This article explores the relationship between the global functions of variable subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken Arabic of the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that lexical class—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined lexical specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or verb-subject word order. The global function of the two orders is explored using an array of measures to show that verb-subject order prototypically presents events, while subject-verb signals available referentiality. Using the quantitatively based study of Anthony Naro and Sebastiao Votre ([1999]. Discourse motivations for linguistic regularities: Verb/subject order in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Probus 11:75–100.) on Brazilian Portuguese as a point of comparison, a typological framework is developed for understanding languages with variable subject-verb order.

The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

This paper uncovers evidence for two linked levels of morphosyntactic change occurring in Canadian English. The more ordinary is a lexical replacement: with finite subordination after seem, the complementizer like has been overtaking all the alternatives (as if, as though, that, and Ø). On top of this, there is a broader syntactic change whereby the entire finite structure (now represented primarily by like) is beginning to catch on at the expense of infinitival subordination after seem. Drawing on complementary evidence from British English and several partial precedents in the historical linguistics literature, I take this correlation to mean that like has reached sufficient rates among the finite strategy to have instigated the second level of change, to the point that it has ramifications for epistemic and evidential marking with the verb seem. I propose that the best model of these trajectories is a set of increasingly large envelopes of variation, one inside the next, and argue that the envelope might itself be an entity susceptible to change over time.

This article examines the perception of the (ing) variants, [ɪŋ] and [ɪn], in three regionally distinct localities in Britain: London in the South of England; Manchester in the North; and Edinburgh in Scotland. Data was gathered in perceptual tests in which respondents from each location rated stimuli doublets, each containing only one of the variants of (ing), on multiple social attribute scales. In London and Manchester, the perception of [ɪŋ] and [ɪn] broadly matches findings made for the United States in that speakers using [ɪŋ] are considered more articulate and hardworking, and less casual than speakers using [ɪn]. In Edinburgh, results are markedly different. We argue that these differences are due to a combination of factors that include the historical development of (ing) in a particular locale, which led to differences in production, variations in language ideology and, as a result, class-specific evaluations that appear to be regionally dependent.

In Korean, the tendency to delete the labiovelar glide w when it appears postconsonantally is conditioned by linguistic, stylistic, and social factors. Chief among these is the place specification for the preceding consonant: labiovelar glides are more likely to be deleted when preceded by a velar than by a labial, alveolar, or alveopalatal. It is proposed that this observation can be explained in terms of current phonological theory, in particular, the notions of feature geometry (Clements 1985; Sagey 1986) and the Obligatory Contour Principle (McCarthy 1986). Under such a model, adjacent segments share common features in ways that promote variability; specifically, the labiovelar glide shares the feature [back] with an adjacent velar (but shares no place features with adjacent labials, alveolars, and alveopalatals), thereby providing structural cohesiveness that inhibits the application of the deletion rule.

The different population ecologies of slavery-era America necessitate an investigation into the issue of regional variation in Early African American English (AAE). This article addresses this issue through the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence, a corpus of letters written by semiliterate African American settlers in Liberia between 1834 and 1866. We investigate nonstandard verbal -s and its conditioning by linguistic and social factors, including each writer's regional origin in the United States. Results show that, despite differences in overall rates across regions, the linguistic conditioning largely remains constant. These results suggest that subtle regional distinctions in Early AAE existed when specific settlement and population ecologies encouraged them, but that the shared history and circumstances of language contact and development led to an overall identity of forms and conditioning factors across regional varieties.The data on which this study is based are taken from the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence (OREAAC; Van Herk & Poplack, 2003), housed in the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. Financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author. Earlier versions of the analyses reported here were presented at meetings of the American Dialect Society (Chicago, January 2000) and the Canadian Linguistics Association (University of Toronto, June 2002). We thank the audiences at these presentations for their comments and suggestions, and we thank Shana Poplack and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are our own responsibility.

