The Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) is a major North American vowel chain shift spreading across many disparate dialect regions. In this field-based study, we examine the speech of fifty-nine White Western Massachusetts speakers, aged 18–89. Using diagnostics in Becker (2019) and Boberg (2019b), we find the LBMS emerging at the expense of the Northern Cities Shift (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972) and traditional New England features (Boberg, 2001; Kurath, 1939; Nagy & Roberts, 2004). In Becker's LBMS model (2019:9), the low-back merger (lot-thought) triggers front-vowel shifts. Our results suggest that local social meaning can sometimes override this chronology such that the front-vowel shifts occur before the low-back merger, even as the overall configuration comes to match Becker's predictions. Sociosymbolic meaning associated with the older New England system has led to a different temporal ordering of LBMS components, thus providing new theoretical and empirical insights into the mechanisms by which supralocal patterns are adopted.

This article examines Finnish lects spoken in Helsinki from the 1970s to the 2010s with a probabilistic model called Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The model searches for underlying components based on the linguistic features used in the interviews. Several coherent lects were discovered as components in the data, which counters the results of previous studies that report only weak covariation between features that are assumed to be present in the same lect. The speakers, however, are not categorical in their linguistic behavior and tend to use more than one lect in their speech. This implies that the lects should not be considered in parallel with seemingly uniform linguistic systems such as languages, but as partial systems that constitute a network.

This article focuses on change in the “short-a system” of New York City English (NYCE). Recent results suggest that a complex set of tensing rules traditionally described for NYCE are being replaced by several simpler systems. This article reports on a study of this change using a recently developed large audio-aligned parsed speech corpus (CoNYCE). This change is similar to the simplification reported for Philadelphia by Labov et al. (2016). Unlike in the Philadelphia case, however, our results do not show evidence of a single abstract process of change. Our findings, rather, suggest at least two separate changes in the community—one affecting short-a in prenasal contexts and a second affecting pre-oral obstruent contexts. In addition, the results suggest an additional independent process of lowering and retraction affecting short-a sounds in contexts not targeted by the process of phonological reorganization, that is, “trap-backing.”

This paper examines sociolinguistic properties of lifespan changes in language use from a non-Western perspective. Based on real-time studies in a change from above context (standardization) and panel surveys of prosody, the paper demonstrates that the stability of individuals’ language use over time varies along the following interwoven factors: (1) levels of grammar; (2) lexical properties; (3) progressive stages of a community in transition; and (4) locally constructed social identities. While segmental phonology and morphosyntax remain intact, lexical accents and vocabulary items tend to change in close linkage to sociolinguistic properties of individual words. Such changes are also motivated by the coexistence of an incoming standard, revitalized traditional dialect, and newly emerging “diaglossic” in-between variants in a community that is shifting to bidialectalism. Lifespan changes could also be community-specific, varying even within a single dialect region between two communities across which the stages of standardization and members’ locally constructed social identities differ.

This study reports the results of a crosslinguistic matched guise test examining /s/ and pitch variation in judgments of sexual orientation and nonnormative masculinity among English, French, and German listeners. Listeners responded to /s/ and pitch manipulations in native and other language stimuli (English, French, German, and Estonian). All listener groups rate higher pitch guises as more gay- and effeminate-sounding than lower pitch guises. However, only English listeners hear [s+] guises as more gay- and effeminate-sounding than [s] or [s−] guises for all stimuli languages. French and German listeners do not hear [s+] guises as more gay- or effeminate-sounding in any stimulus language, despite this feature's presence in native speech production. English listener results show evidence of indexical transfer, when indexical knowledge is applied to the perception of unknown languages. French and German listener results show how the enregistered status of /s/ variation affects perception, despite crosslinguistic similarities in production.

The evaluation of normalization methods sometimes focuses on the maximization of vowel-space similarity. This focus can lead to the adoption of methods that erase legitimate phonetic variation from our data, that is, overnormalization. First, a production corpus is presented that highlights three types of variation in formant patterns: uniform scaling, nonuniform scaling, and centralization. Then the results of two perceptual experiments are presented, both suggesting that listeners tend to ignore variation according to uniform scaling, while associating nonuniform scaling and centralization with phonetic differences. Overall, results suggest that normalization methods that remove variation not according to uniform scaling can remove legitimate phonetic variation from vowel formant data. As a result, although these methods can provide more similar vowel spaces, they do so by erasing phonetic variation from vowel data that may be socially and linguistically meaningful, including a potential male-female difference in the low vowels in our corpus.

Recent work has demonstrated an ongoing change across varieties of English in which /s/ retracts before consonants, particularly before /tɹ/ clusters (e.g., Lawrence, 2000; Shapiro, 1995; Stuart-Smith et al., 2019). Much of this work has focused on the social and linguistic distributions of /stɹ/ within single communities, without an examination of the broader sibilant space (e.g., /s/ and /ʃ/). Meanwhile, analyses across multiple corpora have shown that /s/ and /ʃ/ also show within-community variability, beyond /stɹ/ contexts (Stuart-Smith et al., 2019, 2020). Intersecting these approaches, this paper explores sibilant variation and change across /stɹ/, /s/, and /ʃ/ using a corpus of Washington D.C. African American Language (AAL). Results indicate that /stɹ/-retraction is a stable variant in this variety of AAL and /s/ and /ʃ/ show evidence of socially stratified variation and change. Overall, this paper demonstrates the need to examine the sibilant space more holistically when examining changes in /stɹ/.

