This study comprises an exploration of the speech of 19 Vermonters, aged 9 to 90. Tokens of /ai/ and /au/ were analyzed acoustically. Results reveal that although centralized /au/ and /ai/ were reported to be disappearing by Kurath (1939a; 1939b), they were still present in the oldest of the speakers but were differentially undergoing change. Raised /au/ was used by older men, but had all but disappeared in younger speakers and all of the women in the study except the oldest speaker (age 90). Instead, speakers used a front low onset. /ai/ presented a more complex pattern: centralization occurred in all speakers, but a back, somewhat rounded onset was restricted primarily to older men. In addition, men and older speakers demonstrated centralized onsets in all environments, whereas younger speakers showed more of a “Canadian Raising” pattern. Implications, when results and settlement history of Vermont were examined, included the suggestion that, in Vermont, the raised variants are the older, base forms and that the “Canadian Raising” pattern of younger speakers and women may be the result of an overall leveling from changing socioeconomic conditions in the area.The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF # 9975078) for this study. Appreciation is also extended to Rebecca Peabody Amblo, Mieka LeClair, Elisha Huskes, and Danra Kaczinski for assistance with data collection and analysis, and three anonymous reviewers for their very valuable suggestions. Finally, thanks are due to the speakers, who generously shared their voices and stories.

In this article I examine the ongoing loss of palatalization assimilation in Modern Standard Russian within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) (McCarthy & Prince, 1993a; Prince & Smolensky, 1993) and show that this theory offers new, meaningful explanations for the role of markedness and naturalness in the mechanism of a sound change. I also argue that OT provides new possibilities for relating quantitative patterns to the formal principles of grammatical organization. In particular, in OT, suggested cross-linguistically invariant relations between phonological factors predict a general pattern of influence that these factors have on the quantitative outcome of a change. I suggest that a change operates as a gradual weakening or strengthening of whole subhierarchies of constraints with universally fixed rankings (constraint families, which implement markedness scales in OT). In an examination of variable data, I argue that the major differences in quantitative patterns mirror the fixed constraint ranking within such constraint families and constraint violation/nonviolation in OT grammar. I also discuss the problem of modeling variable data within OT, which, like other formal phonological theories, permits no output variation. I examine a grammar competition model explored in OT literature and argue instead for constraint competition with constraint weight in production.

This study examines subject personal pronoun expression in the Spanish of the west-central highlands of Puerto Rico. Although rates of s-deletion are comparably high, rates of overt subject expression are shown to be much lower than rates reported for varieties of coastal Puerto Rican Spanish and U.S. mainland Puerto Rican Spanish. The linguistic constraints on overt versus null pronoun usage in the data are shown to coincide to a very large extent with constraints identified for other Puerto Rican dialects and also Castilian Spanish in central Spain, whereas of the social factors, only the distinction between farmers and nonfarmers is significant. The study suggests that, if rates of personal subject pronoun expression are an indication of dialectal variation, the rates presented here for this syntactic phenomenon represent the continuing effects of a conservative dialect in the interior of the island of Puerto Rico.

This article investigates the sociolinguistic variable of apical palatalization in Cairene Arabic. First, I discuss its linguistic features and then its sociolinguistic distribution. The significance of palatalization as a sociolinguistic variable is its status as a stylistic resource of Cairene Arabic. Depending on the complex interaction of a number of factors, some Egyptians use features of Classical Arabic while speaking in Egyptian Arabic for stylistic purposes. Palatalization, on the other hand, is an example of a stylistic resource that belongs to Cairene Arabic proper. The roles of gender and social class in the distribution of palatalization are explored in some detail. As in a number of other speech communities, women in Cairo seem to have been the innovators of this sound change.

Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject (VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS, morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other: nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order, generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel perspective.

