The present study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the evolution of the semantic field of third-person male adult noun referents from Old English to Middle English, covering a time depth of approximately six hundred years. Results show a shift from the favored variant wer in Old English to man in Middle English, with the diachronic change in frequency following a prototypical s-shaped distribution. Although the replacement seems to take centuries to be complete, lexical frequency and written transmission are proposed as influential explanatory factors, and a homonymic clash is suggested to have accelerated the process of replacement in Middle English. Text type and text origin contribute to variation, with alliteration significantly influencing lexical choices in Old English verse texts. When combined with findings from recent synchronic work, this study highlights a heterogeneously structured semantic domain, which has undergone lexical replacement and change over time, providing some evidence for the applicability of s-shaped patterns for lexical change.

This article examines dialectal variation in mood choice in journalistic prose after the adverbials después de que ‘after’ and luego de que ‘after’ in subordinate clauses of past temporal complex sentences in Spanish. Because the matrix clause of sentences of this type contains a verb in a past tense, indicating that an action has certainly taken place, the event of the verb in the subordinate clause headed by después de que or luego de que is anterior to this completed event and is also a necessarily completed event that therefore is in a prescriptively indicative context. However, data collected from an on-line corpus of Spanish texts from Spanish-speaking countries and from on-line periodicals show that journalistic prose from Spain universally opts for the subjunctive mood in these contexts, whereas Mexico tends to use the indicative. Other Spanish-speaking countries show varying degrees of frequency of choice for these moods. Previous approaches to explaining mood choice have maintained that variation in mood choice in the complement clause is determined by the intentions of the speaker. The data in this study refute these claims by demonstrating that the use of the indicative or the subjunctive mood is well established in Mexico and Spain, respectively, and variable in the other Spanish-speaking countries.The author wishes to thank the College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University for a summer research grant to carry out this study. Special thanks go to Janet Bing, Charles Ruhl, and Alfredo Urzúa of Old Dominion University for their endless patience and attention to detail in reviewing this work. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Keith Walters of the University of Texas at Austin for recommending this journal for the placement of this article.

Both Old French meters and their Modern French descendants are usually thought to lack the internal binary constituent structure of, say, English or German iambic verse. In this article, however, an underlying iambic structure for the Old French octosyllable is established through quantitative analysis of a large corpus of texts written from c. 975 to 1180 (42 distinct works, including over 22,000 lines). Because no texts conform absolutely to the grammar of English iambic verse (Halle & Keyser, 1971; Kiparsky, 1977), certain measures are proposed for the degree to which a sample deviates from the iambic pattern; these values are then compared with the (chance) deviation of normal Old French prose. A significant correlation emerges between these measures and date of composition, author, and genre: early texts are almost perfectly iambic, and late 12th-century texts approach, but do not reach, chance levels. It is concluded that the grammar of meter used by Old French authors underwent a gradual change during the 12th century, a change comparable to more familiar phonological and syntactic changes.

This article focuses on the directionality observed in the processes of change and acquisition of the prepositions that replaced Latin cases in the speech of Rio de Janeiro and in the Contact Portuguese spoken by Brazilian Indians in the region of Xingu. In Brazilian Portuguese, it is possible to delete the indirect case preposition of some verbs. The system loses and maintains prepositional nexus in a cyclic process motivated by the semantic transparency and the iconicity of the preposition, the adjacency between verb and complement, and the degree of transitivity of the verb. The variable use in Contact Portuguese shows the same effects observed in the Rio de Janeiro variety, in a process that includes a gradual filling up of categorical and variable contexts. We argue that the forces that guide acquisition of the Portuguese prepositional subsystem in the Xingu variety act in the same way as those that constrain variation in urban language.

This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained in terms of syntactic calquing from the speakers’ left-branching L1s. However, the order GEN+N does not occur with the same frequency in all types of genitive noun phrases but is affected by several lexicosemantic and formal features of both the head and the genitive modifier. Therefore, we are not dealing with simple pattern borrowing. Rather, L1 influence strengthens certain universal tendencies that are not motivated by contact. The comparison with monolinguals’ Russian, in which prepositive genitives sporadically occur too, supports this hypothesis.

It is widely debated whether creole languages form a typological class; however, crosslinguistic generalizations from functional typology are seldom tested in creoles. Typological studies report a strong crosslinguistic tendency for asymmetries in habitual grammatical expressions across the present and past temporal reference domains (Bybee, 1994:245–8; Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994:151–60). This study analyzes two linguistic variants, preverbal asé and zero, which compete for habitual marking in Palenquero Creole (Colombia). I ask here: To what degree does the linguistic patterning of these forms conform to the crosslinguistic tendency? Results show that, despite Palenquero having widely cited creole features (e.g., preverbal markers and bare verb stems), the asymmetrical expression, distribution, and relative ordering of forms in the variable contexts closely align with crosslinguistic predictions for habituals, thus giving convincing evidence of typological markedness and not a Creole Prototype.

