Pat terns of age-based linguistic variat ion in American English

In variationist research, speaker age is considered t he primary correlate of language change (Chambers 2002), and as such is generally included as independent variable in studies of language change. However, in contrast with other social variables (e.g., sex, socio-economic class), in sociolinguistics, age has not typically been of interest in and of itself: “there has been little, if any, research that has had age differences in language use as its primary focus ” (Cheshire 1987: 766). There is a dearth of research investigat ing “how word use changes across the life span ” (Pennebaker, Mehl and Niederhoffer 2003: 556). Indeed, most prior mainstream sociolinguistic research has focused on morpho-phonological variation, while syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic variation have remained under-investigated (Cheshire 2005). In sum, we know relatively little about how speakers from different age groups might differ in their linguistic choices, particularly at the lexico-grammatical level. Syntactic, lexical and pragmatic variation however cannot be tackled the same way as phonological variation, where a linguist ic variable is identified by circumscribing relevant variants. R ather, we need approaches t aking int o account the fact that the social embedding of these forms may involve forms drawn from other linguisti