To appear in R. Bayley, R. Cameron & C. Lucas (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Studies of the Community and the Individual

James A. Walker & Miriam Meyerhoff York University University of Auckland

1. Introduction

A longstanding question of linguistics is whether language resides in the individual speaker or in the community. Despite Saussure’s (1916) recognition of language as a social fact, (post-)Saussurean linguistics has tended to focus on individuals rather than social groups. Generative linguistics, arguably Saussure’s predominant legacy, takes as its object of inquiry the knowledge of language residing in the brain of the individual speaker (cf. Chomsky’s (1965) “ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech community”), with the language of the community seen as the intersection of the languages of the individual speakers. In contrast, the study of sociolinguistic variation and change has traditionally operated under a different set of methodological and epistemological assumptions: in general, its object of inquiry has not been the language of individual speakers but rather the extent to which groups of speakers agree or differ with regard to their linguistic behavior. At one extreme of this approach is the view that “the individual does not exist as a linguistic object” (Labov 2001:34).

This focus has often led to the impression that the individual speaker has no place in sociolinguistics, in which studies have typically grouped individuals along different dimensions (social class, sex/gender, ethnicity) and compared the linguistic behavior across these groups. This practice has been criticized throughout the variationist enterprise, either because it gives the illusion of variability within the community by grouping speakers with different ‘lects’ (Bickerton 1975) and/or dividing the community along externally-defined measures that may not be sociolinguistically relevant.

However, within the study of sociolinguistic variation and change, two approaches have been developed that attempt to link individual-speaker behavior with the study of the community. One approach makes use of ‘linguistic grouping’, examining the linguistic conditioning of individual speakers and looking for social correlates of the resulting groups. Such studies have demonstrated that variation persists at the level of the individual and that, given enough data per speaker, individuals can be shown to mirror the linguistic conditioning of the speech community of which they are members. Another approach is the detailed analysis of individual speakers in different social situations. Although the narrow focus of this second approach may obviate generalizations about the linguistic behavior of the speech community, it has provided important insight into the role of variation in creating and expressing social meaning.

In this chapter, we provide a synoptic overview of these two research traditions. As an illustration of the issues involved in this research, we present our analyses across groups and individuals in the English spoken on the island of Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines). The linguistic focus of this research is two well-studied grammatical variables: the absence of copula/auxiliary BE and existential constructions. We compare the linguistic conditioning of these features in the speech of ‘urban sojourners’ (individuals who have left Bequia for long periods of time) with that of their stay-at-home peers. Although there are clear differences in the

Studies of the Community and the Individual 2

constraints on BE absence in three villages on Bequia, we see parallel patterns across speakers, even including the urban sojourners. In contrast, for existentials we see striking differences in rates and conditioning between some of the urban sojourners and their stay-at-home peers. The results of these studies emphasize the importance of examining both social and linguistic conditioning of variation in the study of the community and the individual.

2. Social Grouping

Sociolinguistic studies have traditionally relied on ‘social grouping’ (Horvath & Sankoff 1987): that is, define social categories relevant to the sociolinguistic research question(s) (such as the speaker’s sex, age-group, social class and ethnic background), group individual speakers according to their membership in each category, and compare the linguistic behavior across groups. Wolfram and Beckett (2000: 5) identify a principle underlying this methodology, namely that individual-speaker variation is unimportant in describing sociolinguistic variation, which they call the ‘homogeneity assumption’. Under this assumption, data from groups of individuals can be examined together, provided that the social differences that delimit the groups are meaningful (ibid. see also Chambers 1995: 100). Social grouping has been criticized on a number of grounds. Early in the study of linguistic variation, Bailey (1973) and Bickerton (1975) argued that grouping individuals together without examining their patterning obscured the fact that speakers might have different linguistic systems. Wolfram and Beckett (2000: 6) note the tendency in studies of linguistic variation to exclude individual speakers whose behavior is anomalous with respect to their peers. In some cases, finding an appropriate social grouping may be impossible. For example, Dorian (1994) reports a situation in Scottish Gaelic of what she calls ‘personal pattern variation’, in which individual-speaker patterns of variation cannot be explained with reference to any kind of social grouping.

