This account deals with a stage of chain shifting in North American English in which the usual tendency to preserve margins of security does not seem to apply. Two vowels follow a collision course with a high degree of overlap. The question then arises as to whether a small difference in vowel length can effectively preserve a phonemic distinction.This paper was first given at NWAV 33, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Hogg (2004), Levin (1958), and Ogura (1999) have shown the existence of dialectal differences as regards Old English (OE) negative contraction. This study reassesses the traditional view that OE showed optional use of negative concord (NC), and finds instead that variation in NC was dialectal, based on an analysis of 260 instances of indefinites in OE (prose) negated clauses. Standard West Saxon (WS) texts systematically accompanied a negated indefinite (NI) with the particle ne. In non-WS texts ne use was systematic with a postverbal negated indefinite but variable with preverbal NIs. A sample of 389 NIs in Middle English (ME) verse texts from around 1300 from selected dialect areas showed a similar dissociation. These two sets of findings lend support to the notion of a persisting dialect split in early English whereby symmetrical NC characterized the South/Southwest area while Midland regions of England had asymmetric NC. West Saxon texts may thus represent a regional vernacular tendency as regards NC, not merely a standardized scribal dialect.The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful comments of anonymous referees. All remaining errors and misinterpretations are my own.

For the past fifty years, sociolinguistic studies of linguistic change have focused mainly on phonological variables, but recently some attention has been paid to other features, particularly discourse features used by younger speakers that may change within a relatively brief period. This article deals with the appearance of an unusual intensifier “pure” in the speech of adolescents in Glasgow, Scotland. This usage suggests that the Glasgow working-class adolescents have developed a set of norms for their speech community that owes little to adult or outside influence. Grammaticalization is a process that is normally investigated on the basis of historical documents but recent developments in methodology provide an opportunity to explore changes in progress. Intensifiers have historically been unstable and there is evidence that teenagers have recently been developing their own preferences for such items. The range of uses that the Glasgow adolescents have developed for pure suggests a process of grammaticalization that may still be in progress.The project in which the recordings were made was supported by ESRC grant no. R000239757. I am deeply indebted to Jane Stuart-Smith for providing the transcripts and allowing me to make use of them for this article. The sessions were arranged and conducted by the research assistant on the project, Claire Timmins. It is clear from the transcripts that part of the success of the project was the result of her good rapport with the adolescents. There are many joking references to her in the sessions, although the adolescents knew that she would hear these remarks. All the names in the transcripts have been replaced with pseudonyms. I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper from Elizabeth Traugott, Lee Munroe, and the anonymous reviewers for LVC.

This study examines synchronic variation in vowels in an effort to advance our understanding of the “transmission problem” in language change, in particular, the cross-generational perseverance of vowel shifts. Seeking a connection to patterns and directions of shifts in vowel systems over time, we examine the role of a largely neglected parameter of structured heterogeneity: prosodic prominence. Experimental data from two Midwestern dialects of American English—central Ohio and south-central Wisconsin—show that, for the vowels studied here, the changes in vowel characteristics observed under higher degrees of prosodic prominence (or greater emphasis) correspond to the changes predicted by well-established principles of chain shifting. An acoustic study assesses variation in prosodic prominence by examining formant frequencies at multiple locations in the course of vowel duration, which provides information about vowel quality dynamics. A perceptual study determines listeners' sensitivity to the obtained acoustic variation, as manifested in specific patterns of vowel identification, confusions, and category goodness ratings. Finally, a prosodically based explanation of the transmission of sound change is described, which offers new connections between structural and social factors in sound change, notably the roles of “social affect” and speaker gender.This article builds on earlier conference papers (Fox, Jacewicz, & Salmons, 2003; Jacewicz & Salmons, 2003; Jacewicz, Salmons, & Fox, 2004a, 2004b; Salmons & Jacewicz, 2004). Additional acoustic analyses and perceptual results from the data set presented here can be found in Jacewicz et al. (forthcoming) and Fox et al. (forthcoming). We thank three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We also thank Kristin Hatcher, Jennifer Mercer, and Dilara Tepeli for help with collection of the perception data. Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01 DC006871-01 and NIH NIDCD R03 DC 005560 to The Ohio State University (Ewa Jacewicz, PI).

The present study analyzes the speech of a radio presenter in a local station in Murcia and compares it to the audience's linguistic behavior as shown in the phone calls received during the program. We also analyze the data obtained in an interview with the radio presenter. Our results, which show a radical divergence between the presenter's speech and that of his audience, are contrasted with both Audience Design and Speaker Design theoretical tenets, using the explicit knowledge of the presenter's attitudes and opinions to contrast theory and fact. We conclude that neither model offers a completely satisfactory explanation of the patterns found. Finally, we reflect on the need to consider not only performance, but also the script (in the form of a professional voice used following a particular linguistic policy based on sociolinguistic norms and attitudes to language) that condition the individual linguistic behavior, thus suggesting the need to consider community-specific factors in the explanation of stylistic variation.We are very grateful for Peter Trudgill, David Britain, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Dennis Preston, Dagmar Scheu, Rafael Monroy, and José Jiménez-Cano for comments on earlier versions of this paper.