Each To Their Own Language: A study of linguistic individuality

Abstract

Research in linguistics often carries a tacit assumption that members of a language community have the exact same mental grammars. However, a growing number of studies have identified the fact that linguistic variation is not just a group phenomenon, but an individual one too. Moreover, some theories of language actually predict the uniqueness of each individual’s language system, for example those which hold that mental grammars are built from the ground up based on the cognitive processing of language use. In the conception of language as a complex adaptive system, language can be viewed at two distinct but interdependent levels: the individual level and the group-level. The focus of this thesis is on language at the individual level, and specifically to what extent individuals vary, even among those with similar demographic attributes. A new experimental paradigm was created: using experimental methods to measure and compare variation within the individual, and variation between individuals. Lower within-speaker variation than between-speaker demonstrates individual linguistic patterning. Three studies are reported in this paper. To measure within-speaker variation, participants completed tasks at two occasions, separated by a period of time. In the first study, within-speaker consistency in selecting variants to realise lexico-grammatical alternations was higher than the consistency of between-speaker response comparisons. In the second, individual patterns were found in the linguistic structures produced by adults to encode the meaning of a wordless picture story in written narrations, while the third applied the same analysis to children’s spoken data, with similar results. The findings of greater variation between individuals than within individuals, referred to as an ‘individuality effect’, can be explained by the notion of varying entrenchment of linguistic chunks in the language system. Chunks have different levels of entrenchment for different individuals, based on how often they have processed them during their lives. It is proposed that participants are more likely to reach for their more entrenched chunks when faced with a choice between two, or in producing an original text.

Date of Award	4 May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Andrea Nini (Main Supervisor) & Colin Bannard (Co Supervisor)