6 - Cultural Motivation in Context

Summary

The insights gained in Chapter 5 are then contextualised in Chapter 6. This is done in two ways: by investigating instances of non-cultural types of motivation, to contrast with cultural motivation, and by quantifying the extent of cultural motivation among instances of change in the data. For this purpose, the chapter opens by presenting a comprehensive typology of motivations of change (based on research discussed in Chapter 2) and then presents the method used to assess motivation in a random sample of instances of significant change in the corpus. Conclusions from six closely researched instances of non-cultural motivation suggest that there are various other strong motivators of change, but also that some of the commonly applied categories of non-culturally motivated change offer less than satisfactory accounts of motivation. In some of these cases, more interesting but difficult to ascertain social factors play a role. At the end of the chapter, an assessment is made of the relative proportions of the different motivators of linguistic change in the sample. This shows that cultural change plays a greater role than language-internal factors.