Do the processes of replication, transfer, and calquing operate on speakers' mental organization of variables? Can the comparison of constraint rankings across languages provide evidence for (or against) the transfer of features in cases of long-term language contact? This article suggests yes to both questions. It undertakes a comparison of constraint rankings on null subjects and null objects in a corpus of Bislama and a corpus of Tamambo narratives to demonstrate the potential and limitations of such methods. It concludes that these methods: (i) allow us to particularize our definitions of replication, transfer, and calquing to inherently variable domains, and (ii) strengthen connections between variationist sociolinguistics and the fields of creolistics and language contact.

Drawing on terminology, concepts, and ideas developed in quantitative morphological typology, the present study takes an exclusive interest in the coding of grammatical information. It offers a sweeping overview of intralingual variability in terms of overt grammatical analyticity (the text frequency of free grammatical markers), grammatical syntheticity (the text frequency of bound grammatical markers), and grammaticity (the text frequency of grammatical markers, bound or free) in English. The variational dimensions investigated include geography, text types, and real time. Empirically, the study taps into a number of publicly accessible text corpora that comprise a large number of different varieties of English. Results are interpreted in terms of how speakers and writers seek to achieve communicative goals while minimizing different types of complexity.

The nativization or phonological adaptation of words transferred from other languages can have structural-phonological consequences for the recipient language. In English, nativization of words in which the stressed vowel is spelled with the letter <a>, here called “foreign (a)” words, leads to variable outcomes, because English <a> represents not one but three phonemes. The most common outcomes historically have been /ey/ (as in potato), /æ/ (tobacco), and /ah/ (spa), but vowel choice shows diachronic, social, and regional variation, including systematic differences between major national dialects. British English uses /ah/ for long vowels and /æ/ elsewhere, American English prefers /ah/ everywhere, whereas Canadian English traditionally prefers /æ/. The Canadian pattern is now changing, with younger speakers adopting American /ah/-variants. This article presents new data on foreign (a) in Canadian English, confirming the use of /ah/ among younger speakers, but finds that some outcomes cannot be classified as either /æ/ or /ah/. A third, phonetically intermediate outcome is often observed. Acoustic analysis confirms the extraphonemic status of these outcomes, which may constitute a new low-central vowel phoneme in Canadian English.

Despite the interest in null direct objects in Spanish, the case of direct objects with propositional antecedents, which complement cognition and communication verbs, remains mostly uninvestigated. This article investigates, from a comparative variationist perspective, null direct objects with propositional antecedents, variably coded by the clitic lo, in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Variable rule analysis of six Spanish corpora reveals a big difference between the two dialects in the frequency of overt vs. null neuter pronoun yet shows that some of the linguistic constraints conditioning the variation are shared by both dialects (presence of a dative pronoun, type of antecedent, sentence type), suggesting that the null pronoun has the same grammatical role in both dialects. Some divergences in the conditioning of the null pronoun also emerge from the analysis and the sociodemographic information available suggests the existence of a change in progress in Mexican Spanish.

This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means within the vowel space, compared with formant data in raw Hertz. The study uses existing data sets of vowel formant data from two varieties of English, Received Pronunciation and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedure performs at least as well as the two speaker-intrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods rated as best performing by Adank (2003): Lobanov's (1971) z-score procedure and Nearey's (1978) individual log-mean procedure (CLIHi4 in Adank [2003], CLIHi2 as tested here), and in some test cases better than the latter.

This article investigates the role of vowel duration in the front vowel system of New Zealand English (NZE), drawing on data obtained from speakers born between the 1890s and the 1930s. After providing a brief overview of the history of short vowels in NZE, a comprehensive analysis of front vowel duration in conjunction with a number of earlier results from formant frequency measurements will be presented. It will be shown that the front vowel system of NZE shows interaction between vowel duration and formant frequency. A number of implications that follow from these patterns for the front vowel system of NZE will be discussed. It will be argued that it is reasonable to divide up the class of short front vowels in NZE into a short set (consisting only of one vowel) and a “not-so-short set.” In addition, it will be concluded that phonological class membership is irrelevant to making generalizations over patterns of movements in vowel change.