Addressing the dearth of variation research in nonurban, noncoastal regions of California, this study examines the extent to which speakers in Redding, an inland community just north of the Central Valley, participate in the California Vowel Shift (CVS). We acoustically analyze the fronting of the back vowels boot and boat, the raising of ban and backing of bat, and the merger of bot and bought, in sociolinguistic interviews with 30 white lifelong residents. Results reveal a change in apparent time for all analyzed variables, indicating the CVS's progression through the community, though not as robust as in urban, coastal areas. Additionally, we provide evidence that shifting patterns for different vowels are structured by the ideological divide between town and country. Thus, as the CVS spreads through Redding, speakers utilize particular features of the shift differently, negotiating identities relevant in California's nonurban locales.

This paper provides the beginnings of a pan–South African English dialectology, characterizing five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Durban) and four ethnicities (Black, Colored, Indian, and White), via a single vowel, BATH (or /ɑ:/). From interviews with 200 selected speakers, 5553 tokens were subjected to acoustic analysis via PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2010), yielding bivariate data on vowel quality. Statistical analysis via analysis of variance focused on sets of five persons in each of 40 city-ethnicity-gender combinations. Overall, no city shows cohesion across all ethnic groups, though Kimberley, the smallest of the cities, and Johannesburg, the largest, come close. Conversely, no ethnicity shows cohesion across all cities, although Black speakers of traditional L2 English background come close. There is a robust regional difference for Colored speakers between Johannesburg and the other cities. Gender effects are notable: women's means are closer to the historically prestige [ɑ:] variant than the historically broader variant [ɔ:] in 6 of 20 possible groupings by city and ethnicity; in none of the cases is the opposite true.

Written and spoken language are known to differ substantially (Biber, 1988; 1995; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). Standard written language is highly uniform and governed by prescription, whereas the vernacular is most revealing of structured heterogeneity (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968). We focus on four English morphosyntactic variables that problematize assumptions about the nature of variation in the vernacular: the genitive, the comparative, the dative, and relative pronouns. Each is characterized in casual speech by functional divides that reflect discrete configurations of variant use. After detailing the patterning of these variables in speech, we explore a characteristic arguably shared by each: its historical pathway into the language, where analogy and prestige were powerful motivations for variant choice. We suggest that this combination of systemic and social factors contributed to the nature of these variables in the vernacular grammar. Furthermore, we advocate for greater scrutiny of written and spoken data and the outcomes of change from above and below within each register. The type of innovation and its trajectory may affect the nature of the emergent variable grammar.

This paper presents a sociolinguistic analysis of the variable devoicing of /ʒ/ in Buenos Aires Spanish, a phenomenon previously characterized as a change in progress. A novel method is implemented to determine the completion of the devoicing change by comparing the voicing levels of /ʒ/ to the inherent voicing variability of /s/, as well as by comparing the allophonic patterns of /ʒ/ to those of /s/. If the voicing levels of /ʒ/ are not significantly different from those of /s/ and the /ʒ/ no longer exhibits positional affrication, then the speaker's underlying postalveolar fricative is /ʃ/: they are a “devoicer.” The results suggest that, although older speakers, of both middle and upper classes, exhibit variation in the distribution of “voicers,” most younger speakers are devoicers, indicating that the /ʒ/ devoicing change is nearing conclusion. As a result, the underlying fricative for the majority of Buenos Aires Spanish speakers may very well be /ʃ/.

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.

Although it was the focus of several publications by Carroll Reed in the 1950s and early 1960s, English spoken in the Pacific Northwestern United States (PNWE) has received minimal research attention in variationist sociolinguistics. This paper provides the first report from an ongoing sociophonetic study. Data from a single-ethnicity, 25-person subsample of the larger corpus, constituted to explore change in apparent time, clarifies Seattleites' use of key markers of Western speech, including merger of cot /a/ and caught /ɔ/, and the positions of all vowel phonemes in the system. Several heretofore unreported characteristic features are found, including a tendency for PNWE speakers to monophthongize /e:/ bake and to raise prevelar /æ/ bag and /ε/ beg toward /e:/.

In recent years, the typological and geographic range of languages subjected to sociophonetic study has been expanding, though until now Australian Aboriginal languages have been absent from this subdiscipline. This first sociophonetic study of an Australian language, Murrinh Patha, shows a type of consonant lenition that is notably distinct from the better known examples in Standard Average European languages, effecting /p/ and /k/ primarily in the onset of stressed, usually word-initial syllables. Young men lenite more frequently than older men do, and paternal heritage from the neighboring Marri language group also predicts more frequent lenition. The latter influence may be the result of intense language contact brought about by recent settlement of diverse language groups at the Catholic Mission of Port Keats.

The Interface Principle posits that morphosyntactic variation does not elicit the same kinds of perceptual reactions as phonetic variables because “members of the speech community evaluate the surface form of language but not more abstract structural features” (Labov, 1993:4). This article examines the effect of linguistic modularity on listeners' social evaluations. Our point of departure is the sociolinguistic monitor, a hypothesized cognitive mechanism that governs frequency-linked perceptual awareness (Labov, Ash, Ravindranath, Weldon, & Nagy, 2011). Results indicate that “higher level” structural variables are available to the sociolinguistic monitor. Moreover, listeners' reactions are conditioned by independent effects of region of provenance and individual cognitive style. Overall, our findings support the claim that sociolinguistic processing is influenced by a range of social and psychological constraints (Campbell-Kibler, 2011; Preston, 2010; Wagner & Hesson, 2014) while also demonstrating the need for models of sociolinguistic cognition to include patterns of grammatical variation (Meyerhoff & Walker, 2013; Walker, 2010).