It is well documented that the study of differences in grammaticality contrasts across the world's languages has implications for the synchronic study of preferential/frequency contrasts within a single language. Our paper extends this observation, arguing that the cross-linguistic study of both grammaticality and frequency contrasts can be crucial to the proper characterization of patterns of diachronic change. As an illustration of this proposal, we investigate patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation in the use of postverbal negative quantifiers (e.g., nothing, nobody, no book, etc., as in, I know nothing) versus negative polarity items under negation (e.g., not … anything, not … anybody, not … any book, etc., as in, I don't know anything) in English. We show how a detailed comparison with similar patterns found elsewhere in closely related languages can give us a better understanding of which linguistic factors condition the use of these different kinds of indefinites in Modern Spoken English and a new perspective on a well-studied proposed change in progress in the English quantificational system.

This article deals with the linguistic embedding, transition, and actuation of the obliteration of the gerund ending -e in the West Flemish dialect of Bruges between the 13th and 20th centuries. The following factors appear to have played a part in the change: syllable structure of the verb, nasalization of the last consonant of the stem, and frequency of the verb. The study shows that deflection (loss of inflections) started in the 14th century and is almost complete today. There are strong indications that the obliteration of the gerund ending was originally caused by analogical factors, but that articulatory factors played a leading role in the ensuing centuries. The areal spread of the linguistic factors that condition the occurrence of the gerund ending in the dialects in the region around Bruges nowadays suggests that the diachronic development in Bruges is not idiosyncratic for Bruges but holds for a much larger area.

The present study investigates internal and external constraints conditioning variable T-glottaling, the realization of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ], in supraregional Scottish Standard English. Drawing on phonemically annotated speech data from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English, a total of 12,162 /t/ tokens produced by 138 speakers were extracted from eight formal speaking categories in the corpus and analyzed auditorily. The results showed that about 28% of the analyzed /t/ tokens were produced as glottal stops, with significant inter- and intra-speaker variability. The realization of T-glottaling is subject to both linguistic (phonetic context and word type) and social factors (age, gender, and speech style). Moreover, patterns of various types of T-glottaling differ from each other and constitute distinctive processes of ongoing sound change in Scotland.

This paper examines sociolinguistic properties of lifespan changes in language use from a non-Western perspective. Based on real-time studies in a change from above context (standardization) and panel surveys of prosody, the paper demonstrates that the stability of individuals’ language use over time varies along the following interwoven factors: (1) levels of grammar; (2) lexical properties; (3) progressive stages of a community in transition; and (4) locally constructed social identities. While segmental phonology and morphosyntax remain intact, lexical accents and vocabulary items tend to change in close linkage to sociolinguistic properties of individual words. Such changes are also motivated by the coexistence of an incoming standard, revitalized traditional dialect, and newly emerging “diaglossic” in-between variants in a community that is shifting to bidialectalism. Lifespan changes could also be community-specific, varying even within a single dialect region between two communities across which the stages of standardization and members’ locally constructed social identities differ.

The St. Louis Corridor extending from Chicago, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri has been described as a “breach” through the Midlands dialect region because of the presence of Inland North features there. Most notably, features associated with the Northern Cities Shift suddenly appeared in Corridor cities in the mid-twentieth century, but they have since largely retreated. Friedman's (2014) population study has uncovered complex relationships between the Corridor's geography and this pattern of advance and retreat, and this work elaborates on that investigation through computational simulations of the Corridor's population structure. Implementing a new network-analytic population model (Kodner & Cerezo Falco, 2018), I find support for Friedman's original hypothesis that migration into cities along Route 66 imported Inland North features into the Corridor first before it spread outward to communities farther away from the route and uncover questions about the Corridor's population that merit further study.

The choice between a pronoun and zero anaphor for the expression of third-person subjects is examined in a corpus of Vera'a (Oceanic). While predominantly expressed by a pronoun, subjects are found to permit zero form with referents that have low anaphoric distance. Within this context, zero is found to be preferred with a subset of verbal predicates that take a specific tense-aspect-mood-polarity (TAMP) marker that historically retains subject agreement. The strong preference for pronouns is related to the clitic behavior of adjacent TAMP morphology and the rudimentarity of agreement. Animacy and number also bear on subject variation. Effects of clause-combining and the use of connectives do not align with findings from studies of the same choice in other languages. Our findings underscore the prominent role of purely structural over functional motivations for the choice of pronouns over zero.

This paper is a quantitative study of the emergence of negative concord in Santa María Chiquimula K'ichee’, apparently the only known case of negative concord in the Mayan stock. It is the latest development in a series of recent changes in the syntax of negative clauses in K'ichee’ (Romero, 2012). Using apparent time and comparative cross-dialectal data, I show that negative concord in this variety is a change in progress that started no earlier than the turn of the 20th century.

