The aggregate and the individual: Thoughts on what non-alternating authors reveal about linguistic alternations - A response to Petré

In one way or another, historical linguists have always been aware of the limitations inherent to working with linguistic data from bygone ages. One of the most substantial limitations, as Petré points out, is that all speakers of a historical variant of a language are unavailable for psycholinguistic study, essentially leaving researchers with their written records as the sole data source. As such, historical linguists often find themselves taking the role of corpus linguists, trying to understand the workings of a language ‘by studying aggregate data that pools the productions of many speakers and writers – often across different media, genres, registers, and even across different time periods’ (Arppe et al. 2010: 3). As Petré points out, the practice of studying language on this aggregate level has dominated the methodologies in historical linguistic studies, and very little attention is paid to the individual level.