This study reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the linguistic factors conditioning several variables within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. Previous studies have focused only on the opposition between Ø and -s in the present tense, ignoring other morphosyntactic constructions. Expanding the variable context to present temporal reference, I demonstrate that different constructions convey different aspects: the previously noted association between -s and habitual aspect is confirmed, but Ø is also associated with an aspectual distinction—that of duration. The progressive is used most often with nonstative verbs to denote durative aspect, whereas its much rarer use with statives appears to reflect an older stage in its “grammaticization.” Combining variationist analysis with the comparative method, this reconstruction provides linguistically meaningful explanations of the observed variability and places it within the context of the development of the English language.

It is usual to study a number of linguistic variables in a single speech community. The present study, however, focuses on a single phonological variable in a number of speech communities—the vocalization of /l/ in nine Australian and New Zealand cities—in order to (1) strengthen and extend the quick and anonymous field method by designing an instrument to include all relevant phonological environments; (2) demonstrate the strategic potential of moving from a unilocality to a multilocality sociolinguistics; (3) conceptualize a variationist isogloss that extends rather than displaces the core methodology of sociolinguistics; and (4) propose a conception of geography that offers mechanisms (space and place effects) to help distinguish language change processes that are universal from those that are not. Place and space represent a system of contrasts within geography. Place effects refer to the ensemble of sociolinguistic conditions within a speech locality, whereas space effects refer to the relationship between speech localities. Place effects provide a potential explanation for why spatial models fail to account adequately for the facts: that is, why some places resist the spread of innovation while other places welcome innovation.

In this article we identify a variable context in the use of two Galician verb forms (cantei and cantara) and three Spanish verb forms used in Galicia (canté, cantara, and había cantado) with identical modal, temporal, and aspectual values: the simple past indicative. We show that the variation in question is constrained by linguistic factors, specifically pragmatic ones, and that, although the forms cantei and canté are widely preferred, contexts with low discourse focalization favor cantara and había cantado. Finally, we test this hypothesis with data from two language corpora (Galician and Galician Spanish), which are quantified and interpreted with the program VARBRUL 2S.

Linguistic parallelism (i.e., the tendency of similar forms to occur together within a stretch of discourse) has been shown to be very strong in many linguistic phenomena and in a vast number of languages. Examining the role of phrase-level parallelism on noun phrase number agreement, this article demonstrates that Puerto Rican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese exhibit more similarities than differences with regard to this constraint. A detailed analysis of Brazilian Portuguese data is presented, and the results are compared with those found by Poplack (1980a) for Puerto Rican Spanish. Guy's (1981a) and Labov's (1994) hypothesis about missing zeroes in Brazilian Portuguese is also discussed. In conclusion, it is claimed that the phrase-level parallelism effect on noun phrase number agreement is embedded in a universal principle of linguistic use: parallel processing.