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 issue of Language Variation and Change brings together seven articles from four continents, North and South America, Europe, and Australia, dealing with Québec French, Brazilian Portuguese, British and Australian English, respectively. Although the geographical spread is great, the articles have in common a focus on how various discourse strategies and devices (punctors, pragmatic expressions, extension particles) maintain coherence or continuity in spoken discourse, and all subscribe to the importance of a rigorous quantitative methodology. They thus bear testimony to the important development in linguistics in recent years that regards discourse processes found mainly in unedited oral speech as crucial data offering a key to the functioning of human language (Ducrot, 1980; Roulet et al., 1985; Schegloff et al., 1977; Schiffrin, 1987; Stenström, 1990).

A social dialect survey of a New Zealand community documented a change in progress in the pronunciation of the vowels in words such as air and ear. The data support a tentative interpretation that a shift to the variant with the closer onset for AIR words was initiated by middle-aged Pakeha women. This was not followed in any strength by other social groups. More recently there has been a change in the opposite direction, with EAR words being realized by a variant with a more open onset. This is being led by young, working class Pakeha speakers, possibly the women. For some speakers, merger of the two diphthongs is close to completion. The change thus seems to have begun in the past 40 years, but its direction has been reversed in the past 20 years. With the strong following among young speakers for the downward shift toward [eə], this seems the likely direction in which change will continue.

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.

A re-examination of primary school descriptions by Anglo, Greek, and Italian speakers in the Sydney sociolinguistic survey focuses on the interactional patterns that characterize the elicitation of a particular text type. Two aspects of the interaction are analyzed—the type or mixture of types of questions asked by the fieldworker within the same or different turns at talk, and the response behavior of the speaker—in order to determine what part of the variability in the text data is the result of the interaction process itself rather than of the characteristics and intentions of the respondents. We hypothesize that a constant feature of every interaction is the negotiation of tension between interviewer and speaker. The results confirm that varying the details of the interviewer's questioning strategy, even when the referential content of the questions seem uniform, can have strong and predictable effects on the nature of the speaker's response. We also demonstrate links among stylistic variation, interactional patterning, and ethnicity differentiation. Where differences in behavior in the same setting have often been attributed to learned patterns of different ethnic or social groups, much of this may instead be due to different degrees of interactional tension. We show that less negotiation of interactional tension is required when the interviewer and the speaker share a set of sociolinguistic assumptions through common ethnic identity, and more negotiation is required when this is not the case.

Guy (1991) proposed a linkage between empirical linguistics, in the morphological constraints of /-t,d/ deletion, and formal linguistic theory, in lexical phonology. He hypothesized an explanation for the actual rate of deletion reported in /-t,d/ studies in the three-tier lexical phonology model (Kiparsky, 1979): namely, that an exponential relationship exists in the relative rate of deletion of /-t,d/ clusters in words, according to different morphological classes as described in the three-tier model. In this article, the hypothesis is tested in the English of 45 Chicanos from Los Angeles, which as a recently formed dialect provides an interesting test case in two respects. A major difference exists between the English of older and younger Chicanos involving the morphological classes associated with /-t,d/ deletion. Additionally, age grading of the /-t,d/ deletion process operates only among the younger speakers. Guy's model receives solid independent confirmation in the Chicano English data. These results simultaneously integrate the three-tier lexical phonology model, Guy's hypothesis, and the dialect-specific characteristics of Chicano English.

In clauses with future meaning in Biblical Hebrew, a basically VSO language, there are consistent functional differences between clauses with verb-initial word order and clauses with non-verb-initial word order. Quantitative study shows that verb-initial clauses are associated with future events that come about through cooperation between (some combination of) the speaker, the listener, and God, whereas non-verb-initial clauses are associated with future events that are the result of unilateral action. This is related to the finding of Givón (1977) that, in clauses with past time reference in Biblical Hebrew, verb-initial order is associated with the unmarked function of temporal sequencing and continuity of the narrative, whereas non-verb-initial order is associated with a break in sequencing and discontinuity. If we take verb-initial order as generally associated with unmarked discourse functions, these data suggest that cooperation represents the unmarked expectation in dialogues about the future in the same way that sequencing represents the unmarked expectation in narratives about the past.

The present study uses a multidimensional approach to analyze the linguistic characteristics of Somali spoken and written registers. Somali is unusual in that it has a very short history of literacy (only since 1973), but at present it has a wide range of written and spoken registers, including governmental, educational, and public information uses. It thus represents a very different language type from previously described languages. We analyze the distribution of 65 linguistic features across 279 texts from 26 spoken and written registers, using factor analysis to identify five major dimensions of variation. None of these dimensions defines an absolute dichotomy between spoken and written registers, although three of the dimensions can be considered “oral/literate” parameters. As in the multidimensional analyses of other languages, the present study shows that no single dimension adequately describes the relations among spoken and written registers; rather, each dimension reflects a different set of communicative functions relating to the purpose, general topic, degree of interactiveness, personal involvement, production circumstances, and other physical mode characteristics. In the conclusion, we briefly discuss our findings relative to previous multidimensional analyses of English, Tuvaluan, and Korean, laying the foundation for cross-linguistic analyses of universal tendencies of register variation.

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 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.

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.

This article reports sociolinguistic research on linguistic change in an intonation feature of New Zealand English, namely, the use of high rising terminal contours (HRTs) in declarative clauses. Recorded interviews from 75 inhabitants of Porirua, a small city north of Wellington, were analyzed for the use of HRTs. The speaker sample was subdivided according to years of age (20–29, 40–49, 70–79), sex, ethnicity (Maori and Pakeha), and class (working and middle). The results show that linguistic change is in progress, the use of HRTs being favored by young Maori and by young Pakeha women. The results are explained in terms of the function of HRTs as positive politeness markers. The usefulness of the term “linguistic variable” in the analysis of intonational change and discourse features is assessed.

Phonological and morphological variation in Classical Latin (e.g., diphthongs ae/au vs. monophthongs e/o, retention vs. loss of final consonants and initial h-, GEN SG -is vs. -us/-os, DAT SG in -ae vs. -a, etc.) has typically been treated as regional in nature. However, these seemingly “rural” features cannot be considered instances of purely geographically based variation, for they also occur both on inscriptions from within Rome and in Roman literary usage. Coleman (1990:14) hinted at “a social dimension” to this variation, but only for au versus o variation. We argue, however, that a distinctly social dimension must be recognized for much of this variation, based on: (a) instances of hypercorrection; (b) the observation that datives in -a occur only in private, primarily domestic, inscriptions and never in public or official inscriptions; (c) Augustus's use of “rural” domos for domus, in keeping with the populist image he cultivated upon his return to Rome. This dialectal/sociolectal situation can be best understood, we argue, in terms of the model of urbanization of Milroy (1980) and Bortoni-Ricardo (1985). The transformation of originally geographic variation into socially determined variation in an urban setting resulted from migrations into Rome and the expansion of Rome after the 4th century b.c.

The study of the 2700 occurrences of phrase-terminal extension particles (e.g., tout ça ‘all that’, des affaires de même ‘things like that’) in two large corpora of Montréal French reveals that they are typically formed of some combination of a quantifier, a generic and a comparative, and that the particle is optionally prefaced by a connector (the conjunctions puis, et ‘and’, ou ‘or’). The 76 particle types (not counting minor variations) also include a good number of fixed forms (e.g., et cetera) often having an onomatopoeic aspect (e.g., patati patata). Extension particles can be characterized through prosodic, syntactic, and semantic criteria. The analysis bears on the sociodemographic conditioning of overall rates of particle use; of choices within the quantifier, generic, and comparative categories; and of preference for each of four major classes of particle: those containing a universal quantifier, those containing an existential quantifier, those consisting of just a generic and a comparative, and fixed forms. The discourse insertion of the four classes is also analyzed in terms of connector, type of discourse transition, the complexity of the term(s) semantically “extended” by the particle, and the discourse genre. The clearest result pertaining to overall rates of use is an age-grading effect, whereby speakers use fewer particles as they grow older. Within the components, women use more quantifiers than men, and both generics and comparatives are sharply stratified by social class and age. The reconstituted particles tend to favor certain co-occurrence patterns and avoid others more than could be predicted from the component distributions, consistent with a stylistic concord effect. As for the four classes of particle, it is the presence and nature of the connector that have the strongest effects, where puis contrasts with both ou and the null connector, while the complexity of the extended term distinguishes among the classes both by virtue of the number of terms and their syntactic complexity. As is predictable from functional considerations the sociodemographic factors do not contrast the two semantically most distinct classes, involving universal versus existential quantifiers. The linguistic validity of the four classes is confirmed by the fact that their quantitative conditioning is not predictable from the strong sociodemographic conditioning of their component elements, but rather reflects their differential suitability for various discourse functions.

Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the analysis of twelve interviews sampled from the Sankoff-Cedergren corpus, we have isolated the following punctors: là ‘there’, tu sais, vous savez ‘you know’, n'est-ce pas ‘isn't it so’, hein ‘eh’, je veux dire ‘I mean to say’, moi ‘me’, osti ‘[communion] host’, vois-tu ‘do you see’, and il/elle dit, j'ai dit ‘he/she says’, ‘I said’ (used in reported discourse). Our main concern in this article is to present the distribution of punctors, within the sentence and within the discourse, and to suggest an explanation of some aspects of their conditioning in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints.

The present study focuses on the use of the three pragmatic expressions (you know, you see, and I mean) by female and male British English speakers. The aim of the study is two-fold: first, to establish actual differences in usage between men and women over a number of functions of the three pragmatic expressions; second, to find out whether such differences could be correlated to same-sex as opposed to mixed-sex interaction. The results of my investigation show that there are gender-specific differences in the use of pragmatic expressions. Some of the more salient differences were that the women tended to use pragmatic expressions between complete propositions to connect consecutive arguments, whereas the men preferred to use them either as attention-drawing devices or to signal repair work. The two groups also showed differences from the point of view of absolute frequencies, so that, generally speaking, the men used the expressions about 25% more often than the women and in some contexts up to twice as much. The results also point to the use of pragmatic expressions being largely dependent on whether the conversation takes place in a same-sex or in a mixed-sex environment, so that they tend to be used more sparingly in mixed-sex as compared to same-sex interaction.