This study investigates the contraction of negatives in a carefully chosen corpus of discourse and writing, to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Evidence is presented that negative contraction is conditioned by interactional and other register variables. The point is made that the pragmatic as well as morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished from each other. Although a Cognitive Prominence Principle predicts noncontraction when the negative conveys semantically focal information, a Social Agreement Principle predicts contraction. This is because it would be face-threatening (and, therefore, in conversation analysis terms “dispreferred”) to focus on disagreement, which is most often the semantic information conveyed by negatives. This hypothesis is examined using corpora which differ along several dimensions. The most important of these (for this study) appear to be the interactional versus informational register dimensions (Finegan, 1994). Data from instructional (workshop presentations), confrontational (political debates), and casual conversational material are contrasted with comparable reading style materials. The following general results are predicted. The Cognitive Prominence Principle will take over in informational contexts when disagreement is acceptable or neutralized. The Social Agreement Principle will take over in more interactional contexts where disagreement is not acceptable. The results are of interest to the student of focus, the sociolinguist concerned with dialect, register, and style variation, and even the speech technician.

We examine a pattern of end-of-word deletion in Faetar, a Francoprovençal dialect spoken in southern Italy, considering synchronic variants like [brókələ] ˜ [brókəl] ˜ [brókə] ˜ [brok] ‘fork’. We use the word “deletion” as a synchronic description of the facts; speakers do not always phonetically produce everything in the input form, assuming that the input form is the longest form ever produced. Optimality Theory accounts for this type of variation by positing different rankings of the constraint hierarchy, each of which produces a different optimal output. The predication of alternate constraint rankings within a single dialect, however, poses problems for Optimality Theory as it has been formulated, necessitating numerous grammars for each speaker. We propose floating constraints (Reynolds, 1994), whereby some particular constraint within a single grammar may be represented as falling anywhere within a designated range in the ranking hierarchy. In a previous study (Reynolds & Nagy, 1994) we showed that this model accounts for the distribution of types of output forms produced. Here, we analyze a corpus of 624 tokens from 40 speakers and show that the pattern of distribution of tokens is accounted for as well: the number of rankings that produce each output form is closely correlated to the number of output forms that occur in the data set.

Ever since Labov, Cohen, Robbins, and Lewis's (1968) pioneering study, it has been commonplace to set aside certain tokens in analyzing variability in the English copula as “don't count” (DC) forms. These cases are most often occurrences of the copula that exhibit categorical behavior (as with the full copula in clause-final position), as well as those that are ambiguous or indeterminate. In this article, I propose a set of copula forms that should be set aside from variable analysis as instances of DC forms to allow for systematic comparisons among studies. I review the major alternative descriptions of DC copula cases in the literature and analyze the behavior of the traditional DC categories. New data are presented to support the exclusion of particular DC cases from analyses of copula variability. Among the conclusions are that [was], [thas], and [is] should be excluded from quantitative analyses of variation in the copula because of their invariant status, and that a number of tokens commonly included (e.g., questions) should be excluded on various grounds.

Long, complex phrases tend to come at the ends of clauses; this is called “endweight.” A variety of characterizations of weight have been proposed in the literature, but none has been sufficient to cover the full range of attested cases of end-weight. Corpus data on heavy NP shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight that are highly correlated with constituent ordering. Proposed explanations for endweight have been based on parsing considerations, largely ignoring the speaker; but what facilitates parsing does not always help in production. Examination of phenomena where these interests do not coincide indicates that the demands of sentence planning provide a better explanation for end-weight than parsing. Finally, accounts of end-weight cannot be purely structure-based, but must take lexical factors into consideration.

This article provides evidence from a small city in the northern United States for Canadian raising, the raising of /au/ and /ai/ to [AU] and [Ai]. As hypothesized, /ai/-raising is much more frequent and regular, but /au/-raising also occurs. Speech style is statistically significant only for /ai/-raising. The raising of /ai/ is not significant for gender or age, but /au/-raising seems to be led by young women. This evidence suggests that, while /ai/-raising has been fully entrenched in this phonological system for some time, /au/-raising is a new and separate change in progress. The /au/-diphthong is also often fronted when raised, a finding similar to several Canadian studies (Chambers, 1981a; Hung, Davison, & Chambers, 1993). This suggests that the Canadian varieties studied may not, as previously suggested (Chambers, 1981b), be conforming to the U.S. norm, but instead that the two varieties are converging.

In this article I examine the ongoing loss of palatalization assimilation in Modern Standard Russian within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) (McCarthy & Prince, 1993a; Prince & Smolensky, 1993) and show that this theory offers new, meaningful explanations for the role of markedness and naturalness in the mechanism of a sound change. I also argue that OT provides new possibilities for relating quantitative patterns to the formal principles of grammatical organization. In particular, in OT, suggested cross-linguistically invariant relations between phonological factors predict a general pattern of influence that these factors have on the quantitative outcome of a change. I suggest that a change operates as a gradual weakening or strengthening of whole subhierarchies of constraints with universally fixed rankings (constraint families, which implement markedness scales in OT). In an examination of variable data, I argue that the major differences in quantitative patterns mirror the fixed constraint ranking within such constraint families and constraint violation/nonviolation in OT grammar. I also discuss the problem of modeling variable data within OT, which, like other formal phonological theories, permits no output variation. I examine a grammar competition model explored in OT literature and argue instead for constraint competition with constraint weight in production.