A comparison of Old Spanish and present-day Spanish data provides evidence that reductive change in grammaticizing forms may be manifested not only as a diachronic process but also as a synchronic difference between formal and informal registers. Clitic climbing frequencies in Spanish auxiliary + gerund sequences have increased diachronically as part of a series of reductive changes and in tandem with construction frequency increases. In calculating construction frequency, both the token frequency of auxiliary + gerund sequences and their frequency relative to lone-standing gerunds turn out to be important. Differences between present-day conversational and written data show that clitic position is stylistically stratified. Register differences in clitic climbing are found to be linked to construction frequency as well, suggesting that frequency effects operate on a more general synchronic level as well as on the level of particular texts. These text-level frequency effects may be related to parallel structure “birds of a feather” effects.

Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), this study describes how the second-person object form you diffused among the population of England during the late middle and early modern period (1350–1710). After the take-off in c. 1480, you replaced the old subject form ye very rapidly, in about three generations of speakers. This article shows that this was a change from below in terms of social awareness, because you was preferred in oral genres and informal registers in the earliest stages of its use. The study suggests that the social origin of you was among the middle ranks, and women led the change in its critical period of diffusion. No specific region has been found as the origin of this change, but London and the Court adopted it before the North and East Anglia.The research reported here was supported in part by the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence funding for the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

An important account of linear ordering in syntax is John A. Hawkins' (2004) theory of cognitive efficiency and the principles of domain minimization formulated therein. In its latest formulation, the theory postulates syntactic and semantic minimization principles. With regard to the relative strength of these principles, prior research into the dynamics of these constraints has come to differing conclusions. Using the relative ordering of prepositional phrases (PPs) in English as a test phenomenon, the present study contributes to the further development of a theory of syntactic serialization through the multifactorial analysis of naturalistic data from a corpus of present-day British English. We find that lexical-semantic dependency constitutes the strongest constraint on serialization followed by the weight-related, syntactic one. More specifically, our results show that although syntactic minimization has much greater data coverage – it applies to a much larger proportion of the data – the lexical-semantic factor has a much greater effect size, thus is more seldomly violated. In addition to assessing the relative importance of the two minimization principles, we also investigate the effects of other potential codeterminants of PP order, namely the manner > place > time generalization and pragmatic information status. Our results suggest that these play statistically significant but tangential roles in PP ordering.

The set of English [+human] pronominal quantifiers has been variable for at least 500 years, with the compound forms –body and –one competing since Middle and Early Modern English. This change has still to run its course (cf. Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003:78). Using corpora of historical texts, we track the development of these variants alongside the demise of the earlier variant –man. Then, drawing on contemporary and regionally diverse corpora, we trace the continued development of –body/–one variation through the 20th century. The trajectories reveal paradigmatic leveling in the late 19th century and the rise of –one as the dominant form. However, grammatical, social, and lexical developments continue. Most striking is that after an initial phase of historical leveling, the different lexical quantifiers—any, every, some, no—go their own ways in the collection of varieties examined here, demonstrating that the mechanisms shaping evolutionary pathways across the globe are not only systemic, but also retain local alternations.

This research examines pre-/l/ allophones of vowels in five lexical sets—GOOSE, FOOT, GOAT, STRUT, and THOUGHT—in Kansas City. It builds an acoustic profile from 5507 tokens drawn from interviews with 67 Kansas Citians born between 1955 and 1999. Results reveal a variety of overlap patterns among all five vowels, with the most widespread being overlap between the pre-/l/ allophones of FOOT, STRUT, and GOAT. Acoustically, overlap patterns generally do not show a trend of change in apparent time. However, responses to minimal pairs reveal substantial apparent-time increases in judgments of “close” or “same.” Speakers appear to adjust their productions of vowels to match their minimal pair judgments. The interaction of these productions and judgments indicates a different profile for these five vowels than has been observed in other communities and suggests that some of these vowels have become phonemically ambiguous in Kansas City.

