The question of whether or not grammatical factors can condition or block sound change has been discussed from many perspectives for more than a century without resolution (Melchert, 1975). Here we consider studies of sound change in progress which show that words or phrases that are used frequently in the phonetic environment for change undergo the change before those whose use is less frequent in these contexts. Because words of different categories and with different structures also have different distributions, they may occur preferentially in certain phonetic environments. Thus, some apparent cases of influence by grammatical and lexical factors can be explained by phonetic factors if we expand our notion of phonetic environment to include frequency within the environment for change, which includes the segmental environment as well as factors that affect the degree of prominence a word receives in context.

This paper reports on patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change in Manchester's goose and goat vowels on the basis of the acoustic analysis of 122 speakers, stratified by age, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Goose fronting is an internal change showing little social differentiation, except before /l/ as in school and pool, where, in contrast to most other dialects of English, goose shows advanced fronting inversely correlated with socioeconomic status. Goat fronting, on the other hand, is a change brought from outside the dialect by the highest status groups, displaying a pattern of monotonic social stratification, a female lead, and a strong effect of ethnicity. The role of attitudes toward the community in the realization of the vowels is compared with the effect of social class construed in terms of distances between social groups. Social class turns out to be a better predictor, suggesting that the role of attitudes and identity may be overestimated in research eschewing a systematic exploration of social class at the same time.

Phonetic variation among Scottish members of the UK Parliament may be influenced by convergence to Southern English norms (Carr & Brulard, 2006) or political identity (e.g., Hall-Lew, Coppock, & Starr, 2010). Drawing on a year's worth of political speeches (2011–2012) from 10 Scottish members of the UK Parliament (MPs), we find no acoustic evidence for the adoption of a Southern English low vowel system; rather, we find that vowel height is significantly correlated with political party: Scottish Labour Party MPs produce a higher cat vowel (Johnston, 1997) than do Scottish National Party MPs. The results contradict claims that Scottish MPs acquire Anglo-English features while serving in the UK Parliament. Rather, we suggest that the variation indexes political meaning, with a subset of individuals drawing on that indexicality in production.

A construction very widely used in Old English and Old Germanic more broadly are correlatives introduced by an adverbial or conditional subclause, as in When you've done your homework, (then) you can come back (Old English: ‘…, then can you come back’). Correlatives originate from a paratactic clause structure, making use of resumptive adverbs such as then belonging to the Old Germanic series of demonstrative adverbs, whose syntactic niche was the clause-initial position, particularly in Verb Second main clauses. Paratactic structure in correlatives is diagnosed by the presence of a resumptive adverb. We show that the correlative use of resumptive adverbs is sensitive to both clause-internal and clause-external variables: mood, subclause-internal particles, negation, subject type, subclause weight, text type, translation. Correlatives decline from late Old English onward. Although it may seem tempting to attribute this to the loss of Verb Second in English, it resulted primarily from the loss of the original Germanic resumptive adverbs.

The role of social networks in language variation has been studied using a wide range of metrics. This study critically examines the effect of different dimensions of networks on different aspects of language variation. Three dimensions of personal network (ethnicity, nationality, diversity) are evaluated in relation to three levels of language structure (phonetic form, accent range, language choice) over three generations of British Asians. The results indicate a scaling of network influences. The two metrics relating to qualities of an individual's ties are more historically and culturally specific, whereas the network metric that relates to the structure of an individual's social world appears to exert a more general effect on accent repertoires across generations. This two-tier typology—network qualities (more culturally contingent) and network structures (more general)—facilitates an integrated understanding of previous studies and a more structured methodology for studying the effect of social networks on language.