Changing socioindexicalities in Swabian: Real-time change in subject pronoun use

Abstract

This paper investigates the variable presence or absence of subject personal pronouns in a real-time, spontaneously spoken corpus of Swabian German. Pronominal finite verb constructions were manually extracted and coded for an array of linguistic (e.g., person-number, clause type), cognitive (e.g., coreferentiality, priming, lexical frequency), and social constraints (e.g., age, gender, education, and style). The results reveal considerable stability in the linguistic and cognitive constraints over time, but changing socioindexicalities in the use of subject pronouns: older, more highly educated women in urban environments use more overt pronominal subjects than younger, less educated, men who use more null subjects. The findings underscore the role of the linguistic architecture in understanding morphosyntactic variation and change, specifically the stability of linguistic and cognitive constraints and the instability and individualism of social influences.