particular speaker, has undergone
diffusion


A socially prestigious speaker comes into contact
with other speakers who try to acquire his/her
linguistic attributes. They then in turn influence
other speakers
A crucial point: there aren’t any linguistic
constraints on diffusion

Implications for language change: certain
traditional claims need to be rethought
It’s incoherent to talk about ‘change in progress’ or a
change that takes place over centuries (though talk
to Joel)
 The ‘change’ happens instantaneously
 However, once the change happens, it’s spread could
take decades or centuries, depending on innovator’s
social prestige, social networks he/she is connected
to, etc.


Also, certain traditional explanations need to be
rethought

A traditional driver of change (supposedly) –
simplification
 Latin sC- syllable clusters to Spanish esC- (e.g., sko:lam →
escuela ‘school’)
 From E-language perspective, Latin has more complex
syllable structure constraints while Spanish has simpler one

This raises serious questions from I-language perspective
 If ‘simplicity’ considerations are relevant for acquiring an I-
language, why aren’t they always operative?
 How could this drive language change?

Same deal with ‘functional’ explanations for
change (e.g., ease of articulation)


Why didn’t these considerations decisively influence
earlier generations of speakers?
Also not clear that any general theory of functional
and dysfunctional changes can be articulated (rather
than identifying after the fact some change as
functionally motivated).

Lightfoot’s (1997) account of the loss of verbsecond in English


V2: the verb follows the first constituent. (V to I to
C, then movement to Spec CP)
The story:
 Children in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (where V2 was
present) were exposed to a sufficient number of
speakers of more southern varieties (which didn’t have
V2), such that the total amount of V2 triggering data
fell below the threshold required for children in these
areas to acquire V2.
 So these new children developed grammars which
didn’t have V2.


But this story can’t be right given what we
already know about I-language acquisition
under conditions of non-homogeneity.
Children don’t mix variations in the PLD into a
hybrid which contains both. They’re just
streamed independently.


Consider the following two subjects, whose PLD
consists of a mixture of two different systems
For reference, let’s call system 1 “English” and
system 2 “Spanish”


Subjects like these don’t at the end of the
acquisition process have one grammar which is
a mixture of the two, or an X% chance of
acquiring “English” vs. a Y% chance of
acquiring “Spanish”.
What they acquire are two grammars, one for
English and one for Spanish


Crucially, from the I-language perspective,
there’s no distinction between different
‘languages’ and different ‘varieties’ of the same
language.
As expected, acquisition of different varieties
results in a similar process – people are bidialectal.

So, conclusion:

If we’ve decided that we want to study I-languages,
then we need to think very carefully about various
traditional arguments and explanations in the realm
of language variation and change. While some of
these may be sensible/coherent if one takes an Elanguage perspective, the shift to an I-language
perspective (which Chomsky suggests may be
independently desirable) requires that many of them
be re-examined.
Consolidation (All is revealed!)