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The Effect of Economic Trajectory and Speaker Profile on Lifespan Change: Evidence from Stative Possessives on Tyneside

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Sociolinguistics in England

Abstract

Changes in the system of stative possessives have been playing out in the English language for centuries. Our analysis explores linguistic changes across the lifespan of the individual in a small panel study of six speakers recorded first in 1971 and again 2013 in the North East of England. Our analysis explores the effect of speaker-based factors, such as their personalities, their contact with children and the socio-economic trajectory of the individual on their participation in ongoing longitudinal change. Our findings add to the growing number of panel studies that report post-critical age speakers picking up (lifespan change) or, indeed, eschewing (retrograde change) changes in community norms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The North East region encompasses a number of other towns and cities, each with their associated varieties, such as the ‘Smoggie’ dialect in Middlesbrough (see Llamas 2007), the ‘Mackem’ dialect in Sunderland (Burbano-Elizondo 2006) and the ‘Sanddancers’ of South Shields (Beal et al. 2012).

  2. 2.

    We leave it to one of our interviewees to explain the contested geographical extent of ‘Geordieland’: ‘People have said to me in the past and I hasten to add that this is not my own opinion that eh Geordies come from north of the river and if you’re from south of the river you’re not a Geordie … I used to say … “you’ve got to be able to piss out your back window into the Tyne before you can be classified as a Geordie”. And they [people from Ashington] didn’t like it’. [Aidan].

  3. 3.

    ‘The cosmopolitan city of NewcastleGateshead was formed when Newcastle and Gateshead joined to become a single visitor destination linked by the River Tyne. [It boasts visitor magnets such as] the area’s famous bridges and … the Quayside, Newcastle and Gateshead’s iconic destination. A favourite English city-break destination it really has something for everybody’ [http://www.visitnewcastlegateshead.co.uk/site/around-the-region/newcastlegateshead] (see Beal 2009: 153). The MSN Travel website even named Newcastle ‘officially the best university city in Britain’ in the years 2008–2011.

  4. 4.

    http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/north-east-unemployment-figures-down-8306128

  5. 5.

    See also Bailey et al. (1991).

  6. 6.

    This is a conservative estimate since there is evidence of around 65 Newcastle and 130 Gateshead interviews. The TLS plan apparently involved interviewing approximately 250 people in Newcastle and 150 in Gateshead. How many of these interviews were indeed conducted is a matter of contention and new material keeps being unearthed (see Pellowe et al. 1972; Mearns 2015).

  7. 7.

    Questions included were ‘Is the television always running in your house?’, ‘Which programmes do you watch?’, ‘Who do you vote for?’, ‘Have you ever been abroad?’ and ‘Do you think a woman should work once she has children?’

  8. 8.

    Stative have is distinct from dynamic have, which indicates events rather than states, as in He had a swim, from have expressing the meaning ‘experience’, as in We had a wonderful holiday, as well as from have expressing obligation, as in I have to mow the lawn (see Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 111).

  9. 9.

    This is in contrast to North American varieties of English, where research reports increasing use have (Biber et al. 1999; Tagliamonte et al. 2010).

  10. 10.

    The percentages in Tables 9.3 and 9.5 do not add up to 100% because of rounding issues due to the small sample size.

  11. 11.

    We will not consider Edith since she produced very low numbers and very inconsistent patterns of stative possessives across her interview.

  12. 12.

    How salient is the change in the system of stative possessives? An analysis across the duration of the interview provides evidence of style-shift, the usual diagnostic adduced for socio-cognitive salience. This suggests that the variation in the system does not fully fly below the radar. Indeed, when we explored the data for signs of style shifting, we noted that Anne and Rob slightly increased their rates of have got across the length of the 2013 interview (from 66% to 75% for Anne and from 78% to 95% for Rob). This might suggest that the variant has achieved at least a moderate level of socio-cognitive salience amongst these two speakers, enough to allow them to modulate their linguistic system in the direction of ongoing trends (see Buchstaller 2016).

  13. 13.

    Already in 1971, Nelly uses two tokens of like in bridging contexts (Heine 2002), which do not occur in the canonical quotative frame but which, nevertheless, ‘foreshadow […] a quote’ (Gumperz 1982: 47). Whether these occurrences should be considered ‘embryonic variants’ (Gordon and Trudgill 1999) of quotative be like or whether they are already instances of full-blown quotation is largely a matter of interpretation (Buchstaller 2014). In any case, instances such as (a) and (b) are on the grammaticalisation path towards quotative function, and Nelly is clearly a frontrunner in their use for her generation (Edith produces one such token).

    • (a) Nelly_1971: Er saying things you know like ‘Haway man let’s away yem’.

    • (b) Nelly_1971: But more-or-less the way I speak and ending their words properly, like ‘[ɪŋ] end[ɪŋ]’ you know, not saying ‘end[ɪn] end[ɪn]’ their words.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Duisburg-Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

    Isabelle Buchstaller

  2. Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

    Adam Mearns

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  1. Isabelle Buchstaller
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  1. School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Natalie Braber

  2. Department of English and American Studies, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Sandra Jansen

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Buchstaller, I., Mearns, A. (2018). The Effect of Economic Trajectory and Speaker Profile on Lifespan Change: Evidence from Stative Possessives on Tyneside. In: Braber, N., Jansen, S. (eds) Sociolinguistics in England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_9

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