This paper explores the relation between controlled and automatic perceptions of a sociolinguistic variable that yields no metalinguistic commentary—a marker (Labov, 1972). Two experiments examine links between the backed trap vowel and its social meanings. The first, a matched guise task, measures social evaluations of the feature in a relatively controlled, introspective task. In the second, two measures are used that access different points in online processing and different degrees of listener control: (a) lexical categorization of an ambiguous stimulus, measured by a mouse click, and (b) automatic, early responses to this ambiguous stimulus, measured by eye movements. While listeners perceptually link trap-backing with social information in all three measures, specific social effects differ across the measures. Findings illustrate that the task and time course of a response influence how listeners link a linguistic marker with social information, even when this sociolinguistic knowledge is below the level of conscious awareness.

This article reports on research which seeks to compare and measure the similarities between phonetic transcriptions in the analysis of relationships between varieties of English. It addresses the question of whether these varieties have been converging, diverging, or maintaining equilibrium as a result of endogenous and exogenous phonetic and phonological changes. We argue that it is only possible to identify such patterns of change by the simultaneous comparison of a wide range of varieties of a language across a data set that has not been specifically selected to highlight those changes that are believed to be important. Our analysis suggests that although there has been an obvious reduction in regional variation with the loss of traditional dialects of English and Scots, there has not been any significant convergence (or divergence) of regional accents of English in recent decades, despite the rapid spread of a number of features such as TH-fronting.

It has often been claimed that it-cleft complements differ syntactically from restrictive relative clauses. Alleged differences in the distribution and relative frequency of wh-forms in the two clause types are generally offered to support this view, but such claims have not been empirically verified. In this study, we examine synchronic and diachronic data for clefts and relative clauses and show that the major claims are unsupported. The diachronic data further show that cleft complements and restrictive relative clauses have changed together over time and at the same rate. On the constant rate hypothesis, the evidence supports the position that the two clause types are not syntactically distinct.

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.

In recent years, the typological and geographic range of languages subjected to sociophonetic study has been expanding, though until now Australian Aboriginal languages have been absent from this subdiscipline. This first sociophonetic study of an Australian language, Murrinh Patha, shows a type of consonant lenition that is notably distinct from the better known examples in Standard Average European languages, effecting /p/ and /k/ primarily in the onset of stressed, usually word-initial syllables. Young men lenite more frequently than older men do, and paternal heritage from the neighboring Marri language group also predicts more frequent lenition. The latter influence may be the result of intense language contact brought about by recent settlement of diverse language groups at the Catholic Mission of Port Keats.

Bislama allows phonetically overt and phonetically null noun phrases (NPs) in argument positions. This article explores constraints on the occurrence of null NPs in direct object position. Discourse factors (given/new status of referent, antecedent's form) and syntactic factors (antecedent's grammatical role, identification by a transitive suffix) are investigated. Morphosyntactic and semantic features that might transfer from substrate languages (referent's animacy, (in)alienable possession) and social factors (age, sex, language of education) are also examined. Strong priming effects for grammatical role of the antecedent and form of the antecedent are identified. Also salient are inalienable possession and semantic type of the verb. The effect of inalienable possession shows the highly abstract transfer of substrate features, raising questions about the modularity of grammar. It is argued that a key motivation for such transfer is not just linguistic availability, but the social and cultural significance of different kinds of possession in Melanesia.

Accurate circumscription of the variable context is crucial to any quantitative analysis of linguistic variation. Investigations of past inflection in African American Vernacular English and Caribbean English creoles thus generally include a more or less detailed section concerning the inclusion or exclusion of particular forms; the theoretical grounds on which these decisions are made, however, are not always spelled out. Consequently, there still does not seem to be agreement on what precisely constitutes the envelope of variation in such investigations—a fact that not only complicates data extraction and analysis but also hampers cross-variety comparisons. This article summarizes and evaluates previous definitions of the scope and relevant contexts of the variable (ed), providing internal (linguistic) argumentation supporting or contraindicating the inclusion or exclusion of particular tokens. My data stem from a larger study of past temporal reference in the urban variety of Bahamian Creole English (Hackert, Stephanie. [2004]. Urban Bahamian Creole: System and variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins), an intermediate creole with close historical links with Gullah as well as relations with African American Vernacular English, Trinidadian Creole, and Barbadian.

In a longitudinal acquisition study of the development of the verb phrase (VP), a Trinidadian child who was exposed to both Standard English (SE) and Trinidadian English-lexicon Creole (TC) was found to use the verb forms of each system differentially according to addressee, discourse mode, semantic intent, and grammatical factors. Systematic variation was first recorded at age 2;7 and continued to develop through to the end of the study at age 4;9. School exposure to demands for SE production resulted in a decline in the child's productive TC competence overall and his movement into mid-range usage of SE and TC. The systems in contact appeared linked for the child in that he produced alternant forms from each one variably in apparent relation to his perception of the appropriate extent and range of their use. The weightings for variable constraints in each area modified over time.

