Language Change Across the Lifespan: Three Trajectory Types
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that an enhanced understanding of the dynamics of language change can be gained by uniting two perspectives whose intimate relationship has not previously been subject to linguists' attention: language change as a historical process, and language change as experienced by individual speakers. It makes the case that during language change in progress, there are three possible trajectory types that can be manifested across speakers' lifespans. I review one example of each, as analyzed in a longitudinal corpus of Québécois French. First, people may acquire patterns of variation reflecting the stage of the change at the time of childhood language acquisition and retain that pattern thereafter. Second, older speakers, continuing to receive input from the younger generations that form an increasingly large proportion of their speech community, may also change in that direction. Third, aging speakers may become more conservative, showing retrograde lifespan change in the face of community change in the opposite direction. In conclusion, I examine the likely etiology of each trajectory type and evaluate its consequences for language change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it