Although the order of major sentence constituents at all stages of Ancient Greek is quite free, the distribution of clause types is not random over time, but changes from predominantly verb-final to predominantly verb-medial, suggesting a change in progress. Using the paradigm of Kroch (1989), in which it is assumed that syntactic change involves competition between grammatical systems, two models are constructed, one for the verb-final grammar of the Homeric period (pre-800 B.C.) and one for the verb-medial grammar of the Hellenistic Koiné (c. 100 A.D.). The language of an intermediate stