One of the core problems in second language acquisition theory is how to describe and explain the highly variable (yet rule-governed) speech of second language learners. Is such variation simply random and most likely due to the first language's interference, or is it governed (at least in part) by general rules that reflect language universals? Within a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis of variability in second language acquisition, this article addresses these questions in the context of a cross-sectional study involving the acquisition of word-final stops by Brazilian Portuguese speakers learning English in a classroom environment. The study follows a sociolinguistic approach for data collection and the analysis is couched within a stochastic version of Optimality Theory.

Structural priming refers to the process whereby the use of a syntactic structure in an utterance functions as a prime on a subsequent utterance, such that that same structure is repeated. This article investigates this phenomenon from the perspective of first-person singular subject expression in Spanish. Two dialects and two genres of spoken Spanish are studied: New Mexican narratives and Colombian Spanish conversation. An analysis of 2,000 verbs occurring with first-person singular subjects reveals that subject expression undergoes a priming effect in both data sets, but that the effect is more short-lived in the Colombian data. This is found to be attributable to the interactional nature of these data, showing that the need to deal with interactional concerns weakens the priming effect. As the first study to compare priming of subject expression across distinct genres, this article makes an important contribution to our understanding of this effect, and in particular, of factors that play a role in its maintenance or dissipation in discourse.I would like to thank Rena Torres Cacoullos for her many invaluable comments on this article and Jill Morford and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi for helpful discussion on the notion of priming. I also gratefully acknowledge Jessi Aaron and Matt Alba for help with the coding and analysis; Neddy Vigil and Garland Bills for making the New Mexican data available to me; Ana Aurora Medina Murillo for help with the transcription of the NM data; and María Elena Rendón, Marianne Dieck, and Rocío Amézquita for the collection and transcription of the Colombian data.

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).

In an effort to provide greater understanding of the mechanisms of the diffusion of the low back vowel merger in American English, this study presents a detailed acoustic analysis of low back vowel systems in the speech of 114 native nonurban Kentucky speakers of English. The study reveals unexpected instances of merger in areas of the state that cannot be explained by current theories of merger. In this respect, it argues that these instances of low back vowel merger, while they may be an expansion of an existing merger, result from a distinct mechanism of merger, that is, merger by glide loss. It is predicted that as elements of traditional Southern phonology recede, similar merger will be widespread across the South.This research has been supported by grants from the Kentucky NSF EPSCoR Research Enhancement Grant Program and the Institute for Regional Analysis and Public Policy at Morehead State University. An earlier version of this work was presented at the South Atlantic American Dialect Society session at SECOL 72.

This study readdresses the loss of Negative Concord (NC) in Standard English. A detailed study of negation in Late Middle English and Early Modern English reveals that the loss of NC was a case of a natural change triggered by some internal factors. A close study of n-words in negative contexts and their ultimate replacement with negative polarity items (NPIs) in a number of grammatical environments shows that the decline of NC follows the same pattern across contexts in a form of parallel curvature, which indicates that the loss of NC is a natural change. However, this study reveals that the decline is not constant across time (see Contra Kroch's Constant Rate Hypothesis [CRH], 1989). Context behavior suggests an alternative principle of linguistic change, the context constancy principle. A context constancy effect is obtained across all contexts, indicating that the loss of NC is triggered by a change in a single underlying parameter setting. Accordingly, a theory-internal explanation is suggested.I would like to thank the reviewer of this article for his/her comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper and for pointing to some crucial theoretical misconceptions in the previous literature. His/her comments are very much appreciated.

In this article, the variable use of verbal -s with (especially, third-person) plural subjects is examined in extreme south-central Indiana. The patterns observed are compared to the same in several varieties of Appalachian English, and it is argued that the local language variety reflects the morphosyntactic stability of the linguistic system brought here by pioneer settlers from various Appalachian states some 200 years before. A very small pilot-study corpus of comparable data from the extreme northwestern corner of Indiana is called on to help refute a “universalist” explanation for the similarities found in southern Indiana and Appalachia. Finally, the conditions surrounding the transplantation of Appalachian English to Kentuckiana and to other places (i.e., the Ozarks, North Carolina's Outer Banks) are considered, and questions are raised about the degree of isolation believed to be necessary in the respective communities.

Comprehensive investigations of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) have demonstrated that most features of AAVE reported in the sociolinguistic literature are consistently seen in nearly every African-American speech community in which vernacular speech has been documented. This article highlights quantitative regional differences in the speech produced by African-American children from three U.S. cities in an academic setting. In this analysis, 157 5- to 8-year-old African-American children in New Orleans, LA, Washington, DC, and Cleveland, OH imitated the sentences of a story presented in Standard American English (SAE) by teachers. The 15 sentences included many items that were possible mismatches between the child's vernacular and SAE. Afterwards, the children retold the story in their own words. Children's use of SAE and AAVE features in both tasks was analyzed. Higher rates of AAVE feature use occurred in New Orleans than in Cleveland or Washington, DC.

