The community grammar and individual grammars

This paper uses data from rhoticity variation in Bristol English to investigate the nature of constraints on sociolinguistic variables and the relationship between the grammars of individuals and the community grammar. The identification of the community grammar as the object of study and the relationship between community grammar and individual grammars allow a number of interpretations. Firstly, we might define the speech community as a community of individuals who share the same variable grammar (i.e., a system of constraints) and evaluative norms. Under this understanding, studying the grammar of the speech community is equivalent in definition to studying the grammars of individuals within it; this is probably the most common understanding (Tamminga, MacKenzie, & Embick, Reference Tamminga, MacKenzie and Embick2016:307; cf., Labov, Reference Labov1966). Secondly, we might define the speech community independently (by shared location, overlapping social networks, other shared cultural practices, etc.) but assume that all individuals within it share the same grammar. In this case, studying the grammar of the speech community is assumed to be a good proxy for studying the grammar of individuals. This is implicit, for example, in work which attempts to determine a formal representation for variation in historical data reflecting multiple speakers (e.g., Abramowicz, Reference Abramowicz2008; Nevins & Parrott, Reference Nevins and Parrott2010; Santorini, Reference Santorini1992, Reference Santorini1994). Thirdly, we could avoid the question by asserting that the grammars of individuals are entirely outside the scope of study, as Labov did when he wrote that “the individual does not exist as a unit of linguistic analysis” (Reference Labov, Celata and Calamai2014:18). Under this conception, individual grammars could be largely uniform and identical to the community grammar (as is Labov's position: “The end result [of native acquisition] is a high degree of uniformity in both the categorical and variable aspects of language production, where individual variation is reduced below the level of linguistic significance” [Labov, Reference Labov, Celata and Calamai2014:17]), or could vary substantially and arbitrarily relative to it.

The assumption that groups of individuals in a given location whose social networks overlap share near identical grammars has been tested. Guy (Reference Guy and Labov1980) investigated t/d deletion in Philadelphia and New York speakers, concluding that individual deviations from the overall constraint hierarchy merely reflected statistical noise, with two exceptions to prove the rule: the effect of a following pause, which differed systematically between New York and Philadelphia speakers, demonstrating that these represented different speech communities, and a morphological condition that differed between middle-class adults and others. Meyerhoff and Walker (Reference Meyerhoff and Walker2007:353–359), investigating variable zero copula in Caribbean English, found no differences between the community grammar and the grammars of speakers who had spent a significant time away from the community as adults.

However, Horvath and Horvath (Reference Horvath and Horvath2003), in a study of l-vocalization in New Zealand and Australian English datasets, found individual deviations in sizes, relative orders, and even directions of effects, although they pointed out that “the percentage of individuals was quite small and statistical fluctuation cannot be ruled out” (Horvath & Horvath, Reference Horvath and Horvath2003:167). Forrest, investigating (ing) in the English of Raleigh, North Carolina, with the caveat that “a reorganization of the hierarchy of internal constraints never truly occurs” (Reference Forrest2015:400), went so far as to say that “it would be overstating the case to say that an aggregate representation of constraint weight values accurately represents all members of the community; rather, they seem to represent a central tendency of speakers, given enough speakers in a corpus” (Reference Forrest2015:401).

Beyond the empirical findings, there is a particular conceptual problem with features undergoing change due to contact. The transmission-diffusion distinction (Labov, Reference Labov2007) suggests that, due to the degraded language-learning ability of adults, when features are transferred among adult speakers (diffusion) rather than from adults to children (transmission), the grammatical detail of those features is disrupted and their complexity reduced. This is proposed to give rise to a distinction between features that have spread into communities from the outside and, therefore, show the disrupted signature of diffusion and undisrupted features with a long history of community-internal transfer. The argument is that the agents of transfer between communities must be mobile adults, and so the mechanism must be diffusion. Intercommunity contact will often involve many independent agents traveling in both directions and will be spread over a longer time; such agents will undergo different degrees of contact-induced adult change (diffusion) at different times. Thus, we must assume that both undisrupted grammars and many grammars with differently disrupted systems of constraints enter such speech communities.

