The different population ecologies of slavery-era America necessitate an investigation into the issue of regional variation in Early African American English (AAE). This article addresses this issue through the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence, a corpus of letters written by semiliterate African American settlers in Liberia between 1834 and 1866. We investigate nonstandard verbal -s and its conditioning by linguistic and social factors, including each writer's regional origin in the United States. Results show that, despite differences in overall rates across regions, the linguistic conditioning largely remains constant. These results suggest that subtle regional distinctions in Early AAE existed when specific settlement and population ecologies encouraged them, but that the shared history and circumstances of language contact and development led to an overall identity of forms and conditioning factors across regional varieties.The data on which this study is based are taken from the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence (OREAAC; Van Herk & Poplack, 2003), housed in the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. Financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author. Earlier versions of the analyses reported here were presented at meetings of the American Dialect Society (Chicago, January 2000) and the Canadian Linguistics Association (University of Toronto, June 2002). We thank the audiences at these presentations for their comments and suggestions, and we thank Shana Poplack and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are our own responsibility.

Based on an impressionistic study of 16 young Canadians, mostly from Ontario, Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995) reported that the short front vowels of Canadian English are involved in a chain shift, the “Canadian Shift,” triggered by the merger of in low-back position, whereby is retracted to low-central position, and are lowered toward the low-front space vacated by . This article extends the study of the Canadian Shift to the English-speaking community of Montreal, Quebec, using acoustic rather than impressionistic analysis and a larger and more diverse sample. The new data motivate a revised view of the Shift, at least as it operates in Montreal, in which the three front vowels are retracted in a set of parallel shifts, rather than rotating in a chain shift.An earlier version of this paper was presented at NWAVE 32 (University of Pennsylvania, October 10, 2003). Thanks are due to members of the audience at that presentation, as well as to anonymous reviewers of the present version of the article, for helpful comments. In the preparation of the present version, the author is especially indebted to Anicka Fast and Erika Lawrance for research assistance and to Myrtis Fossey for assistance with statistical analysis. This research received financial support from three sources: the Research Grants Office of McGill University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (Grant #2003-NC-81927).

This article contributes to a growing body of theory that posits language-external, social factors as a primary motor in diachronic change. Politeness theory and the use of variationist approaches enable us to posit, and test, the hypothesis of a type of pragmaticalization, which I call Politeness-Induced Semantic Change (PISC). Historical data on quand même are presented that give tentative credence to such a model. Moeschler and de Spengler's (1981) and Waltereit's (2001) speech-act theoretic analyses of quand même are reinterpreted within the framework of politeness theory and sociopragmatics. The ensuing corpus investigation of the grammaticalization and pragmatico-semantic evolution of quand même from 1500–2000 highlights the fact that not only the innovation but also the propagation of a new form–function configuration depend on social factors; politeness theory may have explanatory power in capturing the ever-changing social patterning of linguistic features and the conditions that favor the spread of innovation.I wish to acknowledge the very helpful and detailed comments of Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and anonymous reviewers from Language Variation and Change on a draft version of this article. Remaining inadequacies are, of course, entirely my own. I also recognize a debt of gratitude to the Research Committee of the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences of the University of the West of England, Bristol, who granted me the research leave required to complete the article.

The focus of this article is zero copula use in Sri Lankan English speech. Zero copula use has been at the heart of variationist studies, but has received little attention in New English studies because of its limited use in these varieties. In this article I look at zero copula in Sri Lankan English to determine whether the patterns of use parallel those of AAVE, Caribbean Creoles, or other copula studies on varieties of English including New Englishes. The theoretical issue raised in this article is whether zero copula use in Sri Lankan English can be seen as both a creole-like feature and an optional syntactic feature of those who use English a lot, but for whom it is not a native language, or as a substratal influence in language shift. The variable findings for present tense BE demonstrate that speakers of Sri Lankan English make only limited use of BE absence. BE absence appears to be optional in certain environments where Standard English would require the are copula/auxiliary. Zero copula use in Sri Lankan English speech is especially interesting because Sri Lankan English emerged from an educational background and not from a creole setting. However, the linguistic data for zero copula use in Sri Lankan English suggests that the type of complement and the preceding phonological environment play a significant role on zero copula use, which is comparable to that of other varieties of English, focusing on the study of BE absence.A shorter version of this article was presented under a different title at the Triangle Colloquium on Literature and Linguistics held at the University of Sheffield, UK on September 30, 2000. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the excellent comments and insights provided by the two journal reviewers on earlier drafts of this article. Any shortcomings that exist are my own. I would like to dedicate this work to Dr. Anthea Fraser Gupta (University of Leeds) and Prof. Siromi Fernando (University of Colombo).

A combination of observational and experimental data from recent research into the intonation of New Zealand English highlights generational differences in rising intonation patterns. As well as a general increase in the incidence of rising intonation in statement utterances, the data reveal a shift from late rises in mid-age speakers to earlier rise onsets in younger speakers. These differences are discussed in the context of the intonational phonology of New Zealand English and in terms of the functional need for a distinction between question and statement rises.The author would like to thank participants at the 2003 UK Language Variation and Change conference for comments on an oral presentation of the data discussed in this article, and the Royal Society of New Zealand for financial support under Marsden grant VUW604. Special thanks go to Bob Ladd for insightful observations on an earlier version of this article.