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Don’t wait for a change to happen: Find one!

Sali Tagliamonte

University of Toronto

Lattimore 201

In this presentation, I demonstrate how to study emerging changes in contemporary language using a recent example from my lab. The study involves a change that developed in English over the 20th century, a discourse-pragmatic function of the word wait, as in (1). The origins of the innovation come from collocations such as wait a minute, (2), hold on, (3) and others.

• Wait, are Craig and I invited to dinner? (F, 24)
• Ah not thirty-thousand wait a minute it wasn’t that much. (M, 72)
• Now hold on a second here, I treated your family good. (M, 44)

I will outline my procedures for building a research paper beginning with diverse lines of evidence from observant detective work, historical sleuthing and internet searches . Then, turning to sociolinguistic corpora in my archives I will document how to analyze the change using a variation linguistics toolkit for investigation (Tagliamonte, in press).

In so doing, it soon becomes evident that older people use more fully specified variants, wait a minute/wait a second, while wait alone is increasing by date of birth of the speakers with women leading its advance. The variant hold on is a low frequency, stable alternative that is favoured among men. Furthermore, cross-community comparison indicates retention of the longer expressions in rural areas and an increase in waitalone in urban centres with a robust increase in the generation of speakers born after 1973 , e.g. “I haven’t seen her yet. No wait. Yes I have.” (girl, age 12). The social trends are consistent with well-known principles of linguistic change (Labov 2001) that converge with the findings from historical trends and regional diffusion. But what happens when the comparison is extended to other places in the world and to emerging fieldwork (Schwenter et al., 2019; Camacho Salas, 2022)? New data from England and ongoing research in my own archive reveals insightful ongoing developments.

My discussion will synthesize practical and scholarly means to understand evolving patterns in language. In this case, wait develops from a verb, e.g. don’t wait for a change to happen, with temporal specification, e.g. a minute, to a full-fledged discourse-pragmatic marker on the left periphery, wait, that’s it (Tagliamonte, 2021). Indeed, discourse wait is a prime example of an innovative change that happened under our noses. 

Selected references:

Camacho Salas, N. (2022). The use of wait as a discourse-pragmatic marker in spoken British English: a corpus-based analysis. Working Papers on English Studies 29: 31-55.

Schwenter, S., Hoff, M. & the students of SPAN 5630. (2019). Wait, wut? Comparing a discourse marker in English and Spanish. OSUCHiLL 2019. Columus, Ohio. March 2019. 

Tagliamonte, S. A. (2021). Wait, it’s a new English discourse marker. American Speech 96(3): 424–449.

Tagliamonte, S. A. (in press). Analysing sociolinguistic variation, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.