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Wei_Dai comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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Aargh! Surely you know that only low-status people use the preposition "for" in this context!
High-status people say "in".
This is curious. Do you have an explanation for why "for" is associated with low-status and "in" is associated with high-status (in this context)? Are there other similar linguistic phenomena?
Hm, I suppose I could attempt one. I think my current best guess would be along the following lines:
High-status people will tend to have a richer cache of stored expressions; in a given situation, they are more likely to be able to precisely reproduce a previously-heard expression appropriate to the context, rather than having to make up a new expression on the spot. This is especially so if the idea being expressed is one that high-status people think about more often than low-status people do. Consequently, a high-status person will be more likely to remember the phrase "graduate school in philosophy" in detail, including the specific information about "in" being the preposition used; whereas a low-status person, who (at least at first) may not have as much occasion to speak about graduate school in philosophy, may only have something like "graduate school [preposition] philosophy" stored in their mind. As a result, when they first need to use the expression, they will have to spontaneously choose a preposition, and the choice they end up with may not be the same as the one in the existing expression commonly used by high-status folk. But now, when the low-status person next uses the phrase, they will have a tendency to remember the preposition they themselves used the last time; so this new expression will then spread among their low-status associates, and will become the standard cached version of the expression for low-status people.
I don't know whether this is one, but I expect that some such expressions have different "correct" forms on either side of the Atlantic.
Yes, of course status levels are not the only source of linguistic variation; there's also geography, and other things also.
Note however that high-status language varies less by geography than low-status language.
Also, British English (at least "Southern British Standard") sounds higher status to me than American English in general, so I would find it surprising if an expression that struck my (American-English) ear as low status turned out to be a high-status British form. I would expect the reverse -- that is, something that sounds low-status to a British speaker being a high-status American expression -- to be more common.
Sticking to prepositional shibboleths, another one that comes to mind concerns professional athletes and sports teams:
Low status: "X is on the Texas Rangers." (Generalized from the use of "on" in expressions like "whose team are you on?")
High status: "X is with the Texas Rangers." (Standard expression used in the specific context by sports journalists, etc.)