View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Essex Research Repository If A changes to B, make sure A exists: a case study on the dialect origins of New Zealand English1 David Britain Department of Language and Linguistics Essex University Wivenhoe Park Colchester Essex CO4 3SQ Great Britain
[email protected] Introduction: One of the principal advances sociolinguistics has brought to the study of language change has been in trying to answer what Uriel Weinreich, William Labov and Marvin Herzog in their groundbreaking paper Empirical foundations for a theory of language change (1968) termed the embedding problem, namely the route linguistic changes take both through the language as well as through the speech community that uses that language. They convincingly argued that ‘the problem of providing sound empirical foundations for the theory of change revolves about…this embedding’ (1968:185). Once changes are underway, some of the most 1 This research would not have been possible without the financial support given by the British Academy in 1996 (Small Personal Grant Number: BA-AN1594/APN3350) and The Link, a year long programme of events to celebrate and explore the relationship between New Zealand and Britain, devised by the British High Commission in Wellington and The British Council, in 1998. I would like to thank the Wellington Social Dialect Project team for allowing me access to the Porirua recordings. I’d also like to thank the following people for their patience, help