The present study examines the pattern of the variation of the auxiliary avoir and être in the passé composé tense in Vermont French in 22 adult speakers who migrated from Québec or are first-generation Franco-Americans. The purpose of the study is to determine if the process of replacement of être by avoir in progress in Canadian French is also taking place in Vermont and which linguistic and social constraints influence this linguistic change. Results of the study reveal that the process of replacement of être by avoir is also taking place in Vermont, and that it is significantly favored by the presence of a main verb that has a transitive homonym and by the presence of a low-frequency main verb. The fact that social factors do not significantly influence this replacement indicates a later stage of linguistic change, supporting patterns found in the literature of language death.

Gondi is a Dravidian language spoken by 2.2 million speakers (Census of India 1981) in the mountains and forests of four adjacent states in central India. Gondi is a chain of several dialects, some of which, at distant points, are perhaps not mutually intelligible. A major dialect division is provided by a two-step sound change: s- > h- in the west, north, and northwest and h- > - in the south and southeast. The present article studies this two-step sound change, which is still in progress, and establishes two facts. First, contrary to the normal expectation that this sound change would be phonetically gradual and lexically abrupt (Neogram-marian type), there is evidence that it has been lexically gradual and perhaps also phonetically gradual (lexical diffusion). Second, phonetic gradualness and regularity in implementation of sound change are properties not incompatible with the mechanism of lexical diffusion. Labov's observation that s > h > has not been reported as a lexically diffused change in many quantitative studies of Portuguese and Spanish (1981) finds a clear exception in Gondi. Under the lexical diffusion model, the regularity of a sound change is defined as the final outcome in a three-stage change of the relevant lexicon: unchanged (u), variant (u ˜ c), and changed (c). If the entire eligible lexicon passed from u to c through u ˜ c, the change would become regular. If all u ˜ c became c and for some reason no item under u became u ˜ c, the sound change would die prematurely, since the variant stage which provided the rule for the innovation would be absent. Since a regular sound change can result from either the Neogrammarian model or the lexical diffusion model, Labov's (1994:542–543) theoretical proposal of complementarity between the kinds of changes resulting from the two mechanisms calls for more studies of sound change in progress to decide the issue.

This article addresses the question: In dialect contact, is there a difference in degree of convergence at different phonological levels? Data are taken from three experimental studies on British English. The first, a comparison of alveolar assimilation and l-vocalization, tests the hypothesis that the phonologization of connected speech processes involves increasing phonetic discreteness. The second provides evidence of the phonological restructuring of final /1/ in speakers who consistenly vocalize it and who, hypercorrectly, occasionally use “clear” /1/. This anomalous behavior, which may be due to underlying phonological differences, is explained in terms of a clash between nonstandard and standard speech. The third experiment looks at the “clarification” of /1/ before vowels in environments such as peel it, as well as the glottaling of /t/. Data are collected from the speech of two teenagers, native to Reading. It is argued that the phonetically subtle differences between them are due to quite different underlying processes. These data are interpreted in light of Labov's speech community model; it seems necessary to differentiate between levels of analysis and to explain convergence in terms of salience.

Many researchers have investigated the copula for possible links between African American Vernacular English (aave) and Atlantic Creoles, a connection that has served as the foundation of the Creolist Hypothesis in the on-going debate over the origins of aave. One variety that has been of particular interest in this debate is Gullah, which has been hypothetically linked to aave since some of the earliest statements of the Creolist Hypothesis. To date, however, very little research has been done on copula variability in Gullah itself. This study, therefore, provides an analysis of copula variability in present affirmative contexts in Gullah. Variation is found among full, contracted, and zero forms in 1st person singular, plural/2nd person singular, and 3rd person singular environments. The analysis also reveals some parallels between Gullah and aave that offer support for the theory of an aave/creole connection.I would like to acknowledge the Department of Linguistics and the Center for African Studies at Ohio State University for covering the cost of some of the fieldwork for this study. I would also like to acknowledge the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina for providing several hours of recordings used for the study. My sincerest thanks to research assistants Jason Sellers and Cherlon Ussery for help with transcriptions and data tabulation and to the following friends and colleagues for their help and support during various stages of this project: Emily Bender, Eugenia Deas, Vennie Deas-Moore, Brian Joseph, Michele Nichols, Terence Odlin, John Paolillo, Donald Winford, and Walt Wolfram. And, finally, my thanks to James Walker and an anonymous LVC reviewer for their helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. I accept full responsibility for any remaining errors.

