by Neil Wick with files from Carmen LeBlanc
If you haven't been to one of the
meetings of the Sociolinguistics Research Group held over the last school year,
you don't know what you're missing. You don't need to become a sociolinguistics
specialist to benefit from attending. In fact, you don't necessarily need to
know anything about sociolinguistics to attend, but the experience might convert
you.
The menu for the last public meeting included a wide range of linguistic issues related to language change:
We couldn't possibly cover all of that in the time available, but we had a very interesting discussion on many of these topics.
The discussion of grammaticalization continued as sociolinguistics lab people met recently with Professor Paul Hopper, co-author of Grammaticalization (1993), who also gave a talk in the department.
Hopper talked about his research into "multiply articulates verbal expressions." He studied vernacular written narratives like journals and letters to extract forms like verbs with particles (to head straight in) auxiliary constructions (keep on going ahead) and also fixed expressions (to take a chance and...). His conclusion is that they are non-referential and they appear in narratives where the speaker was a witness while ordinary verbs appear when the speaker was not an eyewitness of the event.
A discussion followed about the fact that there needs to be an implicit
understanding of the meaning and the function of those elements between the
interlocutors. A further discussion concerned collocations of forms that are no
longer productive in the grammar and become somewhat formulaic because they are
always found in the same context and may behave the same way as those he had
studied.