here - Linguistic Society of America

Plenary AddressGrand Ballroom Salons G-KThursday, 3 January, 7:30 8:30 PMLanguage Change Across the LifespanGillian SankoffUniversity of PennsylvaniaAlthough it is well known that second dialect and second language acquisition later in life result in grammars that are notisomorphic with those of native speakers, much less is understood about the kinds of modifications that may occur in L1 acrossthe lifespan. Further, the relationship between language change in the speech community and language change across the lifespanhas received little explicit attention prior to the past decade. It is generally accepted that it is in the course of L1 acquisition inchildhood that speakers have the opportunity to reformulate the grammars that constitute their linguistic input. However, researchmade possible from the study of recorded sociolinguistic interviews with speakers of Montréal French at three periods (1971;1984; 1995) has shed new light on issues of language acquisition and the nature of the critical period. This research has revealedthat in the case of changes ongoing within the speech community, there are three possible relationships between lifespantrajectories and language change. Speakers may maintain their childhood grammars unchanged after primary languageacquisition (the default assumption in apparent time, which still proves to be the best first approximation); they may exhibitchange in the direction of the community change (thus contributing to an acceleration of the change); or they may become moreconservative as they age, reverting to patterns more typical of previous generations (thus at least potentially acting as a brake oncommunity change). All three of these patterns will be illustrated in this talk, which will conclude by considering the implicationsof these findings for our general understanding of language acquisition, language transmission and historical language change.During fieldwork for her dissertation on multilingualism in New Guinea (McGill University, 1968), Gillian Sankoff encountereda new generation of children learning the lingua franca, Tok Pisin, as a first language. Tok Pisin had previously been spokenalmost entirely as a second language, and the situation offered a window on the transition from pidgin to creole. She subsequentlyreturned to Papua New Guinea several times to study creolization, focusing on changes in the language related to the emergenceof this first generation of native speakers. Her quantitative research on morphophonology and syntax detected gradual changesacross generations, and showed continuing substrate influence. Since that time her central interest has been in issues oftransmission in language change within a social matrix, as well as in language contact. Her dissertation on Papua New Guineawas followed up by research on bilingualism in Montréal with Pierrette Thibault in the 1990s.She taught at the Université de Montréal for more than a decade, carrying out a sociolinguistic study of French with colleaguesDavid Sankoff and Henrietta Cedergren. During this period she served as President of the Canadian Sociology and AnthropologyAssociation and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. After she moved to theUniversity of Pennsylvania in 1979, colleagues in Québec continued the Montréal French study during the 1980s and 1990s,creating a longitudinal corpus that is the focus of her current research. The dialectic relationship of language change to change inspeakers grammars in childhood (the Tok Pisin research) has now been complemented by studies of changes in the grammars ofadolescents and adults (the Montréal French research). The discovery of how lifespan trajectories vary in their relationship tolanguage change has proven surprising, and she continues to pursue this research direction in a book currently in progress.81