Additionally, longitudinal studies of various ongoing changes have found that a subset of speakers participate in changes during their adulthoods (lifespan change) (e.g., Buchstaller, Reference Buchstaller2006; Raumolin-Brunberg, Reference Raumolin-Brunberg, Nevala, Nurmi and Palander-Collin2009; Sankoff & Blondeau, Reference Sankoff and Blondeau2007). Some studies (such as Blondeau, Reference Blondeau2006; Bowie, Reference Bowie2005; Sankoff & Wagner, Reference Sankoff and Wagner2006; Wagner & Sankoff, Reference Wagner and Sankoff2011) even find retrograde lifespan change—perhaps a sign of advanced changes of which speakers are highly conscious (Sankoff, Reference Sankoff, Bayley, Cameron and Lucas2013:10). The point here is that adults do participate in change, including changing their underlying vernacular grammar (Sankoff & Blondeau, Reference Sankoff, Blondeau, van de Helde, van Hout, Demolin and Zonnevelde2010:15–17; Sankoff & Blondeau, Reference Sankoff, Blondeau, Spreafico and Vietti2013; contra Meyerhoff & Walker, Reference Meyerhoff and Walker2007). This must be understood, in at least some cases, as diffusion, and so we should expect those adults who have undertaken large enough lifespan change to exhibit disrupted grammars for their newly acquired features.

The question then is: if we have a change spreading into a speech community from outside (diffusion) in which some adults are participating (lifespan change), is the end result still somehow a variable grammar that is consistent across individuals? Do learners manage to settle on a common core of constraints that they then reproduce faithfully (koinéization?), or is input variation from the diffusers so great that our transmitters, too, end up with disagreeing grammars?

Mechanisms behind statistical effects

There is good reason to think that not all statistical effects on variable linguistic phenomena reflect constraints in the grammar. Guy (Reference Guy, Hinskens, van Hout and Wetzels1997) distinguished between articulatory universals, which reflect physiological properties of the articulators, functional universals, and the truly linguistic, variety-specific constraints that can evolve from these two types. Horvath and Horvath (Reference Horvath and Horvath2003), investigating l-vocalization, aimed to discover which effects are constant across varieties (‘scale-independent,’ in their vocabulary) and which are variety-specific (‘scale-dependent’) on the assumption that effects that are constant may reflect universal phonetic processes, whereas those that are specific must be “open to social intervention” (Horvath & Horvath, Reference Horvath and Horvath2003:148). Nagy and Irwin (Reference Nagy and Irwin2010) compared constraints from past studies of rhoticity to identify which can and cannot vary between varieties, suggesting that only those which can vary should be used as metrics for relatedness. Tamminga, MacKenzie, and Embick(Reference Tamminga, MacKenzie and Embick2016) distinguished three types of effects:

1. 1. ‘s-conditioning’ = sociostylistic factors

2. 2. ‘i-conditioning’ = internal linguistic factors

3. 3. ‘p-conditioning’ = physical and cognitive factors

These types differ in their relationship to the grammar: i-conditioning is clearly part of the grammar; s-conditioning might fall inside or outside the grammar, depending on your theoretical orientation and whether we are talking about the community grammar or the individual grammar; p-conditioning is clearly outside the grammar. A necessary caveat here is that, over time, p-conditioning can give rise to s- and i-conditioning (see also, Janda & Joseph, Reference Janda, Joseph, Blake and Burridge2003). They also differ in their universality: p-conditioning is universal (even if factors such as short-term memory capacity vary between speakers, they do not vary between populations), whereas i-conditioning and s-conditioning are variety- and/or community-specific. There are potential exceptions to this. It is perfectly conceivable that a variable i- or s-conditioning factor might counteract an invariant p-conditioning factor, giving the appearance of an inconsistent p-conditioning factor. Likewise, it is perfectly conceivable that, within a given set of varieties, an s- or i-conditioning factor might happen to be universal, especially if the varieties in question are related. Nevertheless, we can expect these broad tendencies to hold. Note also that they seem to hold at the level of individuals: in Horvath and Horvath's study (Reference Horvath and Horvath2003:160–161), it appeared that an effect that was more consistent across communities was also more consistent across individuals within a community.

