🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan8.002127.20670@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson) writes:
>
>But they don't.  Exactly why they do change is an area of research.  Clearly,
>the primary mechanism of change is the transmission problem:  Children learning
>a language from their elders--not simply audlts but anyone more advanced in the
>language than they--do not learn to reproduce perfectly the learning of others.
>
How "clear" is this, really?  It's an old idea (there's a discussion of
it in Jespersen's _Philosophy of Grammar_ which is more intelligent than
most current references to it) but when has it ever been demonstrated as
an actual mechanism of language change?  We know of two *demonstrated*
sources of change--non-native speakers and sociolinguistically motivated
innovations of the kind studied by Labov.  The first involve adults, the
second generally adolescents.  For "imperfect learning" to be a factor
it would have to be a normal thing for child language habits to be
carried on into adulthood--what evidence is there for this?
-- 
Scott DeLancey			delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA