The AGM and this talk will take place at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
The role of the individual in large-scale community change has been a long-standing puzzle. Studies have considered conservative and innovative usage, social network location, and identity, among other factors. In this talk, I examine individual cognition and its important role in both larger community change and social positioning. I first present new findings for real-time change over 20 years in the phonology and syntax of London English varieties (www.generationsoflondonenglish.org). The findings support a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model for English (Nevalainen et al. 2020), showing a current phase of stability after the emergence of new vernaculars a generation earlier. Demographic tipping-points and social networks are clear factors in these community dynamics, so how does individual cognition fit in? First, I show variable awareness of features (or their social meanings), which can accelerate or inhibit change. Second, I examine how individual speech repertoires can reveal both how a person participates in community systems and, relatedly, how the speech of ‘interior groups’ (Labov 2001) leads change. And finally, I argue that fine-grained differences in speech control can be consequential. These three closely related phenomena were all noted in early variationist theory but have not always been consistently investigated. I suggest that they are critical for accurate community and identity accounts.
