One striking feature of Vimeu Picard concerns the regular insertion of epenthetic vowels in order to break up consonant clusters and to syllabify word-initial and word-final consonants. This corpus-based study focuses on word-initial epenthesis. It provides quantitative evidence that vowel epenthesis applies categorically in some environments and variably in others. Probabilistic analysis demonstrates that the variable pattern is constrained by a complex interplay of linguistic factors. Following Labov (1972a, 1972b) and Antilla and Cho (1998), I interpret such intricate grammatical conditioning as evidence that this variation is a reflection of a grammatical competence that generates both categorical and variable outputs, and I propose an account within the framework of Optimality Theory. An analysis of individual patterns of epenthesis by members of the community reveals that, even though all speakers share the same basic community grammar, their use of epenthesis differs qualitatively as well as quantitatively. I show that individual grammars can be derived from the community grammar, and that Optimality Theory allows us to formalize the idea that individual grammars constitute more specific versions of community grammars.

Before the advent of Optimality Theory (OT), quantitative variation patterns were usually regarded as the outcome of a selection between categorical grammars (see Bailey, 1973; Bickerton, 1973, among others). In a constraint-based approach, like OT, one is able to account for variation without resorting to a separate grammar for each variant, since the framework allows for variation to be encoded in (and therefore predicted by) a single grammar, through variable ranking (or crucial nonranking) of constraints. Along the lines of Reynolds (1994) and Anttila (1997), this study supports the view that, from the predictions determined by a language-specific set of variably ranked constraints, it is possible to establish quantitatively the probability of application of each variant inherent to the variation process. As a consequence, the analysis of across-word regressive assimilation in Picard attempts to incorporate into the grammar of the language both abstract knowledge and quantitative patterns of language use.

One of the challenges in characterizing non-native varieties of English is accounting for variant uses of ostensibly standard English forms. The present corpus study examines both quantitative and qualitative aspects of pluperfect use in Indian English (IndE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE). IndE is found to differ from native usage by associating had + V-ed with present perfect and preterite meanings. Licensing of pluperfect contexts by time adverbials is also found to be significantly lower in IndE. AmE shows the lowest overall use of the pluperfect and the highest use of disambiguating adverbials. Thus, AmE and IndE show distinct patterns of divergence from BrE. Variation within IndE exhibits a tendency for greater non-nativeness in regional (vs. national) press and in bureaucratic (vs. press) registers, suggesting a multidimensional distribution of IndE nonstandardness in India. These nonstandard uses are shown to convey new pragmatic meanings deriving from ambiguity in the native system and reinforcement from substrate languages. Finally, these changes are evaluated in relation to the broader tense–modality–aspect system of IndE as well as those of other non-native Englishes which exhibit similar characteristics.

The organizing concept behind dialect variation is still seen predominantly as the areas within which similar varieties are spoken. The opposing view—that dialects are organized in a continuum without sharp boundaries—is likewise popular. This article introduces a new element into the discussion, which is the opportunity to view dialectal differences in the aggregate. We employ a dialectometric technique that provides an additive measure of pronunciation difference: the (aggregate) pronunciation distance. This allows us to determine how much of the linguistic variation is accounted for by geography. In our sample of 27 Dutch towns and villages, the variation ranges between 65% and 81%, which lends credence to the continuum view. The borders of well-established dialect areas nonetheless show large deviations from the expected aggregate pronunciation distance. We pay particular attention to a puzzle concerning the subjective perception of continua introduced by Chambers and Trudgill (1998): a traveller walking in a straight line from village to village notices successive small changes, but seldom, if ever, observes large differences. This sounds like a justification of the continuum view, but there is an added twist. Might the traveller be misled by the perspective of most recent memory? We use the Chambers–Trudgill puzzle to organize our argument at several points.