《《the sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation》.pdf

Language Variation and Change, 22 (2010), 191–219. © Cambridge University Press, 2010 0954-3945/10 $16.00 doi:10.1017/S0954394510000098 The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data I S A B E L L E B U C H S T A L L E R Newcastle University J O H N R . R I C K F O R D , E L I Z A B E T H C L O S S T R A U G O T T , T H O M A S W A S O W A N D A R N O L D Z W I C K Y Stanford University A B S T R A C T This paper examines a short-lived innovation, quotative all, in real and apparent time. We used a two-pronged method to trace the trajectory of all over the past two decades: (i) Quantitative analyses of the quotative system of young Californians from different decades; this reveals a startling crossover pattern: in 1990/1994, all predominates, but by 2005, it has given way to like. (ii) Searches of Internet newsgroups; these confirm that after rising briskly in the 1990s, all is declining. Tracing the changing usage of quotative options provides year-to-year evidence that all has recently given way to like. Our paper has two aims: We provide insights from ongoing language change regarding short-term innovations in the history of English. We also discuss our collaboration with Google Inc. and argue for the value of newsgroups to research projects investigating linguistic variation and change in real time, especially where recorded conversational tokens are relatively sparse. An earlier version of this paper was presented at NWAV 35 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) at Ohio State University in Columbus. We are grateful for comments from the audience, in particular to John V. Singl