2007/03/14

Kerswill, P. (1996). Children, adolescents, and language change. Language Variation and Change, 8, 177–202.

Presentation: Renee
Summary: Sally

Language change depends on many factors. Focused on three different age groups (young children, preadolescents, and older adolescents), the author modeled linguistic changes by integrating social and developmental ones. A difficulty hierarchy for language acquisition was proposed: borrowing is the easiest, followed by Neogrammarian changes, which in turn is followed by lexically unpredictable changes. Moreover, if age group was also taken into consideration, lexically unpredictable changes were acquired only by young children, while older adolescents were believed as the most influential group in change transmission due to their network with younger children as well as their desire to pursue for social identity. The author concluded the study by stating that the proposed hierarchy and life-stage correspondence “provides us with a new way of approaching the mechanism behind language changes.”