However, a closer examination of the literature on language variation and change shows a concern with the individual speaker from the earliest days of variationist analysis. In Labov’s (1963) analysis of the centralization of (ay) and (aw) on Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts), the centralization index scores were calculated for each individual speaker before the averages were compared across groups. In fact, Labov’s work (1963, 1966, 2001) has tended to highlight individual speakers who are either representative of or diverge from their respective social group, such as Steve K. in New York City (Labov 1966) or Celeste S. in Philadelphia (Labov 2001). As he notes in a 2006 comment on his 1966 study of New York City:

There are no people in most of the sociolinguistic studies that followed – just means, charts, and trends. Although I have campaigned to bring people back into the field of sociolinguistics there has been only a limited response on this front. (Labov 1966/2006: 157)

Another area in which individual speakers have proven important is the study of language contact. For example, Rickford’s (1985) study of English in the Sea Islands in South Carolina, where African Americans and white Americans have co-existed for centuries, examined the speech of two individuals, an African American woman and a white American man. Unsurprisingly, these two speakers were found to share many phonological and grammatical features characteristic of both Southern American English and African American English. However, the quantitative distributions of these features were quite different for the two speakers, demonstrating that individual speakers of linguistic varieties in contact for long periods

Walker & Meyerhoff 3

of time can show different distributional preferences. Similarly, Wolfram and Beckett’s (2000) analysis of phonological and grammatical variation in 11 elderly African Americans from Hyde County, North Carolina, found a surprising degree of heterogeneity among speakers in their convergence to white American norms. Wolfram and Beckett argue that the differences for individual speakers and individual linguistic variables are better explained by referring to aspects of “personal history, interactional relations, and attitudes and values than of conventional social divisions or even constructed social identities” (Wolfram & Becket 2000: 27).

The stability of the individual speaker’s linguistic system across the lifespan (once language acquisition has been completed) is an important assumption of diachronic sociolinguistic studies, since differences among age-groups are often interpreted as reflecting language change (the ‘apparent time’ construct; cf. Bailey 2002). Real-time studies of language change tend to sample different speakers in the same community at different points in time (‘trend studies’), though studies in which individual speakers are tracked longitudinally (‘panel studies’) do exist, and provide insight into the assumption of individual speaker invariance across the lifespan. For example, Sankoff and Blondeau’s (2007) analysis of a change in Montreal French from an apical [r] to uvular [R] examined 32 individual speakers who were interviewed in 1971 and again in 1984. Although the community as a whole showed a substantial increase in uvular [R], only a few of the speakers showed a substantial change, and with one exception, always in the direction of change of the entire community. In fact, they infer that “change is being implemented by people who alter their pronunciation quite rapidly, rather than a steady, incremental raising of levels across individual lifespans” (Sankoff & Blondeau 2007: 575). This conclusion provides some support for the validity of the apparent-time construct, though it does highlight the need to examine the behavior of individual speakers.

One response to the criticisms against social grouping has been to reconceptualize larger-scale groups, such as social class, into smaller-scale groupings. The Milroys’ work in Belfast in the 1970s (Milroy 1987; Milroy & Milroy 1992) recast social-class distinctions in terms of the social networks that individuals engage in. Their work showed that the strength of network ties of individual speakers can act as a conservative force, resisting changes encroaching from the larger speech community, and that the types of social roles that individuals engage in are just as important as the number of ties. For example, a sex-based difference noted in one neighborhood was reversed in another neighborhood where high rates of unemployment had shifted gender roles. Similarly, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s (1992) work on language and gender introduced the ‘community of practice’, defined as “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992: 464). In contrast with higher-level categories such as social class (which relate individual speakers to the means of production) and other smaller-level categories such as social network (which stress the number and nature of ties between individuals), the community of practice emphasizes the mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire that characterize smaller groups of individuals (Holmes & Meyerhoff 1999).

Beginning in the 1990s, some researchers questioned the very practice of grouping individual speakers into categories that may not be internally homogeneous or even salient to the speakers. Some researchers argued that sociolinguistics, as a social science, should be concerned with interrogating the stability of social categories and the manner in which language serves to create and reify social categories and hierarchies of power. This ‘third wave’ of sociolinguistics,

