Socio-cultural impact on language change (SILC)

Comparing present-day English usage with usage conventions of past decades, it is evident that many changes can be linked to changing conceptualizations of social relations. Address terms stressing differences in power and social distance, such as sir, are now common in much fewer contexts than they used to be. This can be linked to democratization, a tendency gaining ground since the 1960s in many societies, which leads to an avoidance of stressing hierarchical differences (cf. Farrelly & Seoane 2012: 393) and is visible e.g. in a decline in formal address (titles and last name) (cf. Leech 2014: 293).

The present paper focuses on changes in the use of generic address terms, such as sir, madam, man, girl, for singular addressees, and ladies and gentlemen, guys for a group of addressees using the Corpus of Historical American English (focusing on 1900-2010). The first hypothesis, that formal terms are decreasing and informal terms are increasing, is clearly borne out: comparing 1900-1909 to 2010-2019, sir decreases by more than half, while guys rises dramatically from 0.55 to 241.36 per a million words. The second hypothesis posits that this is due to a loss of acceptable contexts for more formal terms and an increase of contexts for informal terms. Based on random samples of sir and guys from different decades, we will classify speaker-addressee relations (based on Buyle 2021) to investigate the type of power and distance relation that exists in speaker-addressee pairings. The qualitative analysis conducted so far seems to support the hypothesis of an ever-increasing range of guys (from informal and highly colloquial to acceptable in various neutral contexts) and a growing restriction in the range of contexts for sir (from very wide-spread in all types of constellations to +P interactions and even a high concentration of instances in military contexts).

References

Buyle, A. (2021). Between grammar and pragmatics: Social deixis in English address terms and directives. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. KU Leuven.

Farrelly, M., & Seoane, E. (2012). Democratization. In T. Nevalainen & E. C. Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English (pp. 392–401). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leech, G. N. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Contrastive work on English and German communicative styles has highlighted that German discourse tends towards more direct styles and uses e.g. more imperatives (e.g. Gib mir mal den Zucker! ‘Give me mal(mod particle) the sugar!’), whereas English (both British and American English) discourse has a tendency to prefer conventionalized indirectness (e.g. Could you pass the sugar?) (cf. e.g. House 1996).  This can lead to a perception of German speakers as impolite by speakers of English (cf. House 2008). More recently, Kranich & Schramm (2015) have, however, shown that younger speakers of German seem to behave much more alike to British young speakers, when it comes to the formulation of requests, as both groups very clearly preferred conventional indirectness over both directness and hints. This trend may either be an effect of influence of English norms on German through e.g. more cross-cultural contact situations, or it might be a more global trend of Western societies to follow the same development of democratization (and a concomitant loss of explicit attention to hierarchies), leading to a preference for moderate face-saving strategies across situations, regardless of e.g. power differences.

The present paper wishes to investigate to what extent recent cultural changes have affected speakers’ norms concerning the expected formulation of a request in different English-speaking countries as well as in Germany, and what influence the factors power and weight of the request have. Data has been gathered from younger (under 25) and older (50+) speakers of British English, American English, Indian English, and speakers of German from Germany. Participants were asked to fill in DCTs (discourse completion tests). Additionally, some interviews were conducted to find out more about participants’ attitudes and their reasons for choices.

The changes visible through the comparison of older and younger speakers (total N = 250) represent an apparent time approach to recent change. Using a multi-method approach, the results on changes concerning particular markers, e.g. the use of modals like may, could and would in conventionally indirect requests, will be compared to changes visible in large diachronic corpora of 20th century and 21st century English, such as the COHA (Corpus of Historical American English). Thus, we will be able to correlate large-scale changes, such as the decline of the modals (cf. eg. Mair & Leech 2006), with changes in norms concerning preferred request strategies.

The study is part of a larger project that investigates the impact of recent cultural change on linguistic behaviour.

References

House, Juliane (1996) “Contrastive discourse analysis and misunderstanding: The case of German and English”. In: Hellinger, Marlies and Ulrich Ammon (eds.) Contrastive Sociolinguistics, 345-361. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

House, Juliane (2008) “Impoliteness in Germany: Intercultural encounters in everyday and institutional talk.” Intercultural Pragmatics 7: 561-595.

Kranich, Svenja and Sarina Schramm (2015) “Changes in communicative style in recent German: More interactional, less direct.” 14th IPra (International Pragmatics Association), Antwerp, 26.-31.07.2015.

Mair, Christian and Geoffrey Leech (2006) “Current change in English syntax”. In Aarts, Bas and April MacMahon (eds.) The Handbook of English Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell, 318- 342.

