ABSTRACT
It is well known that young people are the major force in linguistic change, and that changes commonly take on indexical meaning as they spread, as a function of their stylistic use. As people age, they are decreasingly likely to be privy to the discourses in which this meaning is constructed; thus one can say that they become indexically obsolescent. This study focuses on an innovative style in news broadcasting on National Public Radio (NPR), which I call the Marketplace register. Focusing on a well-known NPR commentator, who varies her style according to the news story’s key, I examine this register and then compare older and younger listeners’ evaluations of her speech in this register with her more conservative speech. A between-subjects matched guise experiment shows that younger listeners find the conservative style less authoritative than do the older ones.