Studies of the Community and the Individual 4

most strongly associated with research on language and gender (Eckert 1989), though now concerned with other categories such as sexuality (Podesva 2004) and ethnicity (Benor 2005), draws explicitly on developments in feminist theory, in which early struggles for emancipation and equal opportunity later shifted to a focus on identity and individual agency. For example, Eckert’s (1989) work with high school students in Detroit showed that grouping women together simply because they are female masks important differences: differences among teenage girls were more substantial than the differences between girls and boys. Over the next decade, studies began to consider the linguistic behavior of individuals – even a single individual, in a single conversation, with a constant interlocutor (e.g. Schilling-Estes 2004). Work drawing on the methods of both discourse analysis and quantitative studies of variation was also explored (Holmes 1997). Although some third-wave sociolinguists view traditional methods of social dialectology as hopelessly outdated and some third wave work is viewed as having sight of the social-group forest for the individual-speaker trees (itemizing tokens of variation), a middle road has recently taken shape, in which social-group data complement individual-speaker data and vice versa (e.g. Eckert 2000). Thus, observations made at one level can enrich the analysis of observations at the other level (cf. Labov 2001: 33), highlighting the complementarity of studies of the community and the individual.

3. Linguistic Grouping

While some researchers were querying the nature of social categories, others were developing an alternative approach, what Horvath and Sankoff (1987) call ‘linguistic grouping’. Under this approach, rather than defining social groups and comparing the extent to which individuals agree with or deviate from them, research starts by examining the linguistic behavior of individual speakers and grouping speakers on the basis of similarities in their linguistic patterning (although it should be noted that researchers still have to interpret the groupings in social terms). In an instructive summary, shown in Table 1, Guy (1980: 12) notes the four possible outcomes of examining variation between groups and between individuals in those groups. The first cell, in which variation is shared among groups and individuals, describes a situation in which a variable applies uniformly across a speech community. For example, the variation in (ing) between a velar –ing and an apical –in’ exists across all varieties of English, and the evaluation of these variants (as formal/standard and informal/nonstandard) is similarly shared by all speakers. The second cell, in which variation differs between groups but is shared among individuals within those groups, describes the traditional findings of dialect differences

Table 1: Comparisons of groups and individuals (adapted from Guy 1980: 12)

Groups

Individuals Similar Different

Similar 1. uniform variation 2. geographic or social dialects

Different 3. ‘polylectal’

community 4. ‘free variation’

Walker & Meyerhoff 5

(if the groups are geographically defined), social groups (if the groups are defined on the basis of sex, social class or ethnicity) or language change (if the groups are defined on the basis of age). The third cell, in which different groups share variation but there are a variety of norms for individual speakers, corresponds to the situation of a ‘polylectal’ community, like that proposed for (post)creole communities. For example, De Camp (1971) notes that, although individual speakers in Jamaica exhibit differences in their use of lexical items (pikni or child, nyam or eat), phonological features ([θ] or [t], [ð] or [d]) and grammatical features (no ben or didn’t), they can nevertheless be ordered along a scale from most English-like to most creole-like, with the choice of one feature implying the presence of other features. The fourth cell, in which the variation between both groups and individuals differs, would be a situation of ‘free variation’, or perhaps the personal pattern variation noted by Dorian (1994).

Figure 1: Correlations of four factors derived from principal components analysis of four vowel variables for speakers in Sydney, Australia (adapted from Horvath & Sankoff 1987).

The linguistic behavior of groups and individuals can be compared either in terms of overall rates of use or the conditioning of variation by language-internal factors. The first approach has been investigated in a number of studies (e.g. Horvath & Sankoff 1987; McEntegart & Le Page 1982; Santa Ana & Parodi 1998). For example, Horvath and Sankoff

Studies of the Community and the Individual 6

(1987) use principal components analysis in a study of the vowels of Sydney, Australia, to isolate a smaller set of factors that allow them to cluster speakers into categories that they can then correlate with social characteristics. Using the number of tokens of each variant uttered by each speaker in their sample for four vowel variables, they isolate four principal component factors (plotted against each other in the four graphs shown in Figure 1). The first factor corresponds to native-speaker status (accounting for 32% of the variance), differentiating those born in Sydney from those who arrived as adults. The second factor combines sex and social class (15% of the variance). The third factor combines age and (second-generation) ethnicity (9% of the variance). The fourth factor, less easily identified with social characteristics, has to do with the degree of interaction with speakers in the core speech community (8% of the variance). Note that, although Horvath and Sankoff allow the groupings to fall out of distributions of individual speakers’ features, they must make reference to coherent and socially meaningful factors in order to interpret those groupings.

Figure 2: Linguistic factors contributing to (t/d)-deletion by individual speaker (adapted from Guy 1980: 14).

