In this article, I conduct a quantitative analysis of negative concord in Buckie, a relic dialect from the northeast of Scotland, and compare these findings with transported varieties of English in North America. Two major results arise from the analysis. First, Buckie has high rates of use of negative concord to indeterminates within the same clause, as do all the dialects included in the study. Second, negative concord in other environments is found in certain varieties in the New World that have no counterparts in the Old World. I suggest that the quantitative similarities can be explained in terms of the primitive status of negative concord in vernacular varieties of English, in combination with a shared linguistic heritage during the colonial period. The qualitative differences demonstrate that contexts of linguistic heterogeneity in North America during the early colonization period led to an extension and restructuring of the original rules.

Reporting the results of an instrumental acoustic examination of the vowel systems of ten Jamaican Creole (or basilect-) dominant and nine Jamaican English (or acrolect-) dominant speakers, this article links phonetic features with sociolinguistic factors. The nature and relative role of vowel quantity and quality differences in phonemic contrast are considered. The question of whether contrastive length operates in speakers' phonological systems is addressed by comparison of spectral and temporal features. Intraspeaker variation in vowel quality is found to play an important role in stylistic variation, demonstrating the complexity of variation in Jamaican varieties. The complex vowel quality (spectral) and quantity (temporal) relations reported here extend our understanding of the spectral and temporal characteristics of vowels involved in phonological contrasts in Jamaican varieties, the range of phonetic variation to be found within a postcreole continuum, and the interaction of phonetic factors in the expression of stylistic variation.

It is not difficult to find grammatical and lexical markers of Fiji English. But are there any phonological features that identify an individual as a speaker of this regional variety of English? For the vast majority of Fiji Islanders, English is their second (or third) language, and their accents clearly identify their linguistic background (e.g., indigenous Fijian or Indo-Fijian). However, one pronunciation feature seems to be shared by a vast majority of speakers of English in Fiji: the deletion of yod in non-primary stressed /Cju/ syllables. This article considers variation in yod pronunciation according to ethnicity, age, gender, and education and examines whether yod deletion is a phonological shibboleth of Fiji English or merely a feature of L2 English.

In Early Modern English, double comparatives were often encountered in both spoken and written language. The present article investigates the redundantly marked comparative worser in relation to its irregular, but etymologically justified, counterpart worse. My aim is to examine the diachronic development of the form as well as its distribution in the written language of the 16th and 17th centuries. Two detailed corpus studies are used to reveal the set of parameters underlying the variation between worse and worser, which include system congruity, semantics, and standardization effects. However, the focus here is on the tendency to maintain an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, known as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. This prosodic principle (which has been argued to be particularly influential in English) turns out to be responsible for most of the results obtained in the analysis of the corpus data.

The present study explores the notion of lexical diffusion in relation to an ongoing change in Modern French nasal vowels. Data are interviews with 42 Parisians, recorded in 1972–74 and 1989–93. We start with the notion that sound change ought to be regular, according to the classification of Labov (1994): that is, being a phonetically gradual change, it should be lexically abrupt. The first part of our analysis, which includes more than 10,000 nasal vowel tokens, seems to indicate an influence of factors compatible with the hypothesis of regular sound change (i.e., stress and phonetic surroundings). A closer look at the vowel /[vowel symbol]/, however, reveals an independent lexical and grammatical conditioning, one not entirely explicable in terms of stress or phonetics. As other studies have shown (Krishnamurti, 1998; Yaeger-Dror, 1996), gradual phonetic change might show lexical irregularities, a fact which calls for a revision of Labov's classification.