The problem

If there is considerable interindividual disagreement in variable grammars (constraint hierarchy variation), then effects that have conflicting directions for different speakers will tend to cancel each other out in pooled data. With pooled data, we will most consistently be able to identify effects that reflect universal physical and cognitive factors (i.e., p-conditioning), since these will usually be invariable across individuals: but these effects are precisely those that are not part of the grammar. Effects that are part of the grammar (i-conditioning) will only emerge from analyses of pooled data if they are shared by most speakers or are very strong for the subset of speakers to whom they apply. What is more, the exact composition of the sample from the speech community may have a decisive effect on what effects we find.

This problem is most acute for studies that compare constraint hierarchies identified from different populations of speakers to make arguments about community identities and histories. Examples are studies that compare constraint hierarchies for variable phenomena in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to the grammars of English-lexifier creoles to interrogate the possibility that AAVE is the descendent of such a creole (e.g., Cukor-Avila, Reference Cukor-Avila1999; Poplack & Sankoff, Reference Poplack and Sankoff1987; Poplack & Tagliamonte, Reference Poplack and Tagliamonte1989; Poplack & Tagliamonte, Reference Poplack and Tagliamonte1991; Tagliamonte, Reference Tagliamonte, Chambers and Schilling2013). Other examples include studies that use shared constraint hierarchies in different ethnic groups (e.g., Becker, Reference Becker2014; Hoffman & Walker, Reference Hoffman and Walker2010) or generations (e.g., Blondeau, Reference Blondeau2006) to demonstrate membership of a larger speech community, or, indeed, studies that use differences in constraint hierarchies to argue for a history of diffusion (Buchstaller & D'Arcy, Reference Buchstaller and D'Arcy2009; Labov, Reference Labov2007). These approaches assume that findings of effects in pooled data are findings of constraints in grammars; they are weakened if their methodology is most effective at discovering those effects which are not parts of grammars. They also rely on the assumption that individuals share the grammar of their group. Should we assume, for example, that speakers of AAVE with certain constraints speak a variety descended from a creole and others with different constraints do not?

Rhoticity in Bristol English

Loss of rhoticity in Bristol English offers us an excellent case study to explore these issues. The realization of nonprevocalic /r/ is undergoing change in many English varieties: rhoticity is declining in many previously rhotic British English varieties, but being gained in traditionally nonrhotic varieties in North America. The loss of rhoticity in West Country Englishes like Bristol English is a change in which adults participate and one triggered by an external norm: Standard Southern British English (SSBE) has categorical nonrhoticity in nonprevocalic contexts. Variable rhoticity in other English varieties has been extremely widely studied. Thus, effects found to be universal across previous studies of rhoticity are potential candidates for p-conditioning, whereas variable effects are more likely to reflect i- or s-conditioning. If the above discussion is on the mark, we will find that older Bristol speakers (who were agents of diffusion and/or participated in community-internal lifespan change) vary in the effects of such i- and s-conditioning factors. For younger speakers, we might find that a consistent consensus system has emerged, or we might find yet more constraint hierarchy variation, the result of acquiring the variable from a mixed input. Since the external standard has categorical nonrhoticity, there should be no external standard constraint hierarchy that could play a role.

This study is based on the use of rhoticity by 30 speakers of Bristol English in unstructured sociolinguistic interviews. The sample population was made up of 15 speakers born between 1920 and 1947, four speakers born between 1983 and 1989, and 11 speakers born between 2000 and 2003. A minimum of 20 tokens were collected per speaker for each preceding vowel context, except where fewer occurred in the interview; there were insufficient tokens following certain vowels (exemplified by the lexical sets cure, fire, and hour) and so these were excluded. Tokens were judged by ear as rhotic or nonrhotic and the spectrogram for each token examined; where tokens were perceptually indeterminate, they were classified as rhotic if the spectrogram showed a discernible drop in f3 across the vowel segment. These judgements were made by a single coder, Blaxter. Four speakers with (near-)categorical nonrhoticity (b1, b2, 9, 11) were excluded from the analysis (although they are included in Table 1 and Figure 1). The remaining dataset consists of 5817 tokens.