In cross-cultural as well as in variational pragmatic studies, requests have been widely studied, typically bringing to light variation concerning levels of directness (cf. e.g. Blum-Kulka 1987, Barron 2006). The present paper investigates to what extent recent cultural changes have affected speakers’ norms concerning the expected formulation of a request in different English-speaking countries (UK, India) as well as in Germany. The variational plus contrastive approach has been chosen in order to be able to differentiate clearly between the impact of cultural and linguistic factors.

For this study, participants are asked to complete DCTs, filling in the missing request in scenarios with different hierarchical relationships between speaker and addressee. The data thus collected is not the most natural and spontaneous, but brings to light speakers’ internalized norms, which justifies DCTs as a valid method for our purpose. Focus group interviews complement the findings to give us an insight into speakers’ attitudes. Data from older speakers (>60) and younger speakers (<30) (total n=180) is collected in order to observe ongoing changes. Our hypothesis, based on the analyses carried out so far, is that younger speakers of British English and German show less variation across different power situations than older speakers, due to a decreasing importance of overt hierarchies in both countries (cf. Mair 2006: 5). Indian English speakers, even younger ones, by contrast, still attach more value to hierarchical relations, and behave remarkably different from the two other groups when talking to superiors (e.g. using more negative politeness strategies). The study is part of a larger project that investigates the impact of recent cultural change on linguistic behaviour.

References

Barron, Anne. (2006). Requesting in Irish English and English English: A study of intra-cultural regional pragmatic variation (LAUD paper No. 684). Duisburg/Essen.

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. (1987) “Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different?”. Journal of Pragmatics 11: 131-146.

Mair, Christian. (2006). Twentieth-Century English. History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

One well-investigated recent change in English that has been linked to democratization is the ongoing decline of the core modals (such as may, might, must) and the concomitant rise of the so-called semi-modals or quasi-modals (such as be able to, have to) (cf. e.g. Leech 2003, Mair & Leech 2006).

In this context, it has been suggested that speakers prefer the semi-modals over the modal auxiliaries because of the semi-modals’ lesser focus on the speaker as the deontic source. Thus, if one says “You must go now”, the speaker tends to be identified as the source of the obligation, imposing on the addressee, whereas if one says “You have to go”, it is more likely that the source of the obligation is speaker-external (cf. Westney 1995: 151; Collins 2009a: 35f., 60f.). This makes the latter use often more appropriate in a society that prefers to avoid stressing power hierarchies and rather aims to reduce markers of social distance.

The process is advanced to different degrees in different varieties of English: American English is in the lead, while Australian English is somewhat less advanced and British English even more conservative. Outer circle varieties, such as Indian English, broadly speaking, tend to exhibit still greater conservatism (Collins 2009a, b).

While the suggested correlation between a society’s decreasing attention to social hierarchies and a changing usage of modality markers is intuitively convincing, the line of argument is still somewhat speculative. Thus, it remains to be conclusively shown that a decrease of must and may goes hand in hand with a shift away from hierarchical structures in society and a general avoidance of linguistic structures that draw attention to power differences.

The present paper aims to fill this gap. In a first step, a detailed corpus-linguistic investigation of the decrease of may and must in COHA allows us to see to what extent the different functions of these modal verbs (dynamic, deontic, and epistemic) are responsible for the decline in frequency, and it will be shown that specific construction types are more responsible for the decline than others. In the second part of the study, we combine the corpus-based approach with data gathered using discourse completion tests (DCTs). The DCTs aim to find out to what extent British, American, and Indian English speakers are inclined to choose different linguistic strategies for the realization of requests depending on the power status of their interlocutor (higher, same, or lower). Participants of this study came from two age groups, young adults (18-30) and older speakers (over 50), in order to spot current change. This combination of methods allows us to see to what extent the quantitative differences in modal auxiliary and semi-modal use in the three varieties correlate with general frequencies observed in COHA and the overall tendencies to linguistically deal with hierarchical structures in society. The study is part of a larger project that investigates the impact of recent cultural change on linguistic behaviour.

References

Collins, P. (2009a) Modals and Quasi-Modals in English. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

Collins, P. (2009b) Modals and Quasi-Modals in World Englishes. World Englishes 28(3): 281–292.

Leech, G. (2003) Modality on the Move: the English Modal Auxiliaries 1961-1992, in: R. Facchinetti, M. Krug and F. Palmer (eds), Modality in Contemporary English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 223-240.

Mair C. and G. N. Leech (2006) Current Changes in English Syntax, in: B. Aarts and A. McMahon (eds), Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 318-342.

Westney, P. (1995) Modals and Periphrastics in English: An Investigation into the Semantic Correspondence between certain English Modal Verbs and their Periphrastic Equivalents. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.