| Kommentar |
In this class, we will consider how the factor of age has an impact on linguistic practice and linguistic variation. It is intuitively clear that age influences the way we speak and interact with discourse: languages are learned and forgotten, certain ways of speaking are perceived as typical (or appropriate) of younger or older people. In this seminar, we will examine these perceptions and intuitions and compare them against linguistic evidence about language through the lifespan.
We will begin with a general and interdisciplinary introduction to the topic, exploring age as a social, psychological, physiological and political category. We will also discuss central linguistic research fields, such as first and second language acquisition, language attrition, and sociolinguistic concepts such as language change and age-grading. After that, we will zoom in on selected life stages such as early childhood, adolescence and old age, and analyze salient linguistic practices associated with them, from parentese to eldertalk. Finally, we will take into account discourses about age and ageing, and how stages of the lifespan are discursively constructed. |
| Literatur |
Sankoff, G. (2018). Language change across the lifespan. Annual Review of Linguistics, 4, 297-316.
Gerstenberg, A., & Voeste, A. (Eds.). (2015). Language development: The lifespan perspective. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
|
