Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the last four decades, studies of language variation have brought a new perspective to the problems of historical linguistics. Previously, diachronic studies had been largely confined by evidentiary limitations to post-hoc analysis of the end-products of language change. But beginning with William Labov's pioneering studies of sound change in Martha's Vineyard (1963) and New York City (1966), it has been possible to investigate language change in progress, while it is actually under way, and thus to study the social and linguistic mechanisms of change.Saying this is not to devalue the considerable achievements in this area of other historical methodologies. The linguistic aspects of change processes have been the subject of numerous insightful theoretical proposals, dating back to the Neogrammarians and beyond. The social spread of language change has been a matter of keen interest in dialectological studies, and early attempts to study sound change in progress can be found in works such as Gauchat (1905) and Hermann (1929). But it was Labov's focus on the fact of sociolinguistic variation, and the theoretical treatment of variation proposed by Weinreich et al. (1968), that opened the way to more intensive and productive study of change in progress.The focus on variation has opened up three new areas of investigation for studies of language change. First, studying change in the ... log in or subscribe to read full text