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SUMMARY:Language variation and change within the individual - Laurel MacKe
 nzie\, University of Manchester
DTSTART:20160218T163000Z
DTEND:20160218T183000Z
UID:TALK60914@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jamie Douglas
DESCRIPTION:While the traditional focus of sociolinguistic research has be
 en the speech community\, there are nonetheless many questions to be asked
  and answered about how sociolinguistic variation is stored and produced b
 y individual speakers. In this talk\, I'll discuss how new methodological 
 tools can shed light on two related aspects of sociolinguistic variation a
 t the level of the individual: (i) the nature of individuals' mental repre
 sentations of variable phenomena\, and (ii) the types of factors that can 
 condition variability. The first half of the talk will address point (i)\,
  specifically as it concerns the (in)stability of an individual's mental r
 epresentations across their lifespan. This strand of my research makes use
  of a novel longitudinal dataset collected from Sir David Attenborough's n
 ature documentary narrations across his half-century-long career. The seco
 nd part of the talk will address point (ii) by asking how psycholinguistic
  aspects of the language production system may shape patterns of variation
 . I'll present evidence from corpus data on the role of the incremental pl
 anning of speech in the patterning of auxiliary contraction in English\, a
 nd discuss upcoming experimental work to probe these results further. At t
 he end of the talk\, I'll draw conclusions from the presented findings for
  the nature of grammatical architecture and the cognitive mechanisms that 
 derive varying linguistic forms.
LOCATION:GR06-7\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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