Gender distinctions constitute one of the central grammatical categories in Hebrew grammar and are closely related to number distinctions. Both are acquired early on, since they apply to almost every morphological category: three major classes of content words, as well as two classes of function words. Feminine words are marked by Suffixal -α and -t, while masculine words carry either a zero or -e suffix. A small class of what might be termed “numeral nounclassifiers” are supposed to agree in gender with their head nouns, but carry a mirror-image gender marking, resulting in rule opacity. The subjects, 40 children (20 fourth graders, 20 seventh graders) from a lower middle-class background, were tested on gender markings of numerals in two situations involving monitored and unmonitored situations. The results indicate the disappearance of gender agreement in Modern Hebrew numerals and a reanalysis of numeral suffixes by speakers.

New York City English (NYCE) and New Orleans English (NOE) demonstrate remarkable similarity for cities located 1300 miles apart. Though the question of whether these dialects feature a shared history has fueled papers on the subject (Berger, 1980; Labov, 2007), there remain a number of issues with the historical record that prevent researchers from arriving at a consensus (Eble, 2016). This article presents linguistic evidence from constraint ranking comparisons of variable nonrhoticity and bought-raising in comparable contemporary samples of NYCE and NOE speakers. Findings demonstrate strikingly similar systems for (r), but dissimilar systems for bought-raising. We examine the results of our analyses in the context of evidence from previous comparisons of NYCE and NOE, concluding that the resemblance between the two dialects is likely due to diffusion from New York City to New Orleans, occurring in the 19th century before bought-raising emerged in either variety.

This paper reports on a large-scale diachronic investigation into the timing of New Zealand English (NZE), which points to changes in its rhythmic structure. The Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) was used to measure the mean variation in duration, intensity, and pitch of successive vowels in the speech of over 500 New Zealanders, born between 1851 and 1988. Normalized vocalic PVIs for duration have reduced over time, after allowing for changes in speech rate, supporting existing findings that stressed and unstressed vowels are less differentiated by duration in modern NZE than in other varieties of English. Rhythmically, syllable duration may be playing a reduced role in signalling prominence in NZE. This is supported by the finding that there have been contemporaneous changes in pitch and intensity variation. We discuss external and internal influences on the timing of NZE, including contact with Māori, the emergence of Māori English, and diachronic vowel shift.

We examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising of trap in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robust trap-raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 of trap—a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although older people raise trap more in wordlist reading than in spontaneous speech, younger people do the opposite. We infer that increasing negative evaluation of the feature led Ogdensburg speakers to collectively abandon raising trap between 2008 and 2016. This indicates a role for communal change in the transition of a dialect feature from an indicator to a marker.

This study focuses on language variation in three families with small children in Antwerp, an officially Dutch-speaking large city in Belgium. Language variation is mainly considered here in terms of whether utterances contain local dialect features or not. Phonetic transcriptions of recorded natural family interaction were coded for language variation on an utterance-by-utterance basis. The following distinctions in usage emerge: “local” utterances containing dialect elements tend to be used when older children and adults in the family address each other. “Neutral” forms, which are common all over Flanders, may also be used, whereas “distal” features, which are imports from a Dutch variety outside Flanders, are to be avoided. However, when older children and adults address the younger members of the family, they increase their use of neutral forms, substantially reduce their use of local forms, and occasionally use distal forms. The younger children use mainly utterances categorized as neutral, dependent on who they are addressing. Implications of this variation across family members for language change are discussed.Financial support for the project reported on in this article comes from the Belgian National Science Foundation (KAN-grant to the author) and the Research Council of the University of Antwerp/UIA. Many thanks to the families, schools, and students who helped at the data collection stage. I also thank Wolfgang Wölck and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

The evaluation of normalization methods sometimes focuses on the maximization of vowel-space similarity. This focus can lead to the adoption of methods that erase legitimate phonetic variation from our data, that is, overnormalization. First, a production corpus is presented that highlights three types of variation in formant patterns: uniform scaling, nonuniform scaling, and centralization. Then the results of two perceptual experiments are presented, both suggesting that listeners tend to ignore variation according to uniform scaling, while associating nonuniform scaling and centralization with phonetic differences. Overall, results suggest that normalization methods that remove variation not according to uniform scaling can remove legitimate phonetic variation from vowel formant data. As a result, although these methods can provide more similar vowel spaces, they do so by erasing phonetic variation from vowel data that may be socially and linguistically meaningful, including a potential male-female difference in the low vowels in our corpus.

