Obsolescence and abortive innovations in variationist approaches to language change

Abstract

The focus of most variationist studies of linguistic change to date has been the emergence and increase of new forms. The opposing process—obsolescence, or the decline and loss of older variants—is less well understood. Addressing several calls for more attention to be paid to obsolescence and its properties, this article surveys case studies mostly from English and French and suggests generalisations. Obsolescence, for many reasons, is a very long process. While the linguistic factors influencing an obsolescent form often become unpredictable, the social meaning and/or pragmatic effects associated with it may strengthen rather than weaken. A special subset of obsolescent forms are abortive innovations—those that begin by increasing, but then disappear suddenly. The notion that an abortive innovation is always a subcomponent of a two-step innovation, otherwise successful, applies straightforwardly to several case studies identified in the variationist literature in recent years.