Linguistic and stylistic change through indexical growth: Covariation in Sacramento, California

Abstract:

The foundations of variationist sociolinguistics lie in the study of changes in progress, examining why they spread faster among some groups than others. But the tendency to track changes one-by-one, as if they all have lives of their own, misses the ways they enter into styles as they spread. In this dissertation, I argue that to understand the social motivations of a linguistic change, we have to understand its (stylistic) relation to other changes that occur alongside it. The empirical core of the dissertation is an examination of 8 ongoing changes in progress in Sacramento English, covering shifts in vowel quality, fricative production, voice quality, and discourse-pragmatics. Given that styles are "clusters" of linguistic forms, I examine how linguistic changes "cluster" together as they spread, focusing in particular on patterns of interspeaker covariation (i.e., the extent to which speakers' productions of one linguistic change predicts their productions of others). I find that the relations among linguistic changes shift in apparent time, and that younger speakers show more robust covariation than older speakers. The emergent covariation among younger speakers is tied, in part, to the ways they orient to social life in Sacramento and California more broadly. I tie the restructuring of linguistic change in Sacramento to what I call "indexical growth", the process by which the relations among linguistic forms become socially meaningful. As linguistic changes progress, they pick up new indexical meanings, and as a function of these new meanings, get reorganized into new stylistic relationships. What emerges is a view in which the "structure" that has long defined patterns of linguistic change at the community level is sensitive to processes of stylistic change.