{"id":164,"date":"2018-01-24T15:18:15","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T15:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=164"},"modified":"2018-01-24T15:18:15","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T15:18:15","slug":"language-change-across-the-lifespan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/01\/24\/language-change-across-the-lifespan\/","title":{"rendered":"Language change across the lifespan"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was asked if I could write a blog post, my first thought was “Well, I could<\/em> do.” And I immediately did an internal double-take, as I had uttered something which, for me, should not be a possible English sentence. My North American English ear ought to reject this sort of orphaned “do” (“I could do<\/strong>”, “I will do<\/strong>”, “I should have done<\/strong>”, where North Americans would just leave it out), which struck me as some sort of diseased outgrowth when I first heard it in Britain some years ago. (For more information, see here<\/a>.) After many years in the UK I believe I have retained my native pronunciation and native vocabulary — though sometimes just to be polite I stand “in a queue” rather than “on line” (as one does where I come from) — so why should my syntax change, of all things? It’s like I’ve kept up surface appearances (sound and words) but undergone some internal metamorphosis in my syntactic structures. Scary.<\/p>\n

I’m certainly not alone in being a dialect contact situation, and watching my own language change in response to that. Is the way that it happened to me part of some general pattern? Or are other people affected differently, say, changing their pronunciation while jealously maintaining their syntax?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was asked if I could write a blog post, my first thought was “Well, I could do.” And I immediately did an internal double-take, as I had uttered something which, for me, should not be a possible English sentence. My North American English ear ought to reject this sort of orphaned “do” (“I could do”, “I will do”, “I should have done”, where North Americans would just leave it out), which struck me as some sort of diseased…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,20],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-syntax"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}