Empirical work in linguistics often puts forward claims about the independence of two phenomena as substantive hypotheses. But, independence is always an assumption in the framework of empirical hypothesis testing, meaning independence claims are not empirically verifiable. Hence, they need to be regarded differently from truly empirical hypotheses within the substantive theories of which they are part. In this paper, a number of independence claims are illustrated, alongside their problematic consequences for empirically guided theorizing. Recommendations are made regarding the use of independence that should facilitate the empirical testing of substantive linguistic hypotheses.

In this study, we identify the linguistic and social predictors that condition onset /s/ weakening in speech data from sociolinguistic interviews with 72 Salvadoran Spanish speakers. In addition, we compare and contrast the explanatory power of instrumental and traditional segmental approaches. We find that the instrumental approach, which identifies flanking segments, stress, and region of origin of the speaker as conditioners of onset /s/ shortening and lowering of center of gravity, does not account for observed social variation in the data. Contrastingly, an ordinal logistic regression based on a combination of instrumental measures and perceived phonetic categories identifies flanking segment, region of origin, sex, and age of the speaker as predictors of onset /s/ weakening. We conclude that an exclusively instrumental analysis examining variation of onset /s/ thus obscures the potential social meaning of onset /s/ weakening in El Salvador.

It is widely accepted that internal constraints on variation are not modulated by social and stylistic factors (e.g., Labov, 2010:265). Is this also true for register differences as a special type of sociostylistic factor? To address this question, we investigate future temporal reference (FTR) variation in English (It'll be fun versus It's gonna be fun) via a variationist corpus study (n = 2,600 tokens) and a supplementary rating experiment (n = 114 participants) across four broad registers: conversations, parliamentary debates, blogs, and newspaper prose. Multivariate analysis of the corpus dataset indicates that register modulates the effect of five out of nine internal constraints, suggesting that variable grammars vary considerably across registers. The experiment confirms that language users are indeed sensitive to, and aware of, the register-specificity of how variation is conditioned. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for variationist sociolinguistics and for variational linguistics in general.

Several western Swiss German dialects roughly grouped around the nation's capital Bern show /l/ > [u] vocalization in various contexts. The spatial boundaries of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German are suspected to have been expanding since being described in the Linguistic Atlas of German-Speaking Switzerland in the middle of the 20th century. The present study assesses the overall expansion of /l/-vocalization by means of a rapid anonymous survey in 20 urban regional centers situated just beyond the traditional boundaries of /l/-vocalization highlighted by the Atlas. Results show that the expansion of /l/-vocalization mainly progresses in southeasterly, southerly, and westerly directions, but with much less success to the north and northwest, where the equally influential dialectal areas of Basel and Zürich seem to exert opposing influences. Further analysis of the data indicates that somewhat differing constraint hierarchies are at work in the different places to which vocalization has diffused.

Language acquisition is a well-established avenue for language change (Labov, 2007). Given the theoretical importance of language acquisition to language change, it is all the more important to formulate clear theories of transmission-based change. In this paper, we provide a simulation method designed to test the plausibility of different possible transmission-based changes, using the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to determine precise points at which different possible changes may become plausible for children acquiring language. We apply this method to a case study of a complex change currently in progress: the allophonic restructuring of /æ/ in Philadelphia English. Using this model, we are able to evaluate several competing explanations of the ongoing change and determine that the allophonic restructuring of /æ/ in Philadelphia English is mostly likely the result of children acquiring language from mixed dialect input, consisting of approximately 40% input from speakers with a nasal /æ/ split. We show that applying our simulation to a phonological change allows us to make precise quantitative predications about the progress of this change. Moreover, it forces us to reassess intuitively plausible hypotheses about language change, such as grammatical simplification, in a quantitative and independently motivated framework of acquisition.