A classic use of conditioning by language-internal factors to conduct linguistic grouping is Guy’s (1980) analysis of word-final (t/d)-deletion among 18 speakers from New York and Philadelphia. Deletion is conditioned at the group level by a number of factors, including the grammatical status (with monomorphemic forms showing higher rates of deletion than past-tense forms) and the preceding and following phonological context. Examining the linguistic conditioning of individual speakers, he finds first that the patterns of speakers with less data was more likely to deviate from group norms, demonstrating the need to obtain sufficient data from each speaker. If we plot the findings by individual speaker as in Figure 2 (adapted from Guy’s (1980) Table 1.3), we see that speakers are united in their treatment of deletion by the morphological status, with higher rates of deletion with monomorphemic forms than past tense forms (left-hand graph) and higher rates of deletion with a following consonant than a following vowel (right-hand graph). However, as the right-hand graph shows, there are three speakers who deviate from the group norms in having high rates of deletion with a following pause. These ‘deviant’ speakers all turn out to be from New York, suggesting that the treatment of deletion by following pause is a feature that defines a dialect difference between speech communities: in New York, a following pause is treated like a following consonant in promoting deletion; in Philadelphia, a following pause inhibits deletion. These results suggest that speakers mostly share the same linguistic constraints on (t/d)-deletion (morphological status and following

Morphological Status Following Phonological Context

Walker & Meyerhoff 7

consonants and vowels) (though note that one Philadelphian treats consonants and vowels equally) but that dialects may be differentiated on the basis of at least one factor (following pause).

5. Variation in the Community and the Individual on Bequia

In this section, we present an analysis of two well-known grammatical variables across groups and individuals in the English spoken on Bequia, an island in St Vincent and the Grenadines with a population of about 5,000. Most of the inhabitants are the descendants of former African-origin slaves who worked the plantations after which many of the present-day villages are named, though a small percentage are descended from British who arrived in the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries. During 2003-2005, we collected data from five villages on Bequia:

• Hamilton, a former plantation and predominantly African-descent;

• Mount Pleasant, the traditional home of the British-descent population;

• La Pompe and Paget Farm, ethnically mixed fishing and whaling villages on the south side of the island; and

• Lower Bay, located at the south end of Admiralty Bay.

Although all interviewees had grown up in the village where they lived at the time of their interview, in every village there was at least one interviewee who had spent a number of years living in cities overseas (mainly London and Toronto). We call these people ‘urban sojourners’ (Meyerhoff & Walker 2007): their residence in an overseas city before returning to Bequia exposes them to more standard varieties of English and they clearly sound more like speakers of “Standard English” than their stay-at-home peers. Contact with more standard varieties clearly adds to the linguistic resources available to the urban sojourners’ stylistic repertoire, but how extensively does it impact on their linguistic system? We address this question by examining the social and linguistic conditioning across groups and individuals of two well-studied linguistic variables: BE absence and existentials.

5.1. Absence of BE

The variable absence of copular/auxiliary BE is a well-known feature of English-based creoles and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Most attention has been focused on the effects of the grammatical category following BE, in light of Labov’s (1969) finding of the hierarchy in (1) for AAVE, with decreasing BE absence from left to right:

(1) gonna > Verb-ing > adjective/locative > NP

Subsequent work separating adjectives and locatives attributed the tendency of adjectives to favour BE absence to a (prior) creole grammar in which adjectives functioned as predicates, with fluctuation in the relative ordering of adjectives and locatives reflecting decreolization (see Walker 2000 for an overview).

Despite its salience to speakers of other varieties of English, BE absence does not seem to be available to speakers on Bequia for metalinguistic comment. Although people on Bequia readily acknowledge the stylistic salience of BE absence when it is made explicit, it was never

Studies of the Community and the Individual 8

spontaneously cited in discussions of differences between villages or differences from other varieties of English.

Table 2: Variable-rule analysis of the linguistic constraints on BE absence in three

villages on Bequia. Factors favoring absence of BE highlighted in bold.