Studies of accommodation between different dialects have to a greater or lesser extent focused on languages with a spoken standard or a socially prestigious dialect. Irish (Gaelic) has no spoken standard, nor can any of the three major spoken dialects be considered more socially prestigious than the others. This article reports on a pilot study that explores cross-dialect speaker interaction in a task-oriented context focusing primarily on prosodically induced effects on prominence and duration. Although accommodation was not found on a large scale in the synchronous speech task involved, interaction among various pairs of speakers raised interesting questions, both linguistic (e.g., what level of linguistic detail is perceptually relevant) and methodological (e.g., how best to study linguistic interaction between speakers from noncontiguous dialect areas when there is no standard dialect).I would like to thank Fred Cummins whose work on synchronic speech inspired the present study and who assisted in the recording. I would also like to thank Jaye Padgett, Lillis Ó Laoire, Diarmuid Ó Sé, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version.

This study comprises an exploration of the speech of 19 Vermonters, aged 9 to 90. Tokens of /ai/ and /au/ were analyzed acoustically. Results reveal that although centralized /au/ and /ai/ were reported to be disappearing by Kurath (1939a; 1939b), they were still present in the oldest of the speakers but were differentially undergoing change. Raised /au/ was used by older men, but had all but disappeared in younger speakers and all of the women in the study except the oldest speaker (age 90). Instead, speakers used a front low onset. /ai/ presented a more complex pattern: centralization occurred in all speakers, but a back, somewhat rounded onset was restricted primarily to older men. In addition, men and older speakers demonstrated centralized onsets in all environments, whereas younger speakers showed more of a “Canadian Raising” pattern. Implications, when results and settlement history of Vermont were examined, included the suggestion that, in Vermont, the raised variants are the older, base forms and that the “Canadian Raising” pattern of younger speakers and women may be the result of an overall leveling from changing socioeconomic conditions in the area.The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF # 9975078) for this study. Appreciation is also extended to Rebecca Peabody Amblo, Mieka LeClair, Elisha Huskes, and Danra Kaczinski for assistance with data collection and analysis, and three anonymous reviewers for their very valuable suggestions. Finally, thanks are due to the speakers, who generously shared their voices and stories.

Recent work on acquisition in sociolinguistic research suggests that some aspects of the structured variation found in adult speech are evident in children's speech from the very start of language acquisition, and input from the primary caregiver is crucial in this process. In this article we contribute to this research by conducting a cross-sectional analysis of the acquisition of variable forms in a Scottish dialect. Two linguistic variables are targeted in the speech of eleven children (2;10–3;6) and their primary caregivers. Quantitative analysis of over 5000 contexts of use demonstrates that one variable is conditioned by social and linguistic constraints in the speech of the caregiver and these constraints are matched by the children. In contrast, the other variable is influenced by a complex array of linguistic constraints only. We explore the ramifications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms involved in acquisition of variation from the very earliest stages.We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council for award no. RES-000-22-0447. We thank Jack Chambers, Paul Foulkes, and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Hazel Steele for her input to the project in its early stages, and Moira Smith, our invaluable on-site fieldworker. We dedicate this article to the caregivers and children of Buckie who were willing to share their walks, playtimes, bathtimes, and even “meltdowns,” all in the name of linguistic research.

In this article we perform a quantitative analysis of verbs of quotation in a cohesive speech community. The incoming form be like overshadows all other quotative verbs among speakers under 30. This telescoped rate of change provides an opportunity to investigate the actuation problem as well as to probe the underlying mechanism of change in the contrasting variable grammars across generations. Multivariate analyses of factors conditioning be like (content of the quote, grammatical person, sex) reveal stability in the significance of constraints, however the rankings and relative strengths reveal subtle ongoing changes in the system. Interpreting these in sociocultural context, we suggest that be like is an innovation that arose out of a preexisting niche in the grammar. It accelerated during the 1980s due to its preppy associations, later specializing as a marker of narrative present. In accounting for these findings, we are led to contrast generational and communal change and to question what it means to ‘participate’ in linguistic change.The first author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for grant #410-2003-0005 “Linguistic changes in Canada entering the 21st century” and the Research Opportunities Program at the University of Toronto (ROP). Special thanks are owed to the research assistants on these projects who have been instrumental in transcribing, and in some cases extracting, the data: Stephanie Cali, Jonille Clemente, Derek Denis, Louis Filipe, Kevin Galloway, Marion Hau, Matthew King, Megan Lyon, Marion Macdonald, Sonja Molfenter, Jenny Seppänen, Karina von Stedingk, Muhammad Velji, Jessica Wertman, Lina Yang, and Stacy Yeh. An earlier version of this article was presented at NWAVE 33 (Ann Arbor, October 2004), where feedback from our audience was instrumental. We are also grateful to Nathalie Dion and Shana Poplack for their discerning comments on an earlier written version.

This article explores syntactic and regional variation in the choice between declarative (nonrelativizer) that and zero complementizer. Using a corpus of contemporary prose from New Zealand, Australian, American, and British newspapers, the study examines complementizer choice in complements to verbs and adjectives, extraposed complements to verbs, it-subject constructions (It is obvious (that)), and copula constructions (The trouble is (that), It could be (that), What matters is (that), It was only later (that)). The form of the embedded subject (pronoun, short NP (noun phrase), long NP) is also taken into account. It is shown that significant regional differences in zero rates are to some extent syntactic. The New Zealand and Australian data show less inhibition of zero in clauses that are not adjacent to the clause-selecting lexical head than the American and British data.