This article deals with suprasegmental changes in progress in Japanese and English and demonstrates that the same kind of mechanism is in operation. Data on realtime changes in pitch accent, collected by comparing earlier editions of Japanese pronouncing dictionaries with recent editions, are examined. Analysis of data from present-day speech provides supplementary data on innovative accent. Two types of principle for accent change are proposed: the demand for paradigm coherence and the demand for canonical accent pattern. In the case of nouns derived from adjectives, the two appear to be in conflict. It is suggested that in Japanese the demand for paradigm coherence is the stronger principle. Similar kinds of conflict between two possible types of change are observed in ongoing stress changes in English. It is shown that base (or stem) transparency is a major factor in determining the directionality of accent change.

This article concerns the interrelation between the theoretical status and the social dimensions of syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch. I discuss syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch, which consists of (i) a range of dative constructions that are acceptable in the Heerlen dialect but unacceptable in Standard Dutch and (ii) Standard Dutch variants of the dative constructions that are rare in the Heerlen dialect. The theoretical primitive causing syntactic variation is taken to be the different values or settings of a parameter. Although all local dialect constructions in Heerlen Dutch seem superficially similar because they are construed with a dative NP or the reflexive zich, I argue that these constructions must be attributed to two distinct parameters. The different social distributions of dative constructions in Heerlen Dutch are a confirmation that two distinct parameters are involved.

In the study of past be, most researchers have assumed a two variant distinction for negative forms (i.e., wasn't and weren't). In Warren County, North Carolina, evidence suggests a three variant distinction (i.e., wasn't, weren't, and wont). Throughout the history of sociolinguistic investigation, two types of variants have been noted: a sociolinguistic variant and a linguistic variant. In Warren County, wont functions as both types, as demonstrated through acoustic, morphophonological, and sociolinguistic evidence. Through the analysis of negative past be, guidelines are suggested for determining a particular form as a separate linguistic and sociolinguistic variant.

The English of bilingual Cajuns living in southern Louisiana has been pejoratively depicted as an accented English; foremost among the stereotypes of Cajun English is the use of tink and dat for think and that. We present a variationist study of /θ/ and /ð/ in the speech of bilingual Cajuns in St. Landry Parish. The results show a complex interrelationship of age, gender, and social network. One of the major findings is a v-shaped age pattern rather than the regular generational model that is expected. The older generation use more of the dental variants [t, d] than all others, the middle-aged dramatically decrease their use, but the young show a level of usage closer to the old generation. The change is attributed to both language attrition and the blossoming of the Cajun cultural renaissance. Interestingly, neither young men in open networks nor women of all ages in open networks follow the v-shaped age pattern. In addition, they show opposite directions of change: men in open networks lead the change to [d], whereas women in open networks drop the dental variants of [t, d] almost entirely.

This article concerns infinitival relative clauses, such as Mary is the person to ask, and their distribution in spoken English. It analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified NP (the relative complex) in the matrix clause. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spoken British English, I show that the grammatical function of the antecedent in the infinitival relative clause depends on the function of the antecedent in the matrix clause. I argue that the distribution of antecedent functions in the matrix clause can be explained in terms of thematic properties and information structure of the clauses in which the infinitival relatives occur. A key notion is that speakers center their discourse around information that they assume to be important for the communicative event.

This article interrogates the line taken in studies of Northern Ireland English that Catholic/Protestant ethnicity is sociolinguistically irrelevant. Using data from Derry/Londonderry English, gathered with the objective of answering the question of whether ethnicity matters in sociolinguistic terms, it examines the relative importance of a set of social factors for language variation. The strength of these factors (ethnicity, class, sex, and age) varies, but where change is occurring, ethnicity has an effect on the adoption of innovations. In particular, changes originating in the (predominantly Protestant) east of Northern Ireland tend to be adopted primarily by Protestants, whereas Catholics tend to be more conservative. This fits well with a general pattern of diffusion of change suggested by a reading of the sociolinguistic literature from the region.

This sociolinguistic investigation analyzes an innovative usage of Spanish motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives in Barcelona that involves crosslinguistic pragmatic transfer. Speakers in the two social networks examined (N = 58) use these Spanish deictics following pragmatic rules that generally correspond to the rules for their Catalan counterparts. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that this innovative usage of the Spanish deictics is not predictable from the lexical form of the deictic systems in both languages. Multiple regression analysis (SPSS) demonstrates that as relative exposure to Catalan increases so does the amount of innovative usage observed, although degree of integration into a Catalan social network and degree of Catalanist ideology do not affect such usage. Qualitatively, this innovative usage is a linguistic marker of a unique contact variety of Spanish spoken in Catalonia (i.e., Catalan Spanish). In this variety, such usage represents a potential resource for performing Catalan identity.