This article describes the use of negation in three corpora representative of early to mid-19th century African American English: the Ex-Slave Recordings (Bailey, Maynor, & Cukor-Avila, 1991), the Samaná Corpus (Poplack & Sankoff, 1981), and the African Nova Scotian English Corpus (Poplack & Tagliamonte, 1991). The specific structures studied are the negative form ain't, negative concord to indefinites and to verbs, negative inversion, and negative postposing. It is found that Early African American English (i) is far more conservative than modern African American Vernacular English; (ii) is generally similar to Southern White Nonstandard English; and (iii) displays no distinct Creole behavior. In other words, our study suggests that the negation system of Early African American English derived directly (i.e., without approximation or creolization) from colonial English, contrary to the findings of Rickford (1977, 1995), Labov (1982), Winford (1992), De Bose and Faraclas (1993), DeBose (1994), and others.

Les signaux backchannel sont des signaux gestuels et voco-verbaux qui constituent en quelque sorte la verbalisation de l'écoute par l'allocutaire d'une conversation. Si la fonction métacommunicative de ces signaux dans la gestion de l'interaction est connue, les facteurs de leur production ont été jusqu'à maintenant peu étudiés. L'observation de 11 entrevues sociolinguistiques réalisées dans des conditions comparables par un même intervieweur montre que celuici n'intervient pas de la même façon avec chaque informateur. La loquacité de l'informateur semble exercer une influence importante sur la production quantitative et qualitative de signaux backchannel par l'allocutaire-intervieweur.

English auxiliary contraction has received much attention in the linguistic literature, but our knowledge of this variable has remained limited due to the absence of a thorough corpus study. This paper examines contraction of six auxiliaries in two corpora, considering three distinct phonological shapes in which they occur and the implications for an analysis of the grammatical processes that underlie the surface alternation in form. I argue that the data best support a two-stage analysis of contraction, one under which variation in the morphology is followed by phonetic and phonological processes. Moreover, I show that this particular analysis explains a number of patterns in the data that would otherwise be accidental. In this way, I underscore the importance of approaching the study of variable phenomena with both quantitative data and formal analysis.

This article contributes to a growing body of theory that posits language-external, social factors as a primary motor in diachronic change. Politeness theory and the use of variationist approaches enable us to posit, and test, the hypothesis of a type of pragmaticalization, which I call Politeness-Induced Semantic Change (PISC). Historical data on quand même are presented that give tentative credence to such a model. Moeschler and de Spengler's (1981) and Waltereit's (2001) speech-act theoretic analyses of quand même are reinterpreted within the framework of politeness theory and sociopragmatics. The ensuing corpus investigation of the grammaticalization and pragmatico-semantic evolution of quand même from 1500–2000 highlights the fact that not only the innovation but also the propagation of a new form–function configuration depend on social factors; politeness theory may have explanatory power in capturing the ever-changing social patterning of linguistic features and the conditions that favor the spread of innovation.I wish to acknowledge the very helpful and detailed comments of Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and anonymous reviewers from Language Variation and Change on a draft version of this article. Remaining inadequacies are, of course, entirely my own. I also recognize a debt of gratitude to the Research Committee of the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences of the University of the West of England, Bristol, who granted me the research leave required to complete the article.

