Lifespan change and style-shifting: Micro and macro approaches to the individual and collective scenarios of change

The observation of the individual’s heterogeneity is complementarily enriching traditional aggregate studies through intra-speaker designs both theoretically and methodologically. This represents a shift in focus from the collectivity of the community to the singularity of the individual. In addition to tracing sociolinguistic patterns of language development longitudinally, informants are now put under the microscope to atomistically observe their sociolinguistic behaviour on the basis of the social (a)symmetries between addressers and addressees. This paper shows results and conclusions on lifespan changes and style-shifting processes in late medieval England by applying contemporary models of intra-speaker variation to collections of historical private correspondence: the orthographic variable (th) in the Paston Letters (1425-1503). When the sociolinguistic behaviour of informants is observed in communicative interaction to see how they were experiencing a given change, patterns of style-shifting emerge, explaining their lifetime (ir)regularities and raising theoretical and methodological challenges for further inquiry.