HAMILTON MT PLEASANT PAGET FARM

(Ø vs. F+C)

(Insertion)

(Ø vs. C)

(Labov Deletion)

(Ø vs. F+C)

(Insertion)

Total N: 1002 640 690

Input (p0): .386 .459 .250

Following grammatical category

gonna .90 .83 .96

Verb-ing .82 .79 .84

Adjective .64 .47 .54

PP .38 .53 .42

NP .16 .12 .14

Locative adverb .08 .53 .54

Subject type + preceding segment

NP, Vowel .58 .87 .50

Pronoun .53 .47 .50

NP, Consonant .43 .55 .49

From interviews with 18 residents of three villages (Hamilton, Mt Pleasant and Paget Farm), we extracted a representative sample of copula contexts in present-tense finite clauses, and noted whether BE was present or absent. We coded for a number of linguistic factors (see Walker and Meyerhoff 2006 for full details), but here we focus on the following grammatical category, which was coded as gon(na) (2a), present participle VERB-ing (2b), Adjective Phrase (2c), Prepositional Phrase (2d), locative Adverb (2e) or Noun Phrase (2f).

(4) a. Yeah, I think my boy Ø gon done this year. (H5:420) b. He Ø making speed, running. (H3:217) c. They does go walk and bawl, days before they they’re dead.

(P14:274) d. So they figure everybody is for theyself. (M303:634) e. He Ø there in Antigua. (P19:731) f. But her father is a Ollivierre. (P24:172)

The results for the following grammatical category are shown by village in Table 2.1 In all three 1 Three main scenarios have been proposed for modeling the variation of BE absence: an extension of contraction

(Labov Deletion); independent of contraction (Straight Deletion); and (non-)insertion (see Walker 2000). Our

Walker & Meyerhoff 9

villages there is a marked difference between auxiliary and copula functions of BE: following verbal predicates (auxiliary) massively favour absence; following non-verbal predicates (copula) disfavour absence. There is also a qualitative difference between the villages in how predicate adjectives are treated: in Hamilton and Paget Farm, they are treated more like verbal predicates; in Mount Pleasant, more like non-verbal predicates. Thus, speakers in different villages on Bequia appear to have analyzed English adjectives in different ways, possibly reflecting the different settlement histories of the three villages. Since this is the most striking finding, we will take differences between individuals in this respect to be the most crucial, and indicative of fundamentally different grammars.

Figure 3: Rates of BE absence by individual speaker in Bequia.

As we noted in the Introduction, a recurring question in sociolinguistics is whether the patterns of group variation are replicated in the performance of individuals. A particular challenge for this study is whether these patterns are replicated in the speech of the urban sojourners. To investigate this question, we undertook separate analyses of the copula for each speaker in our sample. As Figure 3 shows, the overall rate of BE absence varies among speakers, even within a community, from highs of as much as 60% to lows of 8%. Because of the small numbers per speaker, multivariate analysis is not possible for individuals. To make inter-individual comparisons, we examine the percentage of absence across different following grammatical categories. Despite these methodological adjustments, percentages with small numbers of tokens are still necessarily subject to more fluctuation between individuals than

statistical comparison of different models found Labov Deletion to provide the best fit for Mount Pleasant and non-insertion for the other two communities (see Meyerhoff & Walker 2007; Walker & Meyerhoff 2006).

Studies of the Community and the Individual 10

weighted probabilities are. Nonetheless, across individuals the patterns are very similar for the effect of each following grammatical category relative to all other categories.

Figure 4: Percentage of BE absence for Paget Farm speakers: urban sojourner (dashed) vs. average of stay-at-

home peers (solid).

Figure 5: Percentage of be absence for Hamilton speakers: urban sojourner (dashed) vs. average of stay-at-home

peers (solid).

Figure 6: Percentage of be absence for Mt Pleasant speakers: urban sojourner (dashed) vs. average of

stay-at-home peers (solid).

Walker & Meyerhoff 11

More specifically, the rate of BE absence in the speech of each of the urban sojourners largely falls within the group norms for their stay-at-home peers. The lack of evidence for any substantial reanalysis in the urban sojourners’ distribution of BE absence can be seen in Figures 4-6, which show the patterns for all three villages,2 with the urban sojourner in each village highlighted with a dashed line. This allows us to see how the urban sojourners are treating following adjectives, which we have argued are critical in defining each community’s grammar. In Paget Farm (Figure 4) the parallel between the urban sojourner and the average for her stay-at-home peers is extremely close; in Mt Pleasant (Figure 5) too. In Hamilton (Figure 6), the comparison between the urban sojourner and the rest of the community is complicated by the very small number of tokens we have for the urban sojourner with some following grammatical categories (for example, 4 tokens of a following PP). In Figure 6 we can see clearly that the urban sojourner’s rate of BE absence is much lower than that of the rest of the Hamilton speakers, but even so, he clearly retains the strong preference for BE absence with a following V-ing, just like his stay-at-home peers.3

These results provide surprising evidence of the persistence of shared probabilistic grammars across individuals. The urban sojourners, who sound very different from their stay-at-home peers in the village, have not radically restructured their grammars.