It is widely debated whether creole languages form a typological class; however, crosslinguistic generalizations from functional typology are seldom tested in creoles. Typological studies report a strong crosslinguistic tendency for asymmetries in habitual grammatical expressions across the present and past temporal reference domains (Bybee, 1994:245–8; Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994:151–60). This study analyzes two linguistic variants, preverbal asé and zero, which compete for habitual marking in Palenquero Creole (Colombia). I ask here: To what degree does the linguistic patterning of these forms conform to the crosslinguistic tendency? Results show that, despite Palenquero having widely cited creole features (e.g., preverbal markers and bare verb stems), the asymmetrical expression, distribution, and relative ordering of forms in the variable contexts closely align with crosslinguistic predictions for habituals, thus giving convincing evidence of typological markedness and not a Creole Prototype.

In this paper, we return to the well-studied yet still puzzling phenomenon of complementizer omission in a large spoken corpus of Quebec French, with the help of modern computational methods for annotation and mixed effects logistic regression models. Supporting previous work, our study reveals that complementizer que omission is conditioned by social factors and grammatical factors; however, we also find that que omission is conditioned by cognitive factors such as information density. Our paper thus illustrates an important way in which older variationist corpora can continue to be valuable resources for studying fine-grained patterns of variation, particularly in their cognitive aspects.

This paper probes the well-documented morphological effect on coronal stop deletion (CSD, also called /t,d/-deletion), by which there is more deletion in monomorphemes like mist than in regular past tense forms like missed. We observe that there are, in principle, additional morphological distinctions that could be made within each category: for instance, the “regular past” category contains perfect and passive participles; the “monomorpheme” category typically contains compounds and suffixed forms. We demonstrate that several of these newly introduced distinctions actually have significant effects on CSD rates in a corpus of Philadelphia English. And we argue that these new distinctions are worth attending to because they have consequences for two existing accounts of the basic morphological effect. In each case, we show that the existing accounts do not straightforwardly capture the additional significant distinctions we identify, calling the explanatory power of those accounts into question.

This study describes prevelar merger, the raising of low-front /æ, ɛ/ and lowering of mid-front /e/ before the voiced velar /ɡ/, in Seattle, Washington. In the most advanced part of this change in progress, all twenty speakers (age 18–62, half men, half women, all white) produced /ɛɡ/ and /eɡ/ (beg, vague) as upgliding diphthongs merged in F1 and F2 directly between their nonprevelar counterparts (dress, face). /æɡ/ (bag) was also diphthongal, but its height varied between speakers, with middle-aged men showing near-complete three-way merger with beg-vague and younger speakers raising less, suggesting reversal or avoidance of this component. Previous work lacked information about vague and thus described bag- and beg-raising as failing to reach the height of nonprevelar face. This study revealed that vague is lowered, creating a merger target for both raised beg and bag within a separate diphthongal prevelar subsystem.

Increasingly globalized communication networks in the modern world may influence traditional patterns of linguistic change: in contrast to an orderly sequential pathway of change, more recently a number of “mega trends” have been identified, which accelerate simultaneously in time and space. The rise of obviously within the cohort of adverbs of evidentiality—naturally, evidently, clearly, and of course—may be one such trend. To examine this possibility, we conduct a large-scale sociolinguistic analysis of c12,000 adverbs of evidentiality across over thirty communities in the UK and Canada. The results reveal parallel development across time and space: obviously advances rapidly among individuals born in the 1960s in both countries. The rise of obviously illustrates key attributes that are beginning to emerge from other rapidly innovating features: “off the shelf” changes that (1) are easily borrowed, (2) receptive to global trends, but (3) exhibit parallel patterns as the change progresses.

The existence of a shared constraint hierarchy is one of the criteria that defines and delimits speech communities. In particular, women and men are thought to differ only in their rates of variable usage, not in the constraints governing their variation; that is, women and men are typically considered to belong to the same speech community. We find that in early twentieth century Southland, New Zealand, women and men had different constraint hierarchies for rhoticity, with a community grammar of rhoticity only developing later. These results may be a product of a particular set of sociohistorical facts thatare not peculiar to Southland. We suggest that further research in other geographical locations may indeed reveal that men and women have different constraint hierarchies for other variables. Speech communities may thus be delimited along social lines in ways that have not been previously considered.

This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained in terms of syntactic calquing from the speakers’ left-branching L1s. However, the order GEN+N does not occur with the same frequency in all types of genitive noun phrases but is affected by several lexicosemantic and formal features of both the head and the genitive modifier. Therefore, we are not dealing with simple pattern borrowing. Rather, L1 influence strengthens certain universal tendencies that are not motivated by contact. The comparison with monolinguals’ Russian, in which prepositive genitives sporadically occur too, supports this hypothesis.

The English subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Since then, the mandative variant was reported to have revived, while the adverbial subjunctive continued to diminish. American English is heavily implicated in these developments; it is thought to be leading the revival of the former but lagging in the decline of the latter. Observing that most references to these changes are based on the written language, we examine the diachronic trajectory of the subjunctive in North American English speech. Adopting a variationist perspective, we carried out systematic quantitative analyses of subjunctive use under hundreds of triggers. Results show that, despite the differences in their diachronic trajectories, today both types are not only extremely rare but heavily lexically constrained. We implicate violations of the Principle of Accountability in the disparities between the findings reported here and the consensus in the literature with respect to subjunctive use in North American English.