Brazilian Portuguese possesses two forms used as 1st person plural pronouns: nós and a gente, both meaning ‘we’. The form nós has always been pronominal, whereas a gente is derived diachronically from the noun phrase a gente ‘the people’. In accord with this historical evolution, the standard language prefers the use of the 1st plural verb desinence -mos with nós, as in nós falamos ‘we speak’ or ‘we spoke’. The 3rd person desinence 0 is reserved for a gente, giving a gente fala ‘we speak’ as the preferred form. In popular speech both nós fala and a gente falamos are used frequently. We examine the use of these variable forms across four generations in Rio de Janeiro. In the older generations, phonic salience is the principal controlling factor for both nós and a gente. Since preterit desinences are stressed more frequently than present desinences, this induces a biased surface distribution, with -mos occurring more frequently with past tense reference. Nonetheless, for older speakers tense does not play a statistically significant role. In younger speakers, tense becomes statistically significant as a determining factor in the use of the desinences, with preterit favoring -mos for both subject forms. So far, there has been no change in the grammar itself, but the locus of determination of the use of -mos seems to have shifted from saliency to tense across the generations. One can speculate that some time in the future -mos may become a preterit marker.

The emergence of être comme as a quotative verb in Canadian French is easily construed as a case of contact-induced change by virtue of its superficial similarity to the rapidly diffusing be like quotative (Tagliamonte & D'Arcy, 2007). We pursue the inference of contact-induced change by undertaking a quantitative analysis of French and English quotatives recorded from speakers in the bilingual city of Ottawa between 2008 and 2010. A series of real-time cross sections enables the longitudinal development of the quotative system of each language to be tracked. Analysis of the data confirms that être comme is a change in progress, but not a wholesale replication of its English counterpart. Although the results do not refute the role of external causation in the emergence of être comme, the available evidence suggests that an external source is neither the sole, nor even the preferred, motivation for the emergence of this innovation.

Previous studies have shown that speakers have difficulty interpreting the sounds of another dialect when they are heard in isolation or reduced context, and that this difficulty is greater in areas of dialect contact where exposure to mergers or near-mergers is experienced (Labov & Ash, 1997; Labov, Karen, & Miller, 1991). A cross-dialectal comprehension test was conducted at Ohio University and three of its branch campuses. Responses were elicited to seven words digitally excerpted at three levels of reduced context from a story read by a third-generation resident of southern Ohio. Results indicated that vowel changes occurring in southern Ohio were generally interpreted by the respondents in terms of their own vowel systems, and that limited exposure to the local dialect by outsiders led to recognition only of the more salient or stereotyped sounds. Moreover, students from southern Ohio had difficulty with the same words that outsiders did, presumably reflecting semantic confusion caused by their increased exposure to other dialects. A new boundary for the South Midland dialect area is proposed on the basis of these findings.

The use of the nominative 1sg pronouns in co-ordinate NPs in object position, most famously between you and I, has received much attention from prescriptivists and formal linguists, but it has never been the object of a variationist study that compares its usage to that of other variants. This article seeks to fill the gap, based on a data set of co-ordinate NPs in object position, gathered through observation of everyday speech as well as in experimental sociolinguistic interviews. Arguing that the choice of NP case and of NP order is inseparably related, we identify three major patterns of co-ordinate NPs: Vernacular me and X and two post-Vernacular patterns, Standard X and me and Polite X and I. We then examine social and linguistic factors that constrain the usage of individual patterns. We conclude that all three patterns are robust and that they exist in stable ternary variation.This article, which we authored jointly, arose from a paper we presented with Cecilia Cutler and Keith Fernandes at NWAVE–XXVII in Athens, Georgia. Cece and Keith worked with us in gathering the data and participated in extensive discussion with us concerning the phenomenon under study. We are grateful to them. The NWAVE paper itself grew out of a project in a linguistic variation class at NYU. The other participants in the class project were Tiffany Dugan and Agnieszka Rakowicz, and we thank them for their help. We benefited from discussions with Arto Anttila, Jeff Parrott, and Sharon Klein and from audiences at NYU and Stanford. E. W. Gilman called our attention to several relevant articles, and Maryam Bakht-Rofheart, Erik Falkensteen, Bill Haddican, and Ken Lacy provided us with relevant examples from the media. We also thank Sandra Singler Harding, Tom Leu, Erez Levon, Pat Reilly, and Arnold Zwicky. The quotation from an Episcopal missionary appears courtesy of The Archives of the Episcopal Church USA. We thank Jennifer Peters, archivist, and her staff for their assistance.

