This article argues against Manner–Place–Time and other proposed grammatical principles of ordering for prepositional phrases (PPs) in postverbal position in English. Instead, greater empirical adequacy can be achieved by a theory of processing efficiency that defines a preference for minimal domains in the recognition of syntactic phrase structure and in the processing of lexical–semantic dependencies between verbs and prepositions. Some new entailment tests are proposed on the basis of which these dependencies can be defined. The data come from 500 pages of written English. For 300 pages, an additional analysis is given in terms of structural ambiguity avoidance and pragmatic information status. Syntactic complexity is the biggest single predictor of PP sequences, whereas lexical–semantic factors predominate when syntactic preferences are weak. Manner–Place–Time is not the correct semantic generalization, however. Ambiguity avoidance had no clear impact on these orderings. Pragmatic effects were not visible when syntactic weight made no predictions and were correlated with weight when it did but were less strongly supported.

This article describes a morphosyntactic feature of the Xining dialect that is unique among all Chinese dialects: that is, the use of a postposition to express ablative nominal relationships. The postposition [t[curly-tail lowercase c]ia] is invariably pronounced in the neutral tone and has no cognates in either earlier varieties of Chinese or among present Chinese dialects. The morpheme's origin is shown to have come from a neighboring non-Sinitic language. Moreover, the variations within the syntactic expression of the ablative are correlated with various sociolinguistic groups. These correlations suggest an ongoing change in the dialect's morphosyntactic system of a kind rarely observed among Chinese dialects. Finally, the process of linguistic change is correlated with demographic changes within the Xining region that show Xining is a place where language contact and rapid linguistic change are likely to be found.

When 17th century personal correspondence was studied, it was observed that women used the evidential expression I THINK more often than men. A closer analysis showed that women also used other 1st person evidential verbs as well as the 1st and 2nd person pronouns more frequently than men. This male/female difference was maintained even in different registers, although both sexes have higher frequencies of I THINK in more intimate circumstances, such as when the informants are writing to their friends or close family members. The male/female differences in frequencies are explained as a difference in the style of communication. Women's style is more “involved” and interactive: personal point of view is frequently expressed, and both the writer and the addressee are overtly included in the communication situation. Interestingly, similar differences have also been found in Present-Day English.

In this article we address Labov's claim that sound changes that are not stigmatized are led especially by young women who are the “movers and shakers” in the community, people with energy and enterprise. Such young women, at the same time, are conservative with respect to sound changes or stable linguistic variables that are stigmatized. We investigated this claim by comparing the pronunciation of the non-stigmatized front vowels /I/, /ε/, and /æ/ with that of the stigmatized diphthongs /ai/ and /a[inverted omega]/ in New Zealand English. When we considered the pronunciation of each variable, the young women did not unequivocally support Labov's claim. However, when we examined the behavior of individual speakers across the two sets of variables, Labov's claim was supported. This result leads us to emphasize the importance of considering the behavior of individual speakers in a more holistic way rather than focusing only on the averaged data for single variables.

This article investigates the Southern Vowel Shift—a possibly interrelated series of rotations in vowel space currently affecting the dialects of southern speakers—in terms of examining its classification as a chain-shift process and, more generally, providing a descriptive account of the phonetic character of the changes in each individual vowel class. Based on the work of Labov (1991, 1994) and Feagin (1986), it has been suggested that the Southern Shift involves changes in both the front vowels and the back vowels, with the tense and lax front vowel nuclei essentially switching places and the back vowels moving forward. The relationship of these changes in the front vowels and those in the back vowels has not been firmly established, but they appear to be driven by different social and linguistic forces. What is happening to the low front, the mid, and the low back vowel classes in the Southern Shift has only been superficially explored. A detailed instrumental analysis of the vowel systems of 25 native Memphians of selected ages, socioeconomic classes, and genders is presented, revealing the movement of vowel classes which seem to be playing an important role in the instigation or perpetuation of the Southern Shift. This analysis points out discrepancies about how previously cited vocalic changes are embedded in mid-southern speech and provides a picture of how these changes are affecting other changes in the system. The results suggest that, while many of the changes cited in the literature are indeed present in the sample, the interrelatedness of these changes and their prognosis to move to completion are not so clear.