Spoken language reduction in spontaneous speech constitutes an important part of the process of language change. Utilizing a Mandarin corpus, this article examines monosyllabic word merger with pronouns in the first syllable position. The shortened form marks a respective vocalic or consonantal element stemming from the source syllables. This article proposes that there exists a target syllable for a pair of monosyllabic words, but it is not unique. Depending on the syllable structure of the source syllables, different lines of developments of target syllables are possible. When the combination of the source syllables allows a development into a well-formed Mandarin syllable, the output is a good candidate for a coalescent compound. Furthermore, when the immediately neighboring vocalic parts constitute a front-back contrast or they are identical, it is likely that word merger is produced. Durational results also show that a monosyllabic word merger is usually longer than a single syllable.The author would like to thank the reviewers of the journal Language Variation and Change and two of my colleagues, Professor Ying-chin Lin and Professor Jackson T.-S. Sun, for their constructive comments. The study presented in this article was financially supported by the National Science Council, grant NSC-92-2411-H-001-075 and by the Ministry of Education, grant 91-E-FA06-4-4.

This paper investigates the distribution of a morphological variable that has not gained much attention in the literature: adverbial -s versus -Ø. This morpheme predominantly occurs with adverbs ending in -ward(s), like forward(s), afterward(s), and inward(s), or -way(s), such as anyway(s) or halfway(s). Using a large database of sociolinguistic interviews of Ontario English and an apparent-time perspective, we show that the use of the variants changes over the twentieth century, with the adverbial suffixes -ward(s) and -way(s) behaving differently. -Ward(s) shows a trend towards -s, while most words in -way(s) increasingly take -Ø–splitting by adverbial suffix. Anyway(s) is an exception to this pattern, with a change from below towards -s, strongly conditioned by social standing. We also find evidence for lexicalization of forms without -s in phrasal verbs like to move forward. We explain these findings against the background of variationist sociolinguistic theory and principles of language change.

The current study analyzes the trajectory of the goose vowel in Received Pronunciation (RP) over ten decades (1920s-2010s). Recordings of eighty-seven RP speakers were transcribed in ELAN, and vowel tokens were extracted by FAVE, measuring F1 and F2 values at the midpoint. Showing the life-cycle of a sound change from start to (almost) completion, the results confirm that goose-fronting has been an active sound change for many decades in RP, with F2 starting to increase in the middle of the twentieth century and accelerated changes in the 1970s and the 2010s. We observe similar predictor strengths of linguistic factors as in previous studies. The results are interpreted in light of the social changes in the social composition of the RP group in the second part of the twentieth century, involving increased dialect contact.

We characterized the patterns of agreement variation and consistency in three corpora of child and child-directed US English to better understand preschoolers’ input and to compare preschoolers’ own agreement production. We examined sentences with third-person subjects and tensed forms of be in two large single-family corpora and one cross-sectional corpus collected during a Search-and-Find activity. Caregivers’ agreement variation consistently reflected patterns previously found in adult-to-adult speech. Children's variation was conditioned by many of the same factors (e.g., sentence type, pronoun subject, and order of subject and verb) and clearly demonstrated acquisition of the categorical-variable split. However, some children showed substantially higher rates of nonagreeing forms (There's the cherries) than their caregivers and differed in their ranking of conditioning factors. We suggest that this reflects children's developing production processing abilities: shorter sentence-planning spans may make nonagreement a useful strategy for avoiding early number commitments in verb-first sentences.

This article examines Finnish lects spoken in Helsinki from the 1970s to the 2010s with a probabilistic model called Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The model searches for underlying components based on the linguistic features used in the interviews. Several coherent lects were discovered as components in the data, which counters the results of previous studies that report only weak covariation between features that are assumed to be present in the same lect. The speakers, however, are not categorical in their linguistic behavior and tend to use more than one lect in their speech. This implies that the lects should not be considered in parallel with seemingly uniform linguistic systems such as languages, but as partial systems that constitute a network.

After the Franco dictatorship, written Catalan started to be taught officially in the schools of Catalonia. This teaching has involved a change in some phonetic, morphological, and lexical habits, especially among speakers schooled in Catalan as a first language. The present study shows a linguistic change process observed in Northwestern Catalan linguistic communities. Its focus is the study of absolute initial prestressed vowels spelled 〈e〉 which have traditionally been uttered with solution [a] in forms such as encara ‘yet’ or estudi ‘study’. The population analyzed is the one that is receiving or has received the biggest influence from written language: speakers between 3 and 20 years of age. The data obtained allows us to observe a phonetic change directly connected to writing.I would like to thank Carlos van Oosterzee and James McCullough for discussion. This research was supported by HUM2004-01504/FILO (MEC & FEDER).

Studies of accommodation between different dialects have to a greater or lesser extent focused on languages with a spoken standard or a socially prestigious dialect. Irish (Gaelic) has no spoken standard, nor can any of the three major spoken dialects be considered more socially prestigious than the others. This article reports on a pilot study that explores cross-dialect speaker interaction in a task-oriented context focusing primarily on prosodically induced effects on prominence and duration. Although accommodation was not found on a large scale in the synchronous speech task involved, interaction among various pairs of speakers raised interesting questions, both linguistic (e.g., what level of linguistic detail is perceptually relevant) and methodological (e.g., how best to study linguistic interaction between speakers from noncontiguous dialect areas when there is no standard dialect).I would like to thank Fred Cummins whose work on synchronic speech inspired the present study and who assisted in the recording. I would also like to thank Jaye Padgett, Lillis Ó Laoire, Diarmuid Ó Sé, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version.