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Community rules and speaker behavior: Individual adherence to group constraints on (ING)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Jon Forrest
Jon Forrest*
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University
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Abstract

This paper investigates the degree to which individual speakers follow the morphosyntactic hierarchy governing grammatical constraints on (ING) in the Southern U.S. city of Raleigh, North Carolina. (ING) was used as the variable of study for its well-studied internal constraints and comparability to previous studies on the internal constraints of t/d deletion. A lexical category constraint hierarchy for the community was determined via multivariate mixed-effects statistical models, and each speaker's (ING) pattern was compared to this hierarchy. Results show maintenance in grammatical constraints even when taking phonological factors into account, unlike some work on t/d deletion. Uniformity exists across speakers with respect to the ordering of internal constraints despite the overall decline in rates of –in over time, but constraint weights (expressed as log odds) vary significantly from speaker to speaker, with no correlates to social or internal factors. These results have consequences for representation of individuals in terms of an aggregate pattern, questioning the consistency of factor weight values at the speaker level despite consistent ordering of constraints.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , October 2015 , pp. 377 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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