Auditory phonetic transcription is a stock-in-trade of sociolinguists; it is transcriptions, not actual speech, that form the raw data of much of sociolinguistics. Given its importance, it is surprising that phonetic transcription has rarely been examined by sociolinguists from the point of view of its validity and its reliability — despite the existence of a certain amount of discussion in the phonetic literature. Rather, it has been treated as a pretheoretical notion. In this article, we report an experiment that compares the auditory transcriptions of trained phoneticians with physiological data on the same utterances, using the technique of electropalatography. The experiment shows that (a) there are intervening factors of a psycho-acoustic nature that impinge on a phonetician's transcription, thus affecting validity; and (b) there is considerable inconsistency, both between phoneticians and between a single phonetician's different attempts at transcribing the same token. Both of these latter factors show that a high degree of reliability cannot be assumed.

Based on evidence in Zen dialogues, Bianwen and Chuanqi texts in the Tang Dynasty (a.d. 618–907), and other sources from earlier and later periods, this article, after dismissing the common misconception that during Tang ba () was frequently used in the disposal and serial-verb constructions, proposes that the grammaticalization of the jiang () serial-verb construction was encouraged by yi (), but jiang's disposal characteristic was modeled after its passive counterpart bei, and that it is via the process of lexical replacement that ba replaced jiang's prepositional functions in instrumental and disposal constructions. Ba later lost its instrumental function to na (). We thus resolve the debate between Huang (1986) and Bennett (1981). Moreover, from the recurring pattern of change in the historical development of yi, jiang, ba, and na, we observe two counteracting principles at work: functional refinement, which forces a one-to-one correspondence between a form and its function, and analogous development, which does just the opposite to create a one-to-many relationship.

According to Bickerton's “bioprogram,” creole grammars from the outset contain privative oppositions in the verbal system, where zeroes can be unambiguously interpreted as contrasting with verbs bearing the marked feature. A quantitative analysis of tense and aspect in narrative texts in Tok Pisin and Sranan indicates that this is not the case in either language. Zeroes freely occur with all tense categories. Verbs occurring with no tense markers are thus not “marked with zero,” but constitute the historical residue of an earlier stage of the languages in which tense marking of the superstrate languages had not been transmitted and the Creole markers had not yet evolved.

British Sign Language is a language exhibiting extensive regional variation and undergoing rapid change, in a period of changing attitudes to the language and the community of signers. Fingerspelling (a representation of written English) is an aspect of BSL that reflects these variations strongly. Analysis of interviews with Deaf signers appearing on BBC television shows that use of fingerspelling may vary according to various demographic factors and the signers' use of voice. There has also been a decrease in the overall use of fingerspelling in BSL over the last 10 years. Strong evidence is presented to support the claim that fingerspelling in BSL is of two distinct linguistic types. Some fingerspelling involves code-mixing with English, whereas some has become incorporated into the language itself. Further evidence for such a “discontinuity” between the code-mixing and borrowing is presented and discussed.