Whereas the alternation between the s-genitive (the New Year's message) and the of-genitive (the message of the New Year) is well documented, our study offers a more accountable analysis of genitive variation by including noun-noun (NN)-genitives (the New Year message). We consider four different variable contexts (s versus of, NN versus of, NN versus s, and NN versus s versus of ), which we analyze using regression analysis. The dataset consists of 10,054 variable genitives drawn from the Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. The material covers the period between 1650 and 2000, thus enabling us to track the evolution of variable genitive grammar in real time. We report that there is an overall drift toward the NN-genitive, which is preferred over other variants when constituent noun phrases are short, possessor constituents are inanimate, and possessum constituents are thematic. In addition to these substantive contributions, we showcase methods of dealing with a complex dataset covering nonbinary grammatical variation.

This is a study of the competition of linguistic systems within the speech community, tracing the opposition of distinct phonological configurations. Among younger Philadelphians oriented to higher education, the traditional short-a system is giving way to the nasal system, in which all prenasal vowels are tense. We present evidence that this shift occurs systematically in both the lax and tense allophones. The degree of conformity to each system is measured for 106 subjects by the Pillai statistic; community-wide patterns are revealed by regression modeling and bimodality diagrams. Adherence to the traditional system is greatest for White speakers who graduated from Catholic high schools, while the nasal system is strongest for graduates from elite schools with special admission requirements. African American students show no orientation to the traditional system, but parallel White students in the shift to the nasal system. The histories of students through the educational system show that the speaker's short-a system is largely determined during their middle and high school years, before entering college. Special admission interviews play a special role in this process, as brief speech events that strongly determine the person's linguistic environment for the years that follow.

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.

Word production variability is widespread in speech, and rates of variant production correlate with many factors. Recent research suggests mental representation of both canonical word forms and distinct reduced variants, and that production and processing are sensitive to variant frequency. What factors lead to frequency-weighted variant representations? An experiment manipulated following context and word repetition for final t/d words in read, narrative English speech. Modeling the experimentally generated data statistically showed higher final-segment deletion in tokens followed by consonant-initial words, but no evidence of increased deletion with repetition, regardless of context. Deletion rates were also higher the greater a word's cumulative exposure to consonant contexts (measured from distributional statistics), but there was no effect of word frequency. Token effects are interpreted in terms of articulation processes. The type-level context effect is interpreted within exemplar and usage-based models of language to suggest that experiences with word variants in contexts register as frequency-weighted representations.

This study applies multinomial regression analysis to a parallel corpus of Spanish medieval translations of the Bible in order to study the different factors that condition variation in the expression of possession in Old Spanish. Our methodology allows us to determine the degree to which less frequent possessive constructions (ART + POSS, as in la su casa ‘the his house’; GEN, as in la casa de él ‘the house of him’; and ART/BARE, as in la casa ‘the house’) can be considered competitors to the dominant POSS construction (as in su casa ‘his house’) as a function of usage context differences. In comparison to the POSS construction, the ART + POSS construction usually expresses pragmatic functions such as reverence, the GEN construction is typically used to disambiguate a reference, and the ART/BARE construction is bound to contexts in which the possessor is highly accessible. Crucially, the analysis also sheds light on historical changes in the balance between structural and contextual constraints on the use of these different variants. Whereas in the 13th century, structural and stylistic constraints are almost equally important, the importance of structural constraints diminishes in the 15th century. The study thus illustrates how in reductive processes of language change, variation due to structural constraints yields to stylistic variation.

This paper examines the phonological leveling and diffusion of variants of /t/ in Liverpool, northwest England, and two localities in its hinterland. We show that lenited realizations of /t/, thought to be historically restricted to Liverpool, are increasing over time and spreading over geographical space. We explore Labov's (2007) claims that linguistic changes that progress via transmission, within a speech community, are reproduced in all their structural complexity, whereas changes that spread across speech communities, via diffusion, are “simplified” en route. We find support for these hypotheses. Using a comparative sociolinguistic methodology, we show that the linguistic constraints operating on the realization of /t/ as [h] in Liverpool have remained stable over time, while those in a nearby town—Skelmersdale—seem to have simplified. However, we show that not all speakers from Skelmersdale share the same constraints on this variable form, and we connect this with speakers' positive or negative attitudes toward Skelmersdale or Liverpool.

This paper examines variation in Louisiana French nasalized vowels across two time periods: 1977 and 2010–2011. Non-contrastive nasal vowels are typical of English, while contrastive nasal vowels are typical of French. Louisiana French is an endangered language variety. Instead of simplifying to a single type of vowel nasality, as might be expected in a situation of heavy language contact and language shift, Louisiana French maintains a system of phonetic and phonemic nasal vowels. Digitized interviews with 32 native speakers from lower Lafourche Parish provide 2801 data points for analysis. In contrast with previous assertions in the literature, quantitative analyses reveal that contextual nasalization operates almost exclusively within the domain of the word, not the syllable.

