Grammaticalization and language contact in a discourse-pragmatic change in progress: The spread of innit in London English
| Autor: | Heike Pichler |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
050101 languages & linguistics
030507 speech-language pathology & audiology 03 medical and health sciences Linguistics and Language Sociology and Political Science 05 social sciences Language contact 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Sociology 0305 other medical science Grammaticalization Language and Linguistics Linguistics |
| Zdroj: | Language in Society. 50:723-761 |
| ISSN: | 1469-8013 0047-4045 |
| Popis: | This variationist analysis investigates the development and spread of innit as an invariant tag in London English. The sociolinguistic distribution of innit in a socially stratified corpus of vernacular speech suggests that the form's emergence and spread were initiated and propelled system-internally through changes associated with grammaticalization. Frequency triggered phonetic reduction of isn't it to innit; loss of syntactic-semantic usage constraints and growing functional versatility enabled innit to seize the range of contexts and functions of grammatically-dependent tags (e.g. didn't you, weren't we), virtually ousting these from the system of negative-polarity interrogative tags. Examination of cross-linguistic data and comparisons with relevant pre- and non-contact varieties indicate multiple language contact and grammatical replication may have played an ancillary role. I flag some challenges of establishing contact effects in discourse-pragmatic change, and propose that the promotion of innit for invariant use was governed by its low salience and social indexicality of localness. (Innit, question tags, (Multicultural) London English, grammaticalization, language contact, grammatical replication)* |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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