Table 1. Observations and rhoticity rates per speaker, listed by year of birth

Figure 1. Rates of rhoticity by speaker for the sample population.

Ongoing change, with traditional rhoticity declining under the influence of the nonrhotic standard, is visible in these data as change in apparent time (Blaxter et al., Reference Blaxter and Coatesforthcoming).Footnote ¹ Table 1 and Figure 1 show the number of observations and proportion of rhoticity per speaker against speaker age (the line is the linear trend line; points for female speakers are squares and male speakers diamonds).Footnote ² As is also clear from this figure, there is a high degree of within-group variability. There are speakers with less than 30% rhoticity born before 1950 and speakers with greater than 70% rhoticity born after 2000. The Survey of English Dialects (SED) suggests that the traditional variety when these oldest speakers were children was fully rhotic. Instructively, Piercy (Reference Piercy2012:79) found that 97% of tokens produced by five SED speakers in Dorset were rhotic, a figure similar to the most conservative speakers in this study (b5, b7, and b8 all have over 95% rhoticity). Taken together, these observations suggest that much of the change away from rhoticity has taken place over the course of these speakers' lifetimes. We might guess, then, that the older speakers with the highest rates of rhoticity reflect community usage at the time of their childhoods, whereas the adults who exhibit low rates of rhoticity (such as speakers 26, 28, 20, and 22) have undergone substantial lifespan change.

Independent variables

To identify the relevant independent variables, 34 studies of rhoticity were surveyed. These include seven studies of other West Country varieties (Dudman, Reference Dudman2000; Hollitzer, Reference Hollitzer2013; Jones, Reference Jones1998; Piercy, Reference Piercy2006, Reference Piercy2007, Reference Piercy2012; Sullivan, Reference Sullivan1992), seven of varieties elsewhere in the UK (Barras, Reference Barras2010; French, Reference French, Auer and di Luzio1988; Schützler, Reference Schützler, Cummins, Elder, Godard, Macleod, Schmidt and Walkden2010; Simpson, Reference Simpson1996; Vivian, Reference Vivian2000; Watt, Llamas, & Johnson, Reference Watt, Llamas and Johnson2014; Williams, Reference Williams1991), 16 studies of North American varieties (Baxter, Reference Baxter2008; Becker, Reference Becker2014; Cychosz & Johnson, Reference Cychosz and Johnson2017; Elliott, Reference Elliott2000; Ellis, Groff, & Mead, Reference Ellis, Groff and Mead2006; Feagin, Reference Feagin1990; Hinton & Pollock, Reference Hinton and Pollock2000; Irwin & Nagy, Reference Irwin and Nagy2007; Labov, Reference Labov1972; Miller, Reference Miller and Vera1998; Myhill, Reference Myhill1988; Nagy & Irwin, Reference Nagy and Irwin2010; Parslow, Reference Parslow1967; Parslow, Reference Parslow, Williamson and Burke1971; Pollock & Bernie, Reference Pollock and Bernie1997; Villard, Reference Villard2009), and four studies of English varieties elsewhere (Hartmann & Zerbian, Reference Hartmann and Zerbian2010; Sharbawi & Deterding, Reference Sharbawi and Deterding2010; Sudbury & Hay, Reference Sudbury and Hay2002; Trudgill & Gordon, Reference Trudgill and Gordon2006). Table summaries showing the independent variables and their effects in each study are given in the online appendix. Here, we will concentrate on generalizations across studies. Since even coefficients from similarly designed regression models are not strictly comparable, the findings have been simplified to whether a variable was found to favor, disfavor, or be neutral for rhoticity.