This article aims to contribute new data on periphrastic did by systematically examining its behavior in two varieties of English: Somerset English (SMT), a variety spoken in Southwest England, and Samaná English (SAM), a variety spoken in the Samaná peninsula of the Dominican Republic. We hope to contribute a broader historical and cross-dialectal perspective for understanding the origin and function of periphrastic did in nonstandard varieties of English. We focus on the linguistic contexts of its occurrence from the diachronic and synchronic literature. The results show that periphrastic did is conditioned by a number of constraints, which can be traced throughout the history of the English language, as well as some constraints from English-based creoles. Interpreting these results reveals that the similarities between the two varieties are the result of linguistic diffusion.We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of Great Britain for a DPhil studentship to Jones (R42200034220), as well as the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for Tagliamonte's doctoral fellowship. We would like to acknowledge the University of Ottawa's Sociolinguistics Laboratory, under the direction of Shana Poplack, where the research for the Samaná English corpus was originally carried out for Tagliamonte's PhD dissertation. We would also like to thank Anthony Warner for important comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this analysis and our reviewers who provided invaluable input. We dedicate this article to the speakers of the new Somerset English corpus, who contributed the data on which this study is based.

The choice between pronominal and zero form for objects in the Oceanic language Vera'a is investigated quantitatively in texts from two registers with discourse topics of three different ontological class memberships. Discourse topicality is found to predict best the choice between pronoun and zero, outranking the factors of ontological class membership, antecedent form, and antecedent function. Contrary to current models of referent tracking, antecedent distance does not show any effect at all. It is concluded that (a) discourse structure and activation are not universally the most significant factors in referential choice and (b) ontological class and discourse topicality can be teased apart through appropriate text sampling, and it is the latter that is most significant. This bears important implications for the grammaticalization of object agreement and the typology of differential object marking.

This research explores the extent to which the speech of Appalachian migrants in Ypsilanti, Michigan has been affected by the emerging local norm, an ongoing dialect change labeled the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). Recorded speech from these migrants was acoustically analyzed to determine whether the NCS feature of low-front vowel raising of was present. Index scores derived from formant values were then subjected to statistical analysis to determine the degree to which the respondents' use of this vowel reflects participation in the NCS. The respondents' use or nonuse of this feature was correlated with their sex, social status, age, and social network characteristics to determine which, if any, have influenced respondents' participation, or lack of participation, in the NCS. The results show that social network and sex are statistically significant predictors of acquisition, or lack of acquisition, of the feature in question, whereas age and socioeconomic status are not.This research is part of a National Science Foundation Grant titled “Accommodation in Language Variation and Change.” This research owes much to the support and commitment of Dennis Preston. I am also grateful to Diane Aleksa, Annabelle Mooney, and anonymous reviewers who provided valuable input on earlier versions of this article.

The paper asks whether six ongoing vowel changes in Philadelphia English show interspeaker covariation. In a sample of 66 young white women, pairwise correlations are significant only between three changes that have previously been observed to show parallel diachronic trajectories of change reversal, whereas changes that do not exhibit this diachronic pattern do not show covariation. I propose that the interspeaker covariation in this subset of the changes in progress arises from a shared social motivation for the change reversals that is not shared by the other changes.

Our study presents a variationist analysis of subject doubling in the French of Ontario, Canada. Two principal variants are distinguished: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. In our analyses, both linguistic and social factors are taken into account and analyzed using goldvarb2. It is proposed that subject clitics are marked for default features, and that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP; lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant. Discussion of linguistic factors for the present study, therefore, is limited to those factors which can be explained in terms matching. The principal social factor studied is restricted language use (cf. Mougeon & Beniak, 1991). Our results show that the greater the restriction, the fewer doubled subjects one finds.

Since the 15th century, negative infinitives in French have undergone a change from ne V pas to ne pas V. This change takes place at different times, depending on the nature of the verb. Lexical verbs undergo the change between 1550 and 1750, modals (pouvoir, vouloir, devoir) essentially change between 1650 and 1900, and auxiliaries have been changing at a slow pace since 1650. We explore the idea that, for main verbs, the change in word order reflects a change in the position of pas, while the change in the position of modals and auxiliaries results from the fact that these verbs start assuming a position lower in the structure. Our analysis of the historically different evolution of each type of verb is based on their lexical properties and their distinct affinities with abstract Tense.

