Chapter 13

Towards an acquisitionally informed historical sociolinguistics

This conclusion chapter offers an overview of some of the main themes developed throughout the volume and highlights several important theoretical and methodological implications for the development of new acquisitionally informed research agendas in historical sociolinguistics. The use of acquisition theory and corpora as sources of information to interpret the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic archive is complicated by several methodological and analytical hurdles – nevertheless, it is argued here that acquisitional analogues between past and present and a knowledge of how various groups of learners process different forms of variation can do much to propel the study of language variation and change in historical situations. In addition, new technological developments and sources of data can furnish researchers additional information about how individual acquisitional trajectories may have contributed to the linguistic patterns attested in the archival record. Lastly, an acquisitionally informed perspective can also be a step to address structural inequalities in linguistic description and in the construction of knowledge in our field.