One of the most striking findings of this review is the high degree of intervariety agreement. Especially if we do not consider findings of no effect as strong evidence, most factors either consistently disfavor rhoticity:

• • higher word frequency (disfavoring in 3/3 studies),

• • another /r/ in the word (disfavoring in 3/4 studies, no effect in 1),

• • function words (disfavoring in 2/3 studies, no effect in 1)

or consistently favor it:

• • stress (favoring in 10/10 studies),

• • a following tautosyllabic consonant (favoring in 7/10 studies, no effect in 2, mixed in 1).

Thus, the only factors for which we find substantial intervariety disagreement are:

• • word-final position (disfavoring in 8/12 studies, favoring in 3 and no effect in 1),

• • prepausal position (favoring in 6/7 studies, disfavoring in 1),

• • and morpheme-final (word-internal) position (disfavoring in 3/5 studies, no effect in 1, mixed in 1).

There is some slight evidence that direction of change (or perhaps dialect family) determines the effect of word-final position: all three studies that found word-final position favored rhoticity were studies of North American varieties with increasing rhoticity.

The effects of preceding vowel are more heterogenous. Where studies have simply compared back and front vowels, they have usually found that back vowels favor rhoticity compared with front vowels (Barras, Reference Barras2010; Baxter, Reference Baxter2008; Labov, Reference Labov1972; Sudbury & Hay, Reference Sudbury and Hay2002), although there are contradictory findings (Pollock & Bernie, Reference Pollock and Bernie1997). Where studies have distinguished vowel phonemes (generally denoted by lexical sets), we find considerable variation. Table 2 shows the proportion of studies in which the vowel in the row was found to favor rhoticity compared with the vowel in the column, excluding those in which the vowel was not included or the two were found to have equal effect. Studies that grouped vowels have been coded as finding an identical effect for all of them. On the one hand, certain vowels stand out as having consistent effects: preceding nurse is almost always one of the most favorable contexts (an exception is Nagy and Irwin's [Reference Nagy and Irwin2010] findings for younger speakers); preceding letter, north, and force are usually among the most disfavoring contexts (exceptions include Asprey [Reference Asprey2007] and Trudgill & Gordon [Reference Trudgill and Gordon2006]). On the other, there is no pair of vowels with totally consistent relative effects across previous studies.

Table 2. Proportion of previous studies finding that the vowel in the row favored rhoticity compared with the vowel in the column

These findings offer some evidence for the classification of these factors in terms of the typology proposed by Tamminga, MacKenzie, and Embick (Reference Tamminga, MacKenzie and Embick2016). Since, barring interactions with other factors, p-conditioning should be universal, whereas i-conditioning need not be, factors that were found to have a consistent effect across previous studies are more likely to reflect p-conditioning, and factors found to have inconsistent effects across previous studies are more likely to reflect i-conditioning. This classification can be further informed by other properties of the factors in question. Factors that are crosslinguistically observed never to have categorical effects (such as lexical frequency) must be p-conditioning; in any case, we should be able to posit a plausible mechanism of effect in the relevant domain. Suggested classifications are summarized in Table 3.

Table 3. Classification of internal effects on rhoticity according to the typology proposed by Tamminga, MacKenzie, and Embick (Reference Tamminga, MacKenzie and Embick2016)

This typology guides variable selection for this study. We want to include all potential i-conditioning effects (which are of most interest for our research questions), as well as some of the strongest and best-studied p-conditioning effects. The independent variables included are:

• • preceding vowel,

• • morphological position (morpheme-internal versus word-internal morpheme-final versus word-final),

• • prepausal position,

• • function word versus content word,

• • frequency (on the basis of the spoken BNC [Leech, Rayson, & Wilson, Reference Leech, Rayson and Wilson2001]),

• • and time during the interview measured in seconds (which gives a very crude measure of shifting style).

Finally, note that past studies also identified external effects on rhoticity, which are summarized in online Appendix 1, Table 5A; we can assume that all of these reflect static s-conditioning.