A comparison of Old Spanish and present-day Spanish data provides evidence that reductive change in grammaticizing forms may be manifested not only as a diachronic process but also as a synchronic difference between formal and informal registers. Clitic climbing frequencies in Spanish auxiliary + gerund sequences have increased diachronically as part of a series of reductive changes and in tandem with construction frequency increases. In calculating construction frequency, both the token frequency of auxiliary + gerund sequences and their frequency relative to lone-standing gerunds turn out to be important. Differences between present-day conversational and written data show that clitic position is stylistically stratified. Register differences in clitic climbing are found to be linked to construction frequency as well, suggesting that frequency effects operate on a more general synchronic level as well as on the level of particular texts. These text-level frequency effects may be related to parallel structure “birds of a feather” effects.

The role of gender in language change, as discussed in Eckert (1989a) and Labov (1990), forms the context for an exploration of the role of gender in the development of Cajun English. Neither Principle I, Ia, or II predicts the role of gender in Cajun English, which leads us to question the generalizability of the principles to the specific sociolinguistic setting of this study—a closed cultural enclave. The study of four sociolinguistic variables and three generations of speakers reveals two patterns of language change: a curvilinear or v-shaped age pattern and a linear age pattern. These patterns relate in a complex way to changes from above and below the level of consciousness. We support Eckert's call for a finer specification of the social categories but suggest alternatives to the ethnographic method. Using a variety of sources of information on the social life and sociohistory of three generations, we find an intimate association between the sociohistory of this Cajun community and the linguistic behavior of each generation.

Traditional dialect boundaries in the United States have received renewed attention (Labov, 1991, 1994). Labov outlined three dialects of English (the Northern Cities Chain Shift, the Southern Chain Shift, and the Third Dialect), the boundaries of which are defined by chain shifts in the vowel system and roughly correspond to traditional dialectal boundaries defined through the bundling of lexical items (Kurath, 1949) and phonological isoglosses (Kurath & McDavid, 1961). Other research has suggested that the Third Dialect may be the most heterogeneous of these dialects, with speakers in different areas displaying widely disparate behaviors (see, e.g., Clarke, Elms, & Youssef, 1995; Di Paolo, 1988; Di Paolo & Faber, 1990; Labov, 1996; Moonwomon, 1987). The present article contributes towards a richer picture of the Third Dialect by offering the first systematic variationist analysis of speech in Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on three phonological processes: vocalization of /l/, laxing of /i/ before /l/, and laxing of /u/ before /l/. I argue that Veatch's (1991) model of English syllable structure provides a unified account of these seemingly unrelated phonological changes in Pittsburgh; the implications of this argument for further research on Pittsburgh speech are also noted.

This article deals with divergence on the lexical, phonological, and morphological levels in three dialects that were the same until the mid-20th century (Maaseiks in Belgium, Susters in the Netherlands, and Waldfeuchts in Germany) and that have changed under the influence of three different standard languages (Belgian Dutch, Netherlandic Dutch, and Standard German). The investigation is carried out among girls aged 14 to 16 years and women aged 35 to 50 years. Due to the unique laboratory-like situation, it was possible to gain a detailed understanding of the role of the structure of the dialect and the dialect–standard language situation in the process of dialect change under the influence of a standard language. The data indicate that the linguistic route of the change is largely the same for all dialects. This means that the receiving dialect plays an important part in the linguistic embedding of a change. However, the rationale of the linguistic road is still far from clear. The divergence of the similar dialects occurred relatively recently. Whereas the women of the three places use the old dialect forms almost exclusively, the girls use forms of the standard languages or “mixed” forms, especially in Waldfeucht. The dialect of Waldfeucht is clearly affected much more strongly by Standard German than are the dialect of Maaseik by Belgian Dutch and the dialect of Susteren by Netherlandic Dutch. This can be explained by a number of factors: the position of the dialect at school, comprehensibility of the dialect, attitude towards the dialect, and the use of the dialect.

