A combination of observational and experimental data from recent research into the intonation of New Zealand English highlights generational differences in rising intonation patterns. As well as a general increase in the incidence of rising intonation in statement utterances, the data reveal a shift from late rises in mid-age speakers to earlier rise onsets in younger speakers. These differences are discussed in the context of the intonational phonology of New Zealand English and in terms of the functional need for a distinction between question and statement rises.The author would like to thank participants at the 2003 UK Language Variation and Change conference for comments on an oral presentation of the data discussed in this article, and the Royal Society of New Zealand for financial support under Marsden grant VUW604. Special thanks go to Bob Ladd for insightful observations on an earlier version of this article.

To decipher for the first time what, if any, social meaning is indexed by nonstandard intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rica, such as [paza] for pasa ‘raisin’, the present study digitally manipulates 12 utterances from six Costa Rican speakers to vary only in intervocalic [s] versus [z]. Based on 106 listeners’ responses to these stimuli, I find that intervocalic [z] indexes a lower social status for all speakers but also yields higher ratings of confidence, niceness, localness, and masculinity for male speakers. Given female speakers’ limited ability to evoke positive social meanings associated with [z], I argue that accessibility to the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) conditions men's and women's differential treatment of variation. Offering a satisfying explanation for the gender paradox (Labov, 2001:261–293), this work concludes that women agentively eschew nonstandard variants that result in no positive social gains but lead linguistic innovation when their access to the indexical field is unobstructed.

The dress vowel in New Zealand English (NZE) has been raising for some time, so that it now overlaps the acoustic space of fleece for many younger speakers. This article presents an acoustic analysis of the dress and fleece vowels of 80 speakers and shows that dress continues to raise in contemporary NZE so that for some speakers dress has risen above fleece and can be more front than fleece. fleece has diphthongized as a consequence, making it part of the New Zealand “short front vowel” shift. This suggests that the short/long distinction in New Zealand English may have broken down, at least for the front vowels. The diphthongization of fleece is most advanced in tokens that are followed by voiceless codas. These are the tokens that are most endangered by the high dress, as they are distinguished neither in acoustic space, nor by length.We wish to thank the students who made the original recordings for the Canterbury Corpus and our research assistants Deborah Sagee and Toby Macrae for help with digitizing and marking up the data. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Australian Conference on Speech Science and Technology, December 2004, and we are grateful to members of the audience for useful suggestions. Christian Langstrof, Elizabeth Gordon, and an anonymous referee have made useful comments on an earlier draft, and we are also indebted to Elliott Moreton, whose suggestions considerably facilitated our ability to make sense of this data set. This work was partially funded by a grant from the University of Cantebury (U6286).

Examination of three variable concord phenomena in spoken Portuguese of Rio de Janeiro (noun phrase, subject/predicate adjective, subject/verb) demonstrates that the most consistent and strongest variable constraint on the use of concord is the discourse level serial (or parallel processing) effect, that is, a preference for similar forms to co-occur in sections of discourse, even if this results in redundancy or lack of economy. Given the strength of this constraint, we separated the data into two subsets such that one contains only serial occurrences, where parallel processing can operate, whereas the other contains only isolated or first occurrences, where there is no preceding form to trigger the parallel effect. In the serial set, the parallel effect is so strong that other nonsocial constraints are not selected. External forces, such as the normative pressure of the school system toward fully redundant marking, have no significant effect on the serial tokens, although education does correlate with increased use of concord in isolated/first tokens. Thus, in the serial context the linguistic system is so highly constrained that external, and even internal, influences are blocked. We conclude that strong constraints should be identified, and that data in which they are operative should be analyzed separately from data in which they are not present in order to understand the interplay of the diverse forces in the linguistic system.