4.2. Existentials

We contrast the above analysis by turning to another well-studied variable, the choice of existential construction to introduce new or contrastive referents or information into discourse. In Bequia, existentials are variably expressed with three expletive subjects and three verbs. Expletive subject there occurs with the verb BE (3) as morphologically plural (3a) or singular (3b-c), as found in other varieties of English (see Walker 2007 for an overview). Expletive subject it occurs with the verb HAVE (4) (with singular or plural agreement) or GET/GOT (5), constructions that occur throughout the Caribbean. Thus, there are three primary sites of variation in existentials: the expletive subject (there, it), the verb (be, get/got, have), and agreement (singular, plural). In this analysis, we first divide the data by verb type and then examine variability in morphological agreement in the interviews of 30 individuals from four villages: Hamilton, La Pompe, Mount Pleasant, and Paget Farm.

(3) a. There are very, very few students that I can name. (L28: 351)

b. And there was lot of fellows there who misunderstand. (L316:1799)

c. Well, there’s a lot of changes g- since tourists start to come in. (P14: 252)

(4) a. I would say it has some truth in it. (H2:167)

b. It have certain people here who giving, if you go to them for lumber. (P9:135)

(5) a. It got fire axe all- all inside the thing you know. (H3:1360)

2 We exclude gon(na) from these figures because it almost never occurs with BE. 3 Although his preference for an overt form of BE with a following adjective is admittedly problematic for our

suggestion that the treatment of adjectives might be taken as a diagnostic of adherence to the community grammar, many of the following adjectives in this speaker’s interview are repetitions of is/are weak; is/are strong (in a discussion of homeopathy), and that’s right.

Studies of the Community and the Individual 12

b. And open the seed and it get a white something what with it. (H16: 830)

As shown in Table 3, the urban sojourners consistently diverge from their stay-at-home peers either in quantity or quality of the existential verb they prefer. Since have and get existentials clearly pattern alike with respect to subject type, we treat them as a single variant in subsequent analyses (Meyerhoff & Walker, in press).

Table 3: Overall distribution of existentials in Bequia, by village and speaker type (stay-at-home vs. urban sojourner).

% BE (N) % HAVE (N) % GET (N) Total N

Hamilton stay-at-home 26 (35) 51 (70) 23 (31) 136

urban sojourner 99 (92) 1 (1) 0 93

La Pompe

stay-at-home 76 (79) 23 (24) 1 (1) 104

urban sojourner 88 (7) 0 12 (1) 8

Paget Farm

stay-at-home 75 (113) 23 (34) 2 (3) 150

urban sojourner 31 (18) 69 (41) 0 59

Mt Pleasant

stay-at-home 30 (31) 54 (56) 16 (16) 103

urban sojourner 91 (32) 6 (2) 3 (1) 35

Total 407 228 53 688

4.2.1. BE Existentials

Table 4 shows a multivariate analysis of the factors contributing to standard agreement in BE existentials (3a).4 For Paget Farm and La Pompe, Table 3 showed that the overall frequency of BE existentials differs according to speaker type, with the urban sojourner preferring a different existential construction to their stay-at-home peers. But beneath the story of difference that these summary statistics tell, there is another story of fundamental similarity. In Table 4, we see that if the stay-at-home speakers in these two villages use a BE existential, then they disfavor (normative) agreement (with factor weights of .42 and .32), and this is true for the urban sojourners as well (disfavoring agreement with factor weights of .20 and .14). For Hamilton, Table 3 showed that the overall frequency of BE existentials differs according to speaker type, with the urban sojourner using vastly more BE (99%) than the stay-at-home peers (26%). As Table 4 shows, on the occasions that the stay-at-home Hamilton speakers do use a be existential, they favor (normative) agreement, and this is true for the urban sojourner in Hamilton too (factor weights of .63 and .75, respectively). For Mount Pleasant, Table 3 similarly showed that the 4 The high input probability reflects the near-categorical occurrence of singular agreement (there is, there was,

there’s) in tokens with singular reference, which we retain to shore up the low number of plural tokens. Although this elevates the overall rate of singular agreement, it means that the observed effects can only be a reflection of the contribution of plural tokens.

