Just as a community's distinctive use of language can be said to constitute a dialect, an individual's distinctive use of language is said to be his or her
idiolect. (30) According to Malcolm Coulthard--one of the most prominent forensic linguists (31)--a person's
idiolect "will manifest itself in distinctive and cumulatively unique rule-governed choices for encoding meaning linguistically in written and spoken communications they produce." (32) Individual language users differ in both their linguistic repertoires (i.e., the vocabulary and language patterns they know) and in the choices they make from those repertoires in producing speech and writings.
must undergo--the alien who becomes a citizen, or whose children do, is not to remain a disunited element but to become part of our national
idiolect, even if he retains a trace of an old accent.
By omitting the third-person singular presents, the translators indicate that Karola speaks African American Vernacular English and not a random
idiolect. The translators are to be commended for providing a stellar translation that demonstrates both the strengths and shortcomings of a novel that attempts to explore racial injustice in the United States from a European perspective.
But even though many Kenyans are now part of one huge web community with a shared
idiolect, they still maintain traits attributable to their locality.
It would take you too far outside your own
idiolect, outside your own register.
Building on studies by Brunner, Blakeley, and others, she shows how the distribution of variant forms indicates that Aldred's work does not reflect a uniform
idiolect throughout, and must have been based on earlier source materials.
Their analysis of the different versions reveals the influence of the author's mastery of several languages, as well as the instability of the notion of a "source language," which can be an
idiolect based on more than one language.
Now, though I agree with the grammaticality judgements of (21), both (20a) and (20b) are perfectly grammatical in my own
idiolect, and also in the
idiolect of the Spanish speakers that I have consulted.
Syncretism and distinctions are classified on the basis of information exclusively given from one single
idiolect (see also 3.2).
Mailer's persona, his familiar and constructed "
idiolect"
It is widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of his words and the concepts (or
idiolect meanings) those words express.