Variation and Change in Our Living Language

Rule Governance in Variation and Change Another respect in which the patterns of variation and change illustrated by as far as resemble those of other variables we have studied in the past half century is that they are regular rather than random, governed by unconscious, language-internal rules and restrictions that can often be appreciated only when we assemble large numbers of examples and study these quantitatively. People tend to think of rules and grammar as covering only the small set of items about which we receive overt instruction: to avoid split infinitives, to say It is I rather than It is me, and so on. But in fact we are unconscious of most of the language regularities and restrictions that we follow every day. For instance, we can say He took out the trash or He took the trash out, but if the object is a pronoun, we can only say He took it out, not *He took out it. No one sits us down to teach us this rule, but like most of the rules we follow, we acquire and use it unconsciously as we grow up. Language learning and use would be virtually impossible without systematic rules and restrictions; this generalization applies to all varieties of language, including vernaculars. 11 Many of the entries for which we have provided Our Living Language Notes in this volume are similarly subject to systematic rules that their speakers follow regularly, if unconsciously, even though these words and constructions come from vernaculars that are commonly regarded as lacking rules. For example, the a-prefix that is used with verb + –ing forms in Appalachian and other highland areas of the American South and Southwest is not used randomly but only with –ing forms that are part of a verb phrase, as in She was a-running. The benefactive me that is used instead of myself in Southern and other vernaculars, as in I bought me some new clothes, can only be deployed if it is followed by an indefinite modifier or pronoun, such as a or some. In other words, sentences like *I bought me new clothes are not permitted in English. The be like and be all forms that young people use to introduce quotations are usually restricted to pronoun subjects rather than full noun subjects (i.e., one can say She’s all, "Yes, you are!" but sentences like The woman’s all, "Yes, you are!" are virtually unheard of). Restrictions also apply to the zero copula, the absence of the verb be in certain situations, as in He working and They nice, that is characteristic of African American Vernacular English and some Southern varieties. The copula cannot be deleted (be zero) if it is stressed (He IS nice), if it is the first person form (I’m working), or if it is in the past tense (He was working). 12 In the case of as far as, the verbless construction is more likely to appear at the beginning of a sentence, as in As far as ball techniques and tactics, he’s quite good (perhaps by analogy with the preposition as for, which can only occur initially in sentences) than at the end, as in He’s quite good, as far as ball techniques and tactics. An even more important constraint is that the verbless construction is most likely to be used when its following noun phrase is long and grammatically complex. When that noun phrase is a gerund, as in "People think I’m constantly in motion, as far as making films" (Clint Eastwood, 1988), or contains a full sentence, as in As far as the techniques that he has been using, the coaches were impressed, the chances that is concerned or goes will be dropped are very high, over 80 percent. When the noun phrase is a conjoined noun phrase, like ball techniques and tactics, or when it includes a prepositional phrase, like ball techniques in soccer, the chances of verblessness are about 50-50. And when the noun phrase is a single noun phrase, like the men, the chances of the verb being dropped are much lower. 13 Moreover, this constraint appears to have operated for a long time. The earliest attested verbless as far as/so far as constructions (from the 19th century) all involve gerundial or sentential noun phrases, and the first verbless nonsentential example we find in the 20th century is a conjoined noun phrase ("so far as frame and covering," Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau, 1939). We do not find verbless examples involving a single noun phrase until much later. 14 These historical facts support some general principles of variation and change proposed by the linguist C.J. Bailey in 1973. Among these is that language change does not begin equally in all environments, but begins in one linguistic environment before spreading in waves to other environments while moving to completion where it began. The corollary of this is the more=earlier/less=later principle, which holds that environments that show higher frequencies of the innovating variant at any point in time are likely to be the environments that were affected by the change earlier. The data for as far as constructions with gerundial and sentential noun phrases support this principle. 15 Bailey also suggested that changes begin in a limited geographical, social, and/or stylistic space and radiate from there to other parts of the speech community. Our data on the social contexts of the change involving as far as are not as comprehensive and clear-cut as they are for the linguistic constraints, but it is worth noting that the innovating verbless variant is currently most frequent in speech and least frequent in writing, as we might expect. Interestingly, the frequency for e-mail, where the element of planning is intermediate between speech and writing, falls in between those of printed writing and speech. We have no hard evidence on this, but it is likely that the as far as variation began in spoken usage of the 19th century. 16 Finally, women have a slight but significant lead over men in the use of the innovating as far as variant (60 versus 50 percent in our sample), as has been found to be true in most recent documented cases of ongoing change. Some have suggested that the fact that women frequently lead linguistic change is related to their closer association with the very young, who are often linguistic innovators; others hold that women are more expressive, using language more often as symbolic capital and as markers of personal style. No single explanation has yet been thoroughly validated, nor has any proven applicable to all features and speech communities. The pacesetting role of women in ongoing change is a fascinating recent finding, but one that requires further empirical verification and explanation. 17

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