Walker & Meyerhoff 13

overall frequency of BE existentials differs by speaker type, with urban sojourners using BE at a much higher rate (91%) than their stay-at-home peers (30%). But in Mount Pleasant we see a slightly different pattern with respect to the constraints on the variation. Table 4 shows that this difference persist in speakers’ preference for (normative) agreement: stay-at-home speakers disfavor agreement (.26), while the urban sojourner favors it (.78).

Table 4: Factors contributing to standard agreement with postverbal subjects in BE existentials in Bequia.

Total N: 390 Input: .893

Village and Speaker Type Mt Pleasant, urban sojourner .78 Hamilton, urban sojourner .75 Hamilton, stay-at-home .63 Paget Farm, stay-at-home .42 La Pompe, stay-at-home .32 Mt Pleasant, stay-at-home .26 Paget Farm, urban sojourner .20 La Pompe, urban sojourner .14

Type of Subject there .53 it .19

Factor groups not selected: Sentence polarity, tense morphology.

4.2.2. HAVE/GET Existentials

Table 5 shows a multivariate analysis of factors contributing to the occurrence of standard agreement with HAVE/GET existentials.5 Table 3 showed disagreement in three villages between urban sojourners and their stay-at-home peers in the preference for type of existential. HAVE/GET existentials are preferred by stay-at-home speakers in Hamilton and Mt Pleasant, but by the urban sojourner in Paget Farm. In La Pompe, both types of speakers agree in preferring BE existentials. Because of the small number of tokens of HAVE/GET existentials for the urban sojourners in La Pompe, Hamilton and Mount Pleasant, we can only compare the preference for standard agreement between speaker types in Paget Farm. As Table 5 shows, the stay-at-home speakers in La Pompe and Mt Pleasant favor agreement, while those in Hamilton disfavor agreement. In Paget Farm, despite the disagreement in preferred existential construction, the urban sojourner patterns with her stay-at-home peers in disfavoring agreement.

5 As in Table 4, the high input probability reflects categorical forms (had, got) included to shore up low numbers

and the effects observed can only reflect the contribution of plural tokens.

Studies of the Community and the Individual 14

Table 5: Factors contributing to verbal agreement with

postverbal subjects in HAVE/GET existentials in Bequia.

Total N: 276a Input: .840

Village and Speaker Type La Pompe, stay-at-home .82 Mt Pleasant, stay-at-home .65 Paget Farm, stay-at-home .42 Hamilton, stay-at-home .40 Paget Farm, urban sojourner .34

Range: 48 Speaker Sex

Male .66 Female .31

Range: 35

Factor groups not selected: Sentence polarity, type of subject, tense morphology.

4.3. Discussion

Our analysis of two grammatical variables across groups and individuals in Bequia shows that the rate of BE absence in the urban sojourners largely falls within the group norms for their stay-at-home peers and that the linguistic conditioning of this feature is largely parallel, suggesting that the urban sojourners have not radically restructured their grammars. We see a greater degree of divergence between urban sojourners and their stay-at-home peers in both the quantity and quality of their preferred existential variant. For some of the villages, the patterns of agreement are parallel across individuals, while in others, they are quite different.

The results of these studies provide further support for conclusions we have reached in studying other grammatical variables in Bequia, where we find divergence between villages (Daleszynska 2008; Walker & Meyerhoff 2006; Walker & Sidnell 2011) alongside stability across (some) individuals’ grammars within each village. However, the differences among speakers observed for existentials, in contrast with the uniform parallels across speakers found for BE absence, demonstrates the need to examine variables, as well as speakers, individually.

5. Conclusion

Sociolinguistics has tended to concentrate on community-level issues in the study of language, but this examination of the literature has shown that, although not always methodologically central, there has been a longstanding concern with the role of the individual speaker. Although most studies have relied on social grouping, the individual speaker is

a The data include past and non-past existentials, though the majority (N=178) of it HAVE tokens are past.

Walker & Meyerhoff 15

important in calculating group rates, in the extent to which individuals adhere to or deviate from group norms, and in the reformulation of larger-scale categories as smaller-scale structures. Moreover, as our examination of variation in the speech of urban sojourners showed, the study of individuals may be central in the application of sociolinguistic analysis to questions of language contact and language change (see also Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985). Even when the individual is methodologically central, as in linguistic grouping, the behavior of individual speakers (whether overall rates or linguistic conditioning) can still only be interpreted with reference to the behavior of the group.

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