There is mounting evidence that the filled pauses that pervade spontaneous speech constitute a rich site of linguistic inquiry. The present study uses a comparative variationist method to explore possible effects of language contact on pause behavior, examining 3810 filled pauses produced by 24 Spanish-speaking residents of Boston, Massachusetts. Interspeaker differences in pause behavior correlate with intensity of contact. Participants who have lived in the United States for a larger fraction of their lives, who use English more frequently, and who do so more proficiently fill pauses differently when speaking Spanish than do those who have spent less time in the contact setting and whose English skills and usage are more restricted. Results show that a greater degree of contact corresponds to increased use of centralized vowels in phonologically filled pauses (i.e., more frequent use of [a(m)] and [ə(m)] at the expense of [e(m)]). This pattern is interpreted as evidence of contact-induced change.

We test the hypothesis that single other-language-origin words are nonce loans (Sankoff, Poplack, & Vanniarajan, 1990) as opposed to code-switches in a corpus-based study of English-origin nouns occurring spontaneously in New Mexican Spanish discourse. The object of study is determinerless nouns, whose status is superficially ambiguous. The study shows that, even with typologically similar languages, variable rule analysis can reveal details of the grammar that constitute conflict sites, even when relative frequencies for variants are similar. Though the rate of bare nouns is identical, their distribution patterns in Spanish and English differ. Linguistic conditioning parallel with the former, and at odds with the latter, shows that the contentious items are loanwords. In information flow terms (Dubois, 1980; Thompson, 1997), it is not lack of grammatical integration but nonreferential uses of nonce-loan nouns to form recipient-language predicates that is manifested in zero determination.We are grateful to Neddy A. Vigil for access to the New Mexico–Colorado Spanish Survey tapes. Mayra Cortes-Torres, Matt Alba, Jens Clegg, and Mark Waltemire helped with data transcription and extraction. This work was supported by a University of New Mexico Research Allocations Committee grant to Torres Cacoullos (#02-01). Work was completed during a postdoctoral fellowship for Torres Cacoullos at the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory, for which we thank Shana Poplack. A preliminary version was presented at NWAV-31, Stanford University, October 2002.

One of the most consistent findings to emerge from sociolinguistic research is that “men use more nonstandard forms, less influenced by the social stigma directed against them; or, conversely, women use more standard forms, responding to the overt prestige associated with them” (Labov, 1990:210). With regard to change, these findings indicate that “women lead in both the acquisition of prestige patterns and the elimination of stigmatized forms” (p. 213), apparently without exception in change from above the level of conscious awareness and in all but a few of the cases studied in change from below. An examination of the social parameters of acceptance and spread of intervocalic spirantization of /p/, /t/, /k/ in Tuscany offers the possibility for testing and refining these precepts in a situation of rule competition that is more complex than most of those studied previously, in that here there are three forms in competition. Building on established principles (e.g., Trudgill, 1972), this sociolinguistic analysis of the interaction of three options provides a more precise understanding of the significance of both gender and class as (co-)conditioners of variation and change.

This sociolinguistic investigation analyzes an innovative usage of Spanish motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives in Barcelona that involves crosslinguistic pragmatic transfer. Speakers in the two social networks examined (N = 58) use these Spanish deictics following pragmatic rules that generally correspond to the rules for their Catalan counterparts. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that this innovative usage of the Spanish deictics is not predictable from the lexical form of the deictic systems in both languages. Multiple regression analysis (SPSS) demonstrates that as relative exposure to Catalan increases so does the amount of innovative usage observed, although degree of integration into a Catalan social network and degree of Catalanist ideology do not affect such usage. Qualitatively, this innovative usage is a linguistic marker of a unique contact variety of Spanish spoken in Catalonia (i.e., Catalan Spanish). In this variety, such usage represents a potential resource for performing Catalan identity.

In line with a growing body of literature suggesting that mergers are reversible given the adequate dialect contact and social context, the present study examines the phonetic split of the Andalusian Spanish merger of ceceo into the Castilian Spanish feature of distinción. Specifically, the study analyzes 19,420 coronal fricatives produced by 80 Western Andalusian speakers from the city of Huelva and the nearby town of Lepe using a reading passage and wordlist. The analyses find that leaders of this change are younger speakers, women, those with more educational attainment, those of service and professional occupations, and those from Huelva. The implications are that large-scale societal changes have allowed for the split of the ceceo merger into distinción in both speech communities, albeit at different rates of change due to their unique socioeconomic histories, demonstrating that a split is possible given the right social context.