In many varieties of African American English (AAE), glottal stop replacement and deletion of word-final /t/ and /d/ results in consonant neutralization, while the underlying voicing distinction may be maintained by other cues, such as vowel duration. Here, I examine the relationship between vowel duration, final glottal stop replacement, and deletion of word-final /t, d/ to determine whether the phonological contrast of consonant voicing is maintained through duration of the preceding vowel. Data come from conversational interviews of AAE speakers in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington, DC. Results indicate that glottalization and deletion of word-final /t/ and /d/ are widespread across the speakers in the analysis. Additionally, the duration of vowels is significantly longer before underlying /d/ than /t/ for consonant neutralized contexts, thus showing that duration, normally a secondary cue to final voicing, may be becoming a primary cue in AAE.

This paper presents information on the regional characteristics of two of South Africa's five major varieties of English: viz. those of its Coloured and Indian communities in five cities: Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Kimberley. It proposes that as far as the variable (t) is concerned, and by extension (d), these two “interior” social groupings show regional variation of a more robust kind than that of the Black majority and formerly politically dominant White group (the “exterior” groups). The paper describes the relationship between the two interior groups, showing considerable similarities between them for the variable (t), which has two main stop variants, an alveolar and a more fronted (or dental) one. Parallel developments are outlined for (th) (or /θ/ in IPA terms) by a study of word list style, showing similarities between the two groups in four of the cities. These linguistic features are assessed against outsiders' and local speakers' attitudes to and beliefs about their varieties. Finally, the paper considers the origins of the fronted variant, assessing whether it is a spontaneous development or a contact feature associated with Afrikaans-English bilinguals of varied backgrounds. It concludes that while multiple substrate influences are at work, the most likely source is from 17th- and 18th-century Malay and related languages, showing a double substratum, first into Afrikaans, then into English, without a significant period of Malay-English bilingualism.

Published studies of linguistic variation usually concentrate on the main effects apparent for linguistic and social factor groups. By contrast, interaction effects, whereby the influence of some factor(s) is conditional on the values of other factor groups, have received considerably less attention and, even when recognized, are rarely quantified. Interaction effects involving linguistic factor groups are especially rarely acknowledged, even though the existence of interactions between social factors is widely recognized. This article reclaims interaction effects as an object of systematic variationist study and demonstrates the benefits of including such effects in quantitative modelling: first, by outlining practical methods for investigation of interaction effects within variable-rule analysis; second, by providing direct evidence for the incidence of interaction effects in linguistic data, through reanalyzing several pre-existing studies of phonological variation containing both linguistic and extralinguistic factor groups; and finally, by discussing their interpretation.This article is the result of many years of collaboration with Janet Holmes, who generously provided all of the datasets reanalyzed here. Thanks are also due to David Britain, Peter Patrick, Tom Veatch, and John Paolillo for advice and correspondence on goldvarb/varbrul at various stages over the past decade. The present version has greatly benefitted from audience feedback at the 14th New Zealand Linguistic Society Conference (Christchurch, August 2001) and from the detailed comments of the anonymous referees for LVC.

We analyze four major classes of discourse marker used in Brazilian Portuguese: né and other requests for feedback; aí, a sequential connector; ah, bom, and other turn initiators; and assim, a marker of explanation. The distribution of these forms is compared in argumentation, description, narration, and other genres and explained in terms of discourse function. Sociodemographic conditioning is also analyzed. An innovative component of the data analysis is an accounting for rates of occurrence per number of clauses in the speech samples studied. The results were elaborated through a series of other studies confirming the discourse function of the various markers. A comparison of the results with previous work on English and French discourse markers reveals striking parallels and raises questions about the grammaticalization of these forms.

Several changes in consonant and vowel pronunciations in younger generations of native speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) are currently the object of research interest. In order to further an empirically grounded description of changes in RP, the present study examines variation in weak vowels. Patterns of variation in word-final open weak syllables (happy, city) as well as in past and present/plural suffixes (waited, changes) are investigated acoustically in the interview speech of eight young (born in the late 1970s) speakers of modern RP. The data show variation in happy vowels for some speakers according to phonetic environment, a phenomenon which deserves further study. kit/schwa variation in the inflectional suffixes studied here shows a tendency to maintain kit-like values. Overall, the study indicates that acoustic analysis of such weak vowels can provide interesting data on variation.

