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Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

James Milroy  and
Lesley Milroy
James Milroy
Affiliation:
Department of LinguisticsUniversity of Sheffield
Lesley Milroy
Affiliation:
Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
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Extract

This paper is concerned with the social mechanisms of linguistic change, and we begin by noting the distinction drawn by Bynon (1977) between two quite different approaches to the study of linguistic change. The first and more idealized, associated initially with traditional nineteenth century historical linguistics, involves the study of successive ‘states of the language’, states reconstructed by the application of comparative techniques to necessarily partial historical records. Generalizations (in the form of laws) about the relationships between these states may then be made, and more recently the specification of ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ processes of change has been seen as an important theoretical goal.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , September 1985 , pp. 339 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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