This paper explores the synchrony and diachrony of differential object marking in Paraguayan Guaraní on the basis of a quantitative study of a corpus of naturally occurring data of the modern language and an investigation of object marking in a 17th-century catechism. We show that both animacy and topicality, but not definiteness, affect whether a direct object is marked in modern Guaraní, a finding that has implications for cross-linguistic theories of differential object marking, not all of which recognize topicality as a factor. We also find no categorical constraints on differential object marking in Guaraní, contrary to Bossong (1985b). Our study of the 17th-century catechism provides further support for Bossong's (1985b, 2009) claim that Guaraní did not have differential object marking when it came into contact with Spanish. The paper concludes with a discussion of the hypothesis that differential object marking in Guaraní resulted from contact with Spanish.

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.

This paper examines variation in the use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese. In Portuguese, the distribution of rhotics is determined by syllable structure (Bonet & Mascaró, 1997). However, the emerging variety of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe diverges from the standard norm and shows great variability in its use of rhotics; specifically, Santomeans often use a strong-R in positions that require a weak-r in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Sociolinguistic interviews with 56 speakers from the capital of São Tomé and Príncipe and its surroundings provide 5287 data points for analysis. Based on the apparent-time construct (Bailey, 2004; Bailey et al., 1991), variation patterns show a language change in progress in the use of the strong-R, with younger speakers using it more frequently. Results also reveal the emergence of rhotic fricatives in the speech of Santomeans born after the independence of the country.

Exemplification is considered to be a rhetorical procedure used to illustrate a point. In spoken discourse, we can attribute to it an argumentative and pragmatic character. In this study, the data base is constituted of utterances marked by exemplification particles (par exemple, comme, genre, style, mettons, and disons ‘for example’, ‘like’, ‘of the (…) kind’, ‘of the (…) variety’, ‘let's say’) extracted from two corpora of spoken French in Montréal. One goal is to describe the constraints which govern the choice of discourse variant and at the same time to get the deepest insights possible into the procedure that interrelates these constraints. The main objective is to observe to what extent we can have access to the characteristics of a complex rhetorical phenomenon by using sociolinguistic data.

This study investigates the contraction of negatives in a carefully chosen corpus of discourse and writing, to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Evidence is presented that negative contraction is conditioned by interactional and other register variables. The point is made that the pragmatic as well as morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished from each other. Although a Cognitive Prominence Principle predicts noncontraction when the negative conveys semantically focal information, a Social Agreement Principle predicts contraction. This is because it would be face-threatening (and, therefore, in conversation analysis terms “dispreferred”) to focus on disagreement, which is most often the semantic information conveyed by negatives. This hypothesis is examined using corpora which differ along several dimensions. The most important of these (for this study) appear to be the interactional versus informational register dimensions (Finegan, 1994). Data from instructional (workshop presentations), confrontational (political debates), and casual conversational material are contrasted with comparable reading style materials. The following general results are predicted. The Cognitive Prominence Principle will take over in informational contexts when disagreement is acceptable or neutralized. The Social Agreement Principle will take over in more interactional contexts where disagreement is not acceptable. The results are of interest to the student of focus, the sociolinguist concerned with dialect, register, and style variation, and even the speech technician.

This article presents results of a sociolinguistic study of a Northern Russian dialect as spoken in a small rural community of Pokcha in the Western Urals, Russia. Because of a number of social influences, the dialect has been undergoing a rapid shift towards Standard Russian. The study examines two sound changes in progress: (1) a merger of unstressed mid back vowels and (2) a split of a post-alveolar fricative into two phonemes. The focus of the study is on the role of social factors—age, mobility, education, and sex—in determining the dynamics of the two rather different phonological processes.I am grateful to Jack Chambers for his encouragement and advice throughout this project. I thank Joseph Schallert, Keren Rice, and an anonymous reviewer for many helpful comments and suggestions on the article. I also thank Dr. Tatyana Permyakova and Dr. Irina Rusinova of Perm' University for their help in the organization of my field trip to Cherdyn' region, Russia. All errors are my own. This research was partly supported by a travel grant from the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies.Some of the results of this study have been previously reported in: Kochetov, Alexei. (2000). Sound change in progress: An effect of standardization on a Northern Russian dialect. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 18:62–79.