A standard observation concerning basic constituent order in Old English (OE) is that the position of finite verbs varies by clause type. In root clauses, the finite verb tends to occur toward the beginning of the clause, and we frequently find Verb Second (V2) order. In contrast, in subordinate clauses, finite verbs generally occur toward the end of the clause, and these clauses are frequently verb-final. We challenge the traditional assumption that verb-final orders and, hence, the occurrence of the finite verb in a head-final structural position are rare in OE root clauses. We present new data demonstrating that the frequency of head-final structure in OE root clauses is much higher than previously acknowledged. We then explore some of the implications of this finding for the general structural analysis of OE.

This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of the prosodic system of Québec French in a variationist framework. However, major problems have to be resolved before one can give a comprehensive view of this system, one of these concerning stress assignment. In order to examine the validity of the traditional view claimed for French by most linguists, which states that stress is always superposed on the final syllable of lexical words, different perceptual tests were devised and carried out with two groups of students. The results of these tests show the effect of structural factors on the perception of stressed syllables in Québec French and demonstrate that this canonic rule does not always hold for varieties of Québec French. On the basis of these results, a subset of stress rules is then proposed and illustrated with examples of words tested in the perceptual tests. Counterexamples to these rules are thereafter discussed, and a reconsideration of the principles of syllabification that are usually taken for granted for French is proposed in light of variable rules.

Four vowel variables are investigated in the speech of 50 rural, nonmigrant children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years in the Syrian village Oyoun Al-Wadi. Contrary to previous studies, the children initially acquire the urban and later the rural forms of these vowels. This process of acquisition shows the following. First, children show reversal in the acquisition of forms, and thus the rules associated with them; instead of acquiring the local forms first, they acquire the supralocal forms. Second, children can acquire the rules of the second dialect after the age of 8. Third, gender emerges as significant as boys and girls exhibit different linguistic behavior. Fourth, preadolescents emerge as the age group that is most active in building a social identity. Fifth, social-psychological factors motivate the shift from urban to rural forms. These include local identity, gendered social meanings of the variants, and the growth of the children's sociolinguistic competence throughout their preadolescence and adolescence.

This study investigates the effect of linguistic and social factors (age, gender, and level of education) on the patterns of variation in the affrication of [] for [k] in the stem and suffix in the informal speech of 72 speakers of Qaṣīmī, a local dialect of Najdi Arabic, spoken in the Qaṣīm province in central Saudi Arabia. Findings indicate that affrication is significantly favored in the phonological context of front vowels, particularly the high front ones. Whereas suffix-based affrication is categorically used as [-], stem affrication is strongly correlated with the age, educational level, and gender of the speaker. In particular, older uneducated speakers from both sexes tend to maintain the use of the local variant [], whereas younger and middle-aged educated speakers, particularly women, increasingly shift toward the use of the supralocal variant [k]. The present findings are suggestive of patterns of variation that are typical in regional-dialect leveling, wherein the supralocal variant(s) associated with the major city dialect is (are) diffusing outward, at the expense of traditional and socially marked variant(s), by speakers of smaller towns' dialects. The substantial socioeconomic changes that Saudi Arabia has undergone in the last half century are suggested to have triggered and accelerated the linguistic shift.

This article concerns the interrelation between the theoretical status and the social dimensions of syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch. I discuss syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch, which consists of (i) a range of dative constructions that are acceptable in the Heerlen dialect but unacceptable in Standard Dutch and (ii) Standard Dutch variants of the dative constructions that are rare in the Heerlen dialect. The theoretical primitive causing syntactic variation is taken to be the different values or settings of a parameter. Although all local dialect constructions in Heerlen Dutch seem superficially similar because they are construed with a dative NP or the reflexive zich, I argue that these constructions must be attributed to two distinct parameters. The different social distributions of dative constructions in Heerlen Dutch are a confirmation that two distinct parameters are involved.

In many societies, dialectometry has revealed strong correlations between geographic distances and dialect differences (e.g., Gooskens, 2005; Heeringa & Nerbonne, 2001; Nerbonne, 2009, 2010). But what happens when dialectometry is applied to a small, clan-based society such as the indigenous Sui people of rural southwest China? The Sui results show a strong correlation between dialect difference and geographic distance, thus supporting Nerbonne and Kleiweg's (2007) Fundamental Dialectological Postulate. A new culturally specific computation, “rice paddy distance,” also provides a strong correlation with dialect differences. However, the study finds that some dialectometry patterns of larger societies are not “compressible” into small societies such as Sui. Clan exogamy also poses challenges for dialectometry. Nonetheless, the overall results show that basic principles of dialect variation in space can be generalized cross-culturally, even across very different cultures. This paper also suggests a “lower limit” for dialectology, that is, the smallest distance where regional dialectology may be relevant, all other things being equal.