Previous studies on released /t/ collectively suggest that the linguistic feature is associated with intelligence and education, social meanings that can be recruited in constructing articulate personas. This study examines the production of released /t/ by six prominent U.S. political figures, as well as the social meanings listeners attribute to the variant. Employing a matched guise technique facilitated by digital stimulus manipulation, we find that the social meanings associated with released /t/ are constrained by linguistic and social factors. Regarding the former, word-medial /t/ releases carry stronger social meanings than those appearing word-finally. With respect to social factors, listener interpretations vary according to the identity of the speaker and knowledge of how frequently particular speakers produce /t/ releases. Thus, even though conventionalized associations between linguistic forms and meanings can be drawn upon to construct articulate personas, not all speakers can do so with equal effectiveness.

One consistent finding across sociolinguistic studies is the tendency for female speakers to lead in ongoing change. Different explanations have been proposed for this and a key method of testing these explanations is to identify whether the pattern occurs in the languages of a wider range of societies than have been studied thus far. Historical societies are relatively understudied in this regard, but undertaking variationist research into gender in historical varieties presents many challenges. One way to overcome these is to examine variation internal to fiction data. This paper presents an analysis of the effect of gender on the adverb selected for sentential negation in Old Norse prose fiction. It finds that female characters lead consistently in this change over time. In doing so, it demonstrates the feasibility of using fiction data when examining the effect of gender in historical varieties such as Old Norse.

Based on a corpus of ego-documents (private letters, diaries, memoirs) from the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, this paper presents a variationist comparative study to determine the fate of the modal periphrasis haber de + infinitive in the history of modern Spanish. Detailed analysis of the envelope of variation enables us to show that, despite an abrupt decline in the selection of haber de relative to tener que, both ‘to have to’, grammatical environments that favor its use remain in the mid-20th century. Many of the factor groups and the hierarchy of constraints during this period are similar to those that operated in previous periods. Nevertheless, a generalized decrease in the explanatory power of these factor groups, as well as some divergent patterns within several of these groups are also observed, mainly as a result of the fact that haber de + infinitive is increasingly relegated to some restricted areas of the grammar and lexicon. Based on these results, some theoretical implications for changing rates and constraints in language change and grammaticalization are discussed.

I offer a diachronic perspective on English ellipsis alternation, or the alternation between inclusion and omission of prepositions from remnants under sluicing and bare argument ellipsis. The relative freedom to omit prepositions from remnants has not been stable in English; this freedom is connected to the strength of semantic dependencies between prepositions and verbs. Remnants without prepositions are first attested, but remain less frequent than remnants with prepositions, as late as Early Modern English and gain in frequency following this period. I demonstrate that three constraints—correlate informativity, structural persistence, and construction type—predict ellipsis alternation in Early and Late Modern English. However, predicting ellipsis alternation in present-day English requires semantic dependencies in addition to the three constraints. The constraints can be subsumed under principles of language processing and production (considerations of accessibility, a tendency to reuse structure, and a conventionalized performance preference for efficiently accessing constituents that form processing domains), permitting a unified processing account of ellipsis alternation with cross-linguistic coverage.

This paper investigates the degree to which individual speakers follow the morphosyntactic hierarchy governing grammatical constraints on (ING) in the Southern U.S. city of Raleigh, North Carolina. (ING) was used as the variable of study for its well-studied internal constraints and comparability to previous studies on the internal constraints of t/d deletion. A lexical category constraint hierarchy for the community was determined via multivariate mixed-effects statistical models, and each speaker's (ING) pattern was compared to this hierarchy. Results show maintenance in grammatical constraints even when taking phonological factors into account, unlike some work on t/d deletion. Uniformity exists across speakers with respect to the ordering of internal constraints despite the overall decline in rates of –in over time, but constraint weights (expressed as log odds) vary significantly from speaker to speaker, with no correlates to social or internal factors. These results have consequences for representation of individuals in terms of an aggregate pattern, questioning the consistency of factor weight values at the speaker level despite consistent ordering of constraints.

Language variation is often symptomatic of ongoing historical change, including grammaticalization. Signed languages lack detailed historical records and a written literature, so tracking grammaticalization in these languages is problematic. Grammaticalization can, however, also be observed synchronically through the comparison of data on variant word forms and multiword constructions in particular contexts and in different dialects and registers. In this paper, we report an investigation of language change and variation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Signs glossed as finish were tagged for function (e.g., verb, noun, adverb, auxiliary, conjunction), variation in production (number of hands used, duration, mouthing), position relative to the main verb (pre- or postmodifying), and event types of the clauses in which they appear (states, activities, achievements, accomplishments). The data suggest ongoing grammaticalization may be part of the explanation of the variation—variants correlate with different uses in different linguistic contexts, rather than social and individual factors.