When: Friday, June 6, 2025, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre, Mile End Campus
The Department of Linguistics welcomes Prof. Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow) for her lecture entitled From imitators to innovators: Children and language change as the next instalment in our Jenny Cheshire Lecture Series. Guests must order a free ticket.
The lecture will be followed by a reception in the ArtsTwo foyer with drinks and light snacks.
The Jenny Cheshire Lecture series was founded in 2010 to mark the retirement of Professor Jenny Cheshire FBA. Jenny is a founding member of the QMUL Linguistics department and holds a unique place in the wider community. She has made and continues to make uniquely influential contributions in the areas of grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English, adolescent speech, and especially the identification and documentation of Multicultural London English.
This year we welcome Prof. Jennifer Smith for this public lecture, open to the wider Linguistics community. The lecture is a celebration not just of Jenny's unique place in our field, but also a friendly social gathering to mark the end of the academic year.
Jennifer Smith, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow, teaches and researches language variation and change, focussing on dialect morphosyntax. She has directed a number of ESRC, AHRC and British Academy projects, and has created two major digital resources for the analysis of speech patterns across Scotland, The Scots Syntax Atlas and Speak for Yersel. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Lecture abstract
‘The study of change in progress shows children learning to talk from their parents, then learning to talk differently from their parents, and then even more mysteriously, continuing such differences in the same direction over many generations’ (Labov 2012: 276). When and how do children - whether in the ‘vernacular subculture’ of the Reading playgrounds (e.g., Cheshire 1982), multi-ethnic Hackney (e.g., Cheshire et al 2011), or classrooms throughout the UK (Edwards & Cheshire 1989) - move from imitators to innovators in the course of linguistic change?
Two key stages are identified in this lifecycle of change: transmission, where children ‘replicate faithfully the form of their parents’ language, in all of its structural detail’ (Labov 2007:349), and incrementation, where ‘successive cohorts and generations of children advance [a] change beyond the level of their caretakers and role models’ in the direction of the change in the broader community (Labov 2007:346). In the move from transmission to incrementation, children undergo vernacular reorganization, which ‘must take place in the window of opportunity between first learning and the effective stabilization of the linguistic system’ (Labov 2001:416).
In this talk, I view directly this ‘window of opportunity’ through a real-time analysis of children in north-east Scotland, first in preschool (aged 3-4) with their caregivers, and then in preadolescence (12-13) with their peers. I examine transmission, incrementation and vernacular reorganization by tracking a number of variables undergoing change at these crucial timepoints in sociolinguistic development. In doing so, we can track the dynamics of linguistic change as the children move from imitation in the caregiver-dominated norms of the home to innovation in the community-dominated norms of the wider world.
