My own longitudinal study of Montreal French (see
below) will be on the agenda, and other topics will include work on
the critical period (mostly involving ASL and L2 research) and the nature
of post-critical period language learning; studies of early childhood
bilingual acquisition; a review of all known sociolinguistic studies
that have followed individual speakers over time (there aren't very
many, but recently we have Harrington's interesting work on Queen Eliz.II);
the sociolinguistic community re-studies that have begun to appear since
the late 1990s; research on the perception of change and variation;
work on second dialect acquisition; and any other line of work that
seminar participants feel is related to language change and adult speakers.
I am particularly interested in the question of whether the end of the
critical period is in fact more like a door that creaks shut, sometimes
rather slowly, than like a door that slams tight. Language change in
later life would seem necessarily to involve metalinguistic awareness
in a way that makes it different from L1 acquisition, but it may not
be the case that it is the ONLY basis for language change in later life.
How to understand this in modeling language change vs. stability over
the lifespan? And how does it relate to language change?
I also plan to present some of my own results of work completed, almost
completed, and in progress, in more depth than will be appropriate or
possible for the IRCS talk, in order to raise questions that can motivate
further research. Three analyses now completed or very close to completion
are (1) the [r] --> [R] change; (2) auxiliary selection (être
is on the increase), and (3) periphrastic futures, which are replacing
inflected futures but not without retrograde movement of upper class
speakers across their lifespans. Studies by other scholars based on
the Montreal French corpora will also be reviewed.
Students enrolled in the seminar will be encouraged to find creative
ways to locate relevant data. One suggestion: my paper on the two Northern
British vowels over the lifespans of Nicholas and Neil, featured in
the "7 Up" film series, dealt only with age 7 through 35.
Age 42 and 49 have appeared since then, so that story could be updated.
And there are a number of other speakers in that documentary series
who might be of interest (e.g. Paul, who moved to Australia before age
14). |