Focusing on the process of grammaticization, whereby items with lexical meaning evolve into grammatical markers, this article examines the future temporal reference sectors of three diaspora varieties of African American English which have evolved in linguistic isolates and compares them with those of British-origin rural and mainstream varieties of English. With one exception, the same constraint hierarchies condition the selection of going to across the board, indicating that their future temporal reference systems are descended from a common source. All other distinctions among the varieties result from their differential positioning on the cline of ongoing grammaticization of going to as a future marker. Operationalization of constraints representing different stages of the development of going to and comparison of their probability values across communities confirm that the enclave and the rural varieties retain conservative traits, visible here in the form of variable conditioning, in contrast to mainstream English, which is innovating. We suggest that the major determinant of variability in the expression of the future is the fact that the speech of isolated speakers, whether of African or British origin, instantiates constraints that were operative at an earlier stage of the English language and that are now receding from mainstream varieties.

The present study examines the pattern of the variation of the auxiliary avoir and être in the passé composé tense in Vermont French in 22 adult speakers who migrated from Québec or are first-generation Franco-Americans. The purpose of the study is to determine if the process of replacement of être by avoir in progress in Canadian French is also taking place in Vermont and which linguistic and social constraints influence this linguistic change. Results of the study reveal that the process of replacement of être by avoir is also taking place in Vermont, and that it is significantly favored by the presence of a main verb that has a transitive homonym and by the presence of a low-frequency main verb. The fact that social factors do not significantly influence this replacement indicates a later stage of linguistic change, supporting patterns found in the literature of language death.

Brazilian Portuguese possesses two forms used as 1st person plural pronouns: nós and a gente, both meaning ‘we’. The form nós has always been pronominal, whereas a gente is derived diachronically from the noun phrase a gente ‘the people’. In accord with this historical evolution, the standard language prefers the use of the 1st plural verb desinence -mos with nós, as in nós falamos ‘we speak’ or ‘we spoke’. The 3rd person desinence 0 is reserved for a gente, giving a gente fala ‘we speak’ as the preferred form. In popular speech both nós fala and a gente falamos are used frequently. We examine the use of these variable forms across four generations in Rio de Janeiro. In the older generations, phonic salience is the principal controlling factor for both nós and a gente. Since preterit desinences are stressed more frequently than present desinences, this induces a biased surface distribution, with -mos occurring more frequently with past tense reference. Nonetheless, for older speakers tense does not play a statistically significant role. In younger speakers, tense becomes statistically significant as a determining factor in the use of the desinences, with preterit favoring -mos for both subject forms. So far, there has been no change in the grammar itself, but the locus of determination of the use of -mos seems to have shifted from saliency to tense across the generations. One can speculate that some time in the future -mos may become a preterit marker.

This article aims to contribute (1) new data on verbal -s by systematically examining its behavior in Devon English (DE), a variety spoken in southwest England, and (2) a broader historical and cross-dialectal perspective for understanding the origin and function of verbal -s in nonstandard varieties of English in North America. We focus on the linguistic contexts of its occurrence from the diachronic and synchronic literature. The results show that verbal -s is conditioned by phonological, syntactic, semantic, and lexical factors. These include the few variable constraints on verbal -s attested throughout the evolution of verbal -s in the history of the English language. Moreover, DE exhibits patterns of verbal -s variability that have previously been associated with African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The detailed nature of these linguistic correspondences—not only in frequency of the features examined, but most importantly in the details of an entire set of internal linguistic factors conditioning them—reveal that verbal -s is a linguistic feature of AAVE that originated in British dialects.

This article focuses on the directionality observed in the processes of change and acquisition of the prepositions that replaced Latin cases in the speech of Rio de Janeiro and in the Contact Portuguese spoken by Brazilian Indians in the region of Xingu. In Brazilian Portuguese, it is possible to delete the indirect case preposition of some verbs. The system loses and maintains prepositional nexus in a cyclic process motivated by the semantic transparency and the iconicity of the preposition, the adjacency between verb and complement, and the degree of transitivity of the verb. The variable use in Contact Portuguese shows the same effects observed in the Rio de Janeiro variety, in a process that includes a gradual filling up of categorical and variable contexts. We argue that the forces that guide acquisition of the Portuguese prepositional subsystem in the Xingu variety act in the same way as those that constrain variation in urban language.