A variationist account of how direct quotations are framed in spoken Spanish requires definition of the variable and the envelope of variation followed by investigation of linguistic, stylistic, and social constraints. The variable is defined as a set of three strategies for directly quoting the speech, gestures, and sound effects of people, animals, or things in the natural world, real or imagined, faithfully or not. These strategies involve verbs of direct report, a bare noun phrase (Y yo, “¡¿Ay qué hago?!” ‘And I, “Oh, what should I do?’), and freestanding quotation with no frame. Investigation of linguistic constraints finds influence both from within and above the sentence. These include clause type, person, number, animacy of speaker, quotation content, switch reference, and a “birds of a feather” effect. Data on stylistic constraints provide evidence for style as a function of attention to form. Social constraints reveal complicated, yet familiar influences of age, sex, and class, with teenagers showing parallels to Eckert's work on gender and variation. Evidence also emerges for both age grading and a change in progress.

The prodigious expansion of the progressive (be + ing periphrastic form, where be is at the same time the copula and a statement of existence) was a major feature of the modernization of the English verb system in the 19th century, when its frequency quadrupled. A survey (1787–1880) of the collections of private letters from 22 people, most of them famous writers, reveals that linguistic factors played a relatively small quantitative role in this development, whereas a clear correlation is found with two sociolinguistic factors: gender and intimacy. Frequencies are consistently higher for women than for men, and they increase with more intimate correspondents. Some parallels with biographical and literary data suggest that the Romantic vision, in a wide sense, may have contributed to the rise of this concrete, expressive, warmer existential form.

It has been claimed that the ellipsis of postpositional particles is one of the properties of Japanese women's language. The validity of this claim, however, is compromised by several methodological problems in prior research in this area: (1) the subjective comparison of bare percentages without any statistical verification of male–female differences; (2) the neglect of the intersecting relationships among a variety of potential constraints which simultaneously influence the speaker's choice of the variable; and (3) the exclusive focus on single-sex interactions. Conducting multivariate analyses of conversational data from both single-sex and cross-sex peer interactions, this preliminary study demonstrates the overgeneralization of gender-linked differentiation in past work due to the neglect of the relative strength of potential intersecting factors. The results also reveal statistically significant degrees of stylistic intragender variability across different types of gender composition, which counters the static approach to a social variable of gender in the traditional sociolinguistic paradigm.

In this article, I describe a new research project on York English (YrkE), a variety in northeast England. In addition to providing the first systematic linguistic documentation of YrkE, I conduct a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature which not only is well documented in the literature, but also recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide—was/were variation in the past tense paradigm. Two separate tendencies are observed, neither of which can be explained by any unidimensional notion of analogical leveling of the paradigm: (1) nonstandard was in existential constructions, and (2) nonstandard were in negative tags. Both trends can be tracked in apparent time in which the contrasting behavior of men and women reveals that women are leading both types of linguistic change. In other contexts, nonstandard was is a synchronic remnant which can be traced to earlier stages in the history of English.

Gondi is a Dravidian language spoken by 2.2 million speakers (Census of India 1981) in the mountains and forests of four adjacent states in central India. Gondi is a chain of several dialects, some of which, at distant points, are perhaps not mutually intelligible. A major dialect division is provided by a two-step sound change: s- > h- in the west, north, and northwest and h- > - in the south and southeast. The present article studies this two-step sound change, which is still in progress, and establishes two facts. First, contrary to the normal expectation that this sound change would be phonetically gradual and lexically abrupt (Neogram-marian type), there is evidence that it has been lexically gradual and perhaps also phonetically gradual (lexical diffusion). Second, phonetic gradualness and regularity in implementation of sound change are properties not incompatible with the mechanism of lexical diffusion. Labov's observation that s > h > has not been reported as a lexically diffused change in many quantitative studies of Portuguese and Spanish (1981) finds a clear exception in Gondi. Under the lexical diffusion model, the regularity of a sound change is defined as the final outcome in a three-stage change of the relevant lexicon: unchanged (u), variant (u ˜ c), and changed (c). If the entire eligible lexicon passed from u to c through u ˜ c, the change would become regular. If all u ˜ c became c and for some reason no item under u became u ˜ c, the sound change would die prematurely, since the variant stage which provided the rule for the innovation would be absent. Since a regular sound change can result from either the Neogrammarian model or the lexical diffusion model, Labov's (1994:542–543) theoretical proposal of complementarity between the kinds of changes resulting from the two mechanisms calls for more studies of sound change in progress to decide the issue.