We analyze change in variable subject/verb and noun phrase concord in Rio de Janeiro Portuguese using trend samples from 1980 and 1999/2000. Plural marked forms exhibit increased frequency in this period, reversing earlier trends toward loss or stability in a development typical of flows and counterflows in the community. The directionality of most structural and social dimensions does not change, but age patterns shift. Our aim is to investigate how groups of speakers evolve over time. Comparison of same-age groups at different moments does not yield insight and is not conducive to apprehending patterns of evolution because speakers move from one age group to another. We set up age cohorts so as to sample virtually the same universes. Examining age cohorts, we see increased frequency of number concord, although the original pattern of relative usage is preserved. Speakers are on the move, but constrained by social patterns in which they are situated. The pattern is broken precisely by those who were not in it, the unborn in the 1980s, who reverse direction dramatically toward increased usage of concord.

English auxiliary contraction has received much attention in the linguistic literature, but our knowledge of this variable has remained limited due to the absence of a thorough corpus study. This paper examines contraction of six auxiliaries in two corpora, considering three distinct phonological shapes in which they occur and the implications for an analysis of the grammatical processes that underlie the surface alternation in form. I argue that the data best support a two-stage analysis of contraction, one under which variation in the morphology is followed by phonetic and phonological processes. Moreover, I show that this particular analysis explains a number of patterns in the data that would otherwise be accidental. In this way, I underscore the importance of approaching the study of variable phenomena with both quantitative data and formal analysis.

This study investigates the effect of linguistic and social factors (age, gender, and level of education) on the patterns of variation in the affrication of [] for [k] in the stem and suffix in the informal speech of 72 speakers of Qaṣīmī, a local dialect of Najdi Arabic, spoken in the Qaṣīm province in central Saudi Arabia. Findings indicate that affrication is significantly favored in the phonological context of front vowels, particularly the high front ones. Whereas suffix-based affrication is categorically used as [-], stem affrication is strongly correlated with the age, educational level, and gender of the speaker. In particular, older uneducated speakers from both sexes tend to maintain the use of the local variant [], whereas younger and middle-aged educated speakers, particularly women, increasingly shift toward the use of the supralocal variant [k]. The present findings are suggestive of patterns of variation that are typical in regional-dialect leveling, wherein the supralocal variant(s) associated with the major city dialect is (are) diffusing outward, at the expense of traditional and socially marked variant(s), by speakers of smaller towns' dialects. The substantial socioeconomic changes that Saudi Arabia has undergone in the last half century are suggested to have triggered and accelerated the linguistic shift.

An important account of linear ordering in syntax is John A. Hawkins' (2004) theory of cognitive efficiency and the principles of domain minimization formulated therein. In its latest formulation, the theory postulates syntactic and semantic minimization principles. With regard to the relative strength of these principles, prior research into the dynamics of these constraints has come to differing conclusions. Using the relative ordering of prepositional phrases (PPs) in English as a test phenomenon, the present study contributes to the further development of a theory of syntactic serialization through the multifactorial analysis of naturalistic data from a corpus of present-day British English. We find that lexical-semantic dependency constitutes the strongest constraint on serialization followed by the weight-related, syntactic one. More specifically, our results show that although syntactic minimization has much greater data coverage – it applies to a much larger proportion of the data – the lexical-semantic factor has a much greater effect size, thus is more seldomly violated. In addition to assessing the relative importance of the two minimization principles, we also investigate the effects of other potential codeterminants of PP order, namely the manner > place > time generalization and pragmatic information status. Our results suggest that these play statistically significant but tangential roles in PP ordering.

Individual-level variation is a recurrent issue in variationist sociolinguistics. One current approach recommends addressing this via mixed-effects modeling. This paper shows that a closely related model with fixed effects for individual speakers can be directly estimated using Goldvarb. The consequences of employing different approaches to speaker variation are explored by using different model selection criteria. We conclude by discussing the relation of the statistical model to the assumptions of the research design, pointing out that nonrandom selection of speakers potentially violates the assumptions of models with random effects for speaker, and suggesting that a model with fixed effects for speakers may be a better alternative in these cases.