Persistence, the tendency to repeat a recently used variant in speech, has been observed for a range of sociolinguistic variables. This paper uses quantitative data from ING and TD in Philadelphia English to show that persistence reflects morphological structure and can therefore be a useful tool for defining variables at the phonology–morphology interface. For both ING and TD, persistence arises only when prime and target belong to the same morphological category, with additional interactions between morphological category and lexical repetition. This pattern of results suggests that both the linguistic variables and cognitive processes at play are multifactorial.

The present study analyzes present be leveling with pivot is (as in I is, we is, the old dogs is) in Tristan da Cunha English, a variety of South Atlantic English that developed in geographic isolation and under intense contact conditions. The findings, based on data from a total of 45 speakers born throughout the 20th century, indicate that community-wide variation correlates with social history; whereas present be was subject to (near-)categorical leveling until the 1940s, an opening-up phase after World War II saw interaction with speakers of other dialects on the island, which triggered an increase of a standard am/is/are concord pattern. Variability began to increase from the 1950s onward and the community has now frayed out widely in its usage of leveled is forms (ranging from 10% to over 90% in speakers of the youngest generation, born in the 1980s). The internal constraint ranking for preceding environment in younger generations was partially restructured, which suggests that the social changes affected the grammatical variable. Three outliers represent exonormative orientation and outward mobility.

Previous studies of language contact in multilingual urban neighborhoods in Europe claim the emergence of new varieties spoken by immigrant-background youth. This paper examines the sociolinguistic conditioning of variation in allophones of Swedish /ε:/ of young people of immigrant and nonimmigrant background in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Although speaker background and sex condition the variation, their effects differ in each city. In Stockholm there are no significant social differences and the allophonic difference appears to have been neutralized. Gothenburg speakers are divided into three groups, based on speaker origin and sex, each of which orients toward different norms. Our conclusions appeal to dialectal diffusion and the desire to mark ethnic identity in a diverse sociolinguistic context. These results demonstrate that not only language contact but also dialect change should be considered together when investigating language variation in modern-day cities.

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.

This paper hypothesizes that as an expression becomes more frequent in one grammatical context, its mental retrievability improves, which in turn makes it more easily available in different yet closely related (analogous) grammatical contexts. Such a mechanism can account for the progression of gradual change. The hypothesis generates two testable predictions. First, innovative constructions should be more likely to emerge if their analogical models are better entrenched. Second, an expression's retrievability can also be improved by priming, which in the short term should have a similar effect to entrenchment. These predictions are tested against the development of the noun key into an adjective (as in a very key argument). The change is gradual, starting with increased productivity of compounds with key as specifying element, leading later to debonded and clearly adjectival uses. The development of key is analyzed using data from the British Houses of Parliament. The effect of entrenchment is tested against individual variation. Next, situations are investigated where key has been primed, either by an earlier instance of key or by a collocate of key. The evidence supports the hypothesis. Innovative uses of key are favored under conditions that improve the retrievability of its more conventionalized uses.

This research examines pre-/l/ allophones of vowels in five lexical sets—GOOSE, FOOT, GOAT, STRUT, and THOUGHT—in Kansas City. It builds an acoustic profile from 5507 tokens drawn from interviews with 67 Kansas Citians born between 1955 and 1999. Results reveal a variety of overlap patterns among all five vowels, with the most widespread being overlap between the pre-/l/ allophones of FOOT, STRUT, and GOAT. Acoustically, overlap patterns generally do not show a trend of change in apparent time. However, responses to minimal pairs reveal substantial apparent-time increases in judgments of “close” or “same.” Speakers appear to adjust their productions of vowels to match their minimal pair judgments. The interaction of these productions and judgments indicates a different profile for these five vowels than has been observed in other communities and suggests that some of these vowels have become phonemically ambiguous in Kansas City.

Korean has a typologically unusual three-way laryngeal contrast in voiceless stops among aspirated, lenis, and fortis stops. Seoul Korean is undergoing a female-led sound change in which aspirated stops and lenis stops are merging in voice onset time (VOT) and are better distinguished by the F0 (fundamental frequency) of the following vowel than by their VOT, in younger speakers' speech. This paper compares the VOT pattern of Homeland (Seoul) and Heritage (Toronto) Korean speakers and finds that the same change is in progress in both. However, in the heritage variety, younger speakers do not advance the change, unlike their Seoul counterparts. Rather they have leveled off or are perhaps reversing the change, and there is very little sex difference among the younger heritage speakers' patterns. We consider possible accounts of the differences between the Seoul and Toronto patterns, building our understanding of how language-internal variation operates in bilingual speakers, a topic that has received relatively less attention in the variationist literature.

As a so-called non-null subject language, it has been proposed that in English, unexpressed subjects occur only in registers that have specific grammatical properties. We test this hypothesis through a comparison of the conditioning of subject expression for third-person singular human specific subjects in English conversation and narrative. Despite a stark difference in the rates of nonexpression (4% in conversation vs. 22% in narratives), there is no evidence of different grammars across the registers—in both, outside of coreferential clauses conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects only occur in prosodic initial position in main clause declaratives. Within the variable context, in both registers, expression is sensitive to accessibility, priming, and temporal sequentiality. A register effect is, however, evident in the contextual distribution, with a larger proportion of the narrative tokens occurring in contexts propitious to unexpressed subjects, and it is this that accounts for the higher rate of nonexpression in this register.