This article compares the marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English (TE), with particular attention to the alternation of Ø and {ed}. The comparison reveals similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning which suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier process of shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard English pattern. Further examination of the TE data reveals that the use of {ed} is highly constrained in cases where habitual or characteristic past meaning is conveyed; in such cases, the use of Ø is near categorical. These findings may have implications for BEV which future research can clarify. The article also considers the case of stressed remote BIN in BEV and argues that it may have arisen as the result of reanalysis of an earlier creole anterior bin under the influence of unstressed (continuative perfect) bin, derived from English have + been. This provides further support for the view that, though early BEV may not have been a fully fledged creole, it arose through a process of restructuring in which a creole substrate played a significant role. Finally, the article notes that past marking is only one aspect of the overall organization of the BEV tense/mood/aspect system, which shares other features in common with creole varieties, including resultative done and combinatory possibilities among auxiliaries. Future research on these aspects of the BEV verb complex can shed more light on the BEV/creole connection.

When one language has a grammatical category that is rare or lacking in another, this “orphan” category may constrain the types of structures employed when the two languages are combined in bilingual discourse. We systematically examine the effect of categorial nonequivalence on language mixture in two corpora of spontaneous bilingual speech—Wolof—French and Fongbe—French—exhibiting different typological contrasts in adjectival modification structures. Focusing on lone French-origin items in otherwise Wolof or Fongbe discourse, the most frequent, if the most contentious, type of intrasentential language mixture, our method reveals that superficially identical items pattern in markedly different ways in each corpus. In Wolof, their patterns are consistent with Wolof adjectival elements (i.e., verbs), revealing them to be loanwords, while in Fongbe, they pattern with code-switches. We show that this difference is linked to the degree of categorial mismatch in the languages involved. Where categorial equivalence exists (Fongbe-French), code-switches involving French adjectives may occur, as long as structural equivalence between the two languages is maintained at the switch site. Where categorial equivalence is lacking (Wolof–French), code-switching is inhibited, and language mixture is effected via borrowing. This illustrates how, at code-switch sites, both structural and categorial equivalence are maintained.

Data on person marking in Andalusian Spanish argue in favor of a revision of the functional hypothesis, which pertains to “the tendency for semantically relevant information to be retained in surface structure” (Kiparsky, 1982:87). The first part of this study shows that subject pronouns in Andalusian are not used to disambiguate verb forms, in direct contrast to Hochberg's (1986) findings on subject pronoun usage in Puerto Rican. In the second part of the study, an analysis of contextual person markers, not undertaken in previous studies, shows that person can be indicated by means outside the surface structure. When both linguistic and contextual person markers are taken into account, only 2% of the 1,035 verbs in this sample of Andalusian are unmarked for person. Person marking is thus maintained where it is important to the speaker's message, but it is not limited to surface structure realization as the strong form of the functional hypothesis suggests.

This study uses variationist methods in an L2 context to investigate ING variation in the English speech of UK-based Polish migrants. The results suggest that such variation is as consistent in an L2 context as it is in an L1 context, with several of the expected L1 factors emerging as statistically significant constraints. However, two social factors emerge as particularly worthy of further discussion: the reversal of the typical gender pattern (in this case women are more likely to use the alveolar variant than men), and the question of whether the speaker intends to return to Poland in the future. Gender is discussed from the perspective of contexts of language use (occupation), and future plans is discussed in terms of its role in the construction of identity. There is a strong indication that the intention to return to Poland encourages the use of an ING variant, [ɪŋk], that signals this allegiance to the L1 identity.

This study provides acoustic evidence that in the last 50 years New Zealand English (NZE) has undergone a substantial vowel shift. Two sets of data are studied: the Otago corpus, recorded in 1995, and the Mobile Unit corpus, recorded in 1948. Both corpora have male and female speakers. The corpora were labeled, accented vowels were extracted, and formant values were calculated. The results of the formant analysis from the two corpora are contrasted. We provide evidence that in NZE /i/ has centralized, /e/ and /æ/ have raised, and the diphthongs /i[inverted e]/ and /e[inverted e]/ have merged. We argue that /i/ changed in quality not only because of crowding in the front vowel space, but also because it would be less likely misperceived as an unaccented vowel (i.e., as [inverted e]).