A set of ordered rules for generating variants of a variable determines (a) underlying/surface distinctions among some of the variants and (b) a hierarchical classification of the variants. In the analytical framework of variable rules, frequency data on variant occurrences in context bear only on (b) and not on (a). We provide a combinatorial characterization and enumeration of the set of classifications on n variants, the set of underlying/surface configurations, and the set of rule orders. We describe the statistical and computational techniques for generalizing variable rule analysis to the inference of rule order. These procedures are applied to the problems of the reduction of syllable-final consonants <s>, <n>, and <r> in Caribbean Spanish (n = 3, 4, 6 variants, respectively). Previous analyses have tended to assume that successive weakenings occur in an intrinsic order determined by phonological strength. Our results show that aspiration and deletion can indeed be seen to be intrinsically ordered in both <s> and <r> reduction, though an unordered analysis is equally likely in the case of <s>. On the other hand, velarization and deletion of <n> are unordered, while vocalization is a subsequent process, independent of the other two. Similarly, spirantization, aspiration, and lateralization of <r> are unordered, as confirmed by data sets from both Puerto Rican and Panamanian speakers. Furthermore, with both <n> and <r>, intrinsically ordered rule schemata proved to be extremely unlikely by statistical criteria. Syllable-final consonant reduction then consists of largely independent processes, most of which occur simultaneously.

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 examines variation in American Sign Language (ASL) signs produced with a 1 handshape, which include signs of nearly all grammatical classes. Multivariate analysis of more than 5,000 tokens, extracted from informal conversations among more than 200 signers in seven different regions of the United States, indicates that variation in the form of these signs is conditioned by multiple linguistic and social factors. Significant factor groups include grammatical function and features of the preceding and following segments, as well as a range of social constraints including age, regional origin, and language background. Two findings are especially notable. First, although the results for preceding and following segment effects show evidence of progressive and regressive assimilation, grammatical function is the first-order linguistic constraint on the use of two of the three main variants. Second, signers in all regions of the United States show similar patterns of variation, thus providing evidence that ASL signers constitute a single “speech” community.

This study investigates the role of regional dialect experience on the social awareness of synthesized vowel tokens to regional in-group and out-group members. For the study, speakers from Reno, NV, were given the same perception test used in a previous study in Memphis, TN. Comparing the Reno results to those found in Memphis, the study examines whether differences in regional vowel norms affect how Westerners rate Southern-shifted and non-Southern-shifted vowel variants on Southernness, education, and pleasantness scales. The study also looks at how Reno raters interpreted shifted back vowel variants, found productively in their local community, compared to front vowel shifts found exclusively in the South. Finally, the paper explores how the results suggest that regional dialect exposure attunes listeners to attend to different aspects of vowel quality than those outside the region. In examining how regional dialect experience affects listener recognition and evaluation of local and nonlocal vowel norms, the paper begins to explore how much the production/perception relationship is mediated by speakers' participation in locally constructed and defined speech communities.

This study examines the short-a system in Greater New Orleans (GNO) following the demographic changes and large-scale displacement that occurred after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I provide a linguistic description of the short-a systems of 57 residents of the GNO suburb of Chalmette, half of whom relocated after the storm, and half of whom returned to their pre-Katrina homes. While many speakers demonstrate robust split systems, analysis demonstrates a shift over time toward the nasal system common throughout much of the US. Whether participants returned or relocated was not a significant predictor of short-a system; however, speakers most oriented to places outside of Chalmette may have led the change in progress, pointing to the importance of considering place orientation in contexts of speaker mobility. This study establishes that adoption of the nasal system is well underway in GNO, generating further questions about what New Orleans English will sound like as post-Katrina changes continue to develop.