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they may be reversals of a previous change.) And, more generally, most agents of change are gentle pressures which only gradually affect choices in a statistical way, rather as evolution alters species imperceptibly by selective reproductive success.
1.9Recent and current change
The history of the English language is not merely a matter of the past, for PDE is not (except as a convenient idealisation) a fixed state of the language: change continues. Let us take a handful of examples from different linguistic domains.
New words and phrases enter the language in thousands every year. Recent examples include sushi, recorded from 1893 in OED2 only as a specialist term in Japanese contexts but increasingly familiar in the English-speaking world; docusoap ‘fly-on-the-wall TV documentary series’ (1998–, from documentary + soap opera); slaphead ‘bald person’ (1990–); twoc(k) ‘take without owner’s consent, steal (a car)’ (1990–, from British police usage); the -gate suffix for a political scandal (after the burgling of the Watergate building in 1972); go postal ‘become (homicidally) enraged’ (1994–, after workplace shootings associated with US postal workers). Some of these, of course, are restricted to certain varieties and may or may not generalise.
Existing words develop new meanings. For example, by an obvious extension of its spatial use and the phrase ahead of (one’s) time, the preposition ahead of has started to mean ‘before and in anticipation of (a specific event)’ (1981–), especially in news bulletins. Ellipsis of the head noun from twentieth-century phrases like security forces, security precautions, as in ‘There were renewed expressions of disquiet from scientists about the encroachment of security measures on personal freedom of speech and action’ (1952, OED), has led to a new sense of security as an activity noun: ‘On Oct. 30 delegations from Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation finally took their seats, amid heavy security, at a negotiating table in Madrid’ (1991, BNC). This new sense, attested probably since the 1970s and not yet in OED, has connotations not so much of safety but of (apprehension of) danger.
The verbs substitute and replace have long been used in similar contexts but with different complementation: ‘An editor substituted a better expression for the phrase’ = ‘An editor replaced the phrase with/by a better expression.’ Increasingly, substitute is used with the complementation of replace: ‘An editor substituted the phrase with a better expression’ (‘incorrectly’, according to OED, from 1974, although there is indirect evidence of occurrence from the 1920s). And the resulting confusion can lead to complete reversal of the original usage: ‘Prizes are subject to availability. [The promoter] reserves the right to substitute any prize for one of an equal value’ (2001 scratchcard, Thus plc). The outcome of these lexico-syntactic developments in substitute is not yet clear. Moving further into
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the area of grammar, we find that the long-term statistical decline of the modal verb may/might (mostly in favour of can/could) is being accompanied by numerous changes in what may be its death throes. The negative contraction mayn’t, colloquial in the early twentieth century, is barely possible now. Fewer and fewer speakers treat might as the past tense of may, leading to past counterfactuals like ‘If United had cracked down on Cantona, it may never have come to all this’ (1998 Daily Express), where might would have been normal before the last decades of the twentieth century. And may is increasingly old-fashioned as a verb of permission (‘May I have . . . ?’ losing out to ‘Can I have . . . ?’).
In phonology, the Northern Cities Shift is a good example, with Chicago leading all the major cities in the Northern dialect area of the US in a cyclic pattern of change in vowels, including tensing and raising of /æ/, fronting of /o/, and lowering, centralisation and unrounding of long open /o/. First reports of the shift date from around 1968–9; Labov (1994: 177–201) recounts his bafflement when he first heard a Chicago teenager apparently saying lacks [læks] in a context which proved to require the word locks. For more detail see Section 8.3.4.
In plotting change, the obvious approach is to compare usage attested at two different times, whether close together – a corpus of 1991 material compared with one from 1961, say – or far apart. This is working with ‘real time’. Sociolinguists have given us an alternative technique, that of ‘apparent time’. Here all the data come from a single sampling, but differences in usage between generations can nevertheless indicate a change in progress. For example, a variable in some English speech communities is non-prevocalic /r/: that is, words such as car (except before a following vowel) or hurt are pronounced either with or without /r/ – rhotic vs. nonrhotic accents. This /r/ is generally absent in London English and RP, and absence was still the prestige variant in New York English of the 1930s. In Labov’s classic studies of New York English in the 1960s, the younger the agegroup of his upper-middle-class informants, the greater the use of non-prevocalic /r/. This indicated that the rhotic pronunciation was spreading. The apparent-time technique is most useful for present-day studies but can in principle be applied to older periods where there is sufficient data attributable to writers of varying ages, as in the Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence.
We conclude this glance at the language of today with an intriguing and controversial development, the use of high rising tone – as if for an interrogative – at the end of a declarative sentence. The phenomenon has gone under various names in scholarly and journalistic treatments, among them uptalk, Australian Question Intonation or AQI, high rising terminal contour or HRT. It seems clear that the usage belongs essentially to the last thirty to forty years. It is widespread in Australia and New Zealand, is far more prevalent among the young (though may already be receding in California – Elizabeth Traugott, p.c., 2 May 2002) and is used more (though not exclusively) by females. It has reached Britain, where commentators have linked its spread to the popularity of the Australian soap opera Neighbours, perhaps strengthened by American imports like Friends. The researchers who used the term AQI had assumed that
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its origins lay in Sydney working-class speech in the 1960s. Yet American commentators have traced what seems to be the same linguistic phenomenon to ‘ValSpeak’ or ‘Valley Speak’, the speech of (San Fernando) ‘Valley girls’ in 1980s California, while earlier scholars described it as a Southern trait (noted as early as 1963), as also hinted at in this passage by a writer educated in Oklahoma City:
Less than a minute later a tall brunette appeared and said, ‘Mr Pope? Judge Whetstone will see you now?’ She turned her statement into a question . . . ‘I’m Mary Sue Hethcox, Mr Pope, Judge Whetstone’s secretary?’ the brunette said over her shoulder. She made it yet another Southern question . . . (1975 Ross Thomas, The Money Harvest)
The geographical provenance of this intonation pattern is, then, not yet clear. Sociolinguistically, it has been taken as a gender marker. And what is its discourse meaning? Suggestions include topicalisation, emphasis, deference, politeness, tentativeness, a desire for approval, ‘to convey that the propositional content of the utterance should be added to speaker’s and hearer’s mutual belief space’, verification that the hearer has understood (prompting speculation that it might have been fostered by major postwar immigration to Sydney of Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and others). How non-users interpret it is also an interesting question: in general, issues of interdialectal (mis)comprehension are being taken seriously both in their own right as facts of language and as a possible engine of change. In any event, to vary a point made early on in this chapter, a history of the language must concern not just then but now.