Auditory phonetic transcription is a stock-in-trade of sociolinguists; it is transcriptions, not actual speech, that form the raw data of much of sociolinguistics. Given its importance, it is surprising that phonetic transcription has rarely been examined by sociolinguists from the point of view of its validity and its reliability — despite the existence of a certain amount of discussion in the phonetic literature. Rather, it has been treated as a pretheoretical notion. In this article, we report an experiment that compares the auditory transcriptions of trained phoneticians with physiological data on the same utterances, using the technique of electropalatography. The experiment shows that (a) there are intervening factors of a psycho-acoustic nature that impinge on a phonetician's transcription, thus affecting validity; and (b) there is considerable inconsistency, both between phoneticians and between a single phonetician's different attempts at transcribing the same token. Both of these latter factors show that a high degree of reliability cannot be assumed.

Communicative competence comprises many things, including the ability to use the appropriate pronunciation, based on gender and style. Previous L2 research in phonology has focused on the frequency of nativelike and nonnative forms and variation within nonnative forms, rather than variation within nativelike forms. This study, however, examines variation in nativelike forms by investigating gender and stylistic differences in the English of native speakers and native speakers of Japanese and Spanish. The results of the native speakers demonstrated that there were significant differences based on gender and style. Both groups of nonnative speakers exhibited significant gender differences but only one group showed significant stylistic differences. The results suggest that gender differences are acquired before stylistic differences.Different versions of this article were delivered at the following conferences: EUROSLA, June 1999 in Lund, Sweden; NWAVE, October 1999 in Toronto, Canada; and SLRF, October 2003 in Tucson, Arizona.

This article is based on an extensive panel study wherein the real-time progress of several language changes was mapped over a period of ten years. Our study suggests that categorical linguistic features are inclined to remain categorical in the idiolect. If a speaker, as a child, “learns” a feature with little or no variation in it, no major changes are likely to take place during the speaker's lifetime. In other words, new changes rarely commence in an idiolect later in life. If, however, a speaker adopts a feature as a variable one, with two or more truly competing variants, it is possible that the balance of the variants will shift during the speaker's lifetime. The more equal the proportions of the rivalling variants are, the more likely it is that one of the variants will gain dominancy during the speaker's lifetime.The present study has been partially funded by the Academy of Finland. For assistance we thank the staff of the Virrat Project at the University of Tampere, Finland.

This paper reports on patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change in Manchester's goose and goat vowels on the basis of the acoustic analysis of 122 speakers, stratified by age, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Goose fronting is an internal change showing little social differentiation, except before /l/ as in school and pool, where, in contrast to most other dialects of English, goose shows advanced fronting inversely correlated with socioeconomic status. Goat fronting, on the other hand, is a change brought from outside the dialect by the highest status groups, displaying a pattern of monotonic social stratification, a female lead, and a strong effect of ethnicity. The role of attitudes toward the community in the realization of the vowels is compared with the effect of social class construed in terms of distances between social groups. Social class turns out to be a better predictor, suggesting that the role of attitudes and identity may be overestimated in research eschewing a systematic exploration of social class at the same time.

Sui clan exogamy can serve as a laboratory for investigation of dialect contact and immigration. The Sui people, an indigenous minority of southwest China, have marriage customs requiring that a wife and husband have different clan origins, and the wife permanently immigrates to the husband's village at the time of marriage. Due to subtle interclan dialect variation, a married woman may have different dialect features than her husband and other local villagers. This study presents an acoustic analysis of such clan-level variation in lexical tone, a sociotonetic analysis. Results show that the immigrant women maintain the tone variants of their home clan dialects to a high degree despite spending a decade or more in the husband's village, thus illustrating a case where linguistic identity is maintained in the face of close, long-term contact.

This paper explores the ways in which structural and practice-based social constraints contribute to the maintenance of nonstandard were in Bolton, England. Using data from a school ethnography, 2747 tokens of first- and third-person singular was/were are analyzed according to informants' social class, community of practice, self-identification, and place of birth. Varbrul analyses reveal consistencies in the linguistic constraints on variation irrespective of the type of social analysis undertaken. These patterns generally confirm the findings of previous was/were studies. However, comparisons of log likelihood results suggest that although different social factors constrain this variation with varying degrees of accuracy, no one factor alone sufficiently explains it. Comparisons of groups and individual speakers reveal that nonstandard were maintenance is in fact explained by the combined effect of an established correlation between nonstandard were and local social structures and on-going revitalization of the form in contemporary forms of social practice.

Drawing on terminology, concepts, and ideas developed in quantitative morphological typology, the present study takes an exclusive interest in the coding of grammatical information. It offers a sweeping overview of intralingual variability in terms of overt grammatical analyticity (the text frequency of free grammatical markers), grammatical syntheticity (the text frequency of bound grammatical markers), and grammaticity (the text frequency of grammatical markers, bound or free) in English. The variational dimensions investigated include geography, text types, and real time. Empirically, the study taps into a number of publicly accessible text corpora that comprise a large number of different varieties of English. Results are interpreted in terms of how speakers and writers seek to achieve communicative goals while minimizing different types of complexity.

In this article, I conduct a quantitative analysis of negative concord in Buckie, a relic dialect from the northeast of Scotland, and compare these findings with transported varieties of English in North America. Two major results arise from the analysis. First, Buckie has high rates of use of negative concord to indeterminates within the same clause, as do all the dialects included in the study. Second, negative concord in other environments is found in certain varieties in the New World that have no counterparts in the Old World. I suggest that the quantitative similarities can be explained in terms of the primitive status of negative concord in vernacular varieties of English, in combination with a shared linguistic heritage during the colonial period. The qualitative differences demonstrate that contexts of linguistic heterogeneity in North America during the early colonization period led to an extension and restructuring of the original rules.

This article provides evidence from a small city in the northern United States for Canadian raising, the raising of /au/ and /ai/ to [AU] and [Ai]. As hypothesized, /ai/-raising is much more frequent and regular, but /au/-raising also occurs. Speech style is statistically significant only for /ai/-raising. The raising of /ai/ is not significant for gender or age, but /au/-raising seems to be led by young women. This evidence suggests that, while /ai/-raising has been fully entrenched in this phonological system for some time, /au/-raising is a new and separate change in progress. The /au/-diphthong is also often fronted when raised, a finding similar to several Canadian studies (Chambers, 1981a; Hung, Davison, & Chambers, 1993). This suggests that the Canadian varieties studied may not, as previously suggested (Chambers, 1981b), be conforming to the U.S. norm, but instead that the two varieties are converging.

We use a mathematical model to examine three phenomena involving language change across the lifespan: the apparent time construct, the adolescent peak, and two different patterns of individual change. The apparent time construct is attributed to a decline in flexibility toward language change over one's lifetime; this explanation is borne out in our model. The adolescent peak has been explained by social networks: children interact more with caregivers a generation older until later childhood and adolescence. We find that the peak also occurs with many other network structures, so the peak is not specifically due to caregiver interaction. The two patterns of individual change are one in which most individuals change gradually, following the mean of community change, and another in which most individuals have more categorical behavior and change rapidly if they change at all. Our model suggests that they represent different balances between the differential weighting of competing variants and degree of accommodation to other speakers.

In this article, we report on the results of a study of the diphthongs EAR and AIR, which are merging for many New Zealand speakers. Each stage of the study, which has been repeated at five-year intervals since 1983, involves the analysis of word lists and sentences read by over 100 14- and 15-year-old school pupils. The results show a clear trend toward a merger to the EAR diphthong. This is also confirmed in a study carried out in 1994 of 79 speakers (selected according to age, sex, and socioeconomic class) reading six word pairs. The results from both of these studies differ from those reported by Holmes and Bell (1992). We suggest the reasons for the different results could be methodological, and that the mechanism of the merger is merger by approximation after the AIR diphthong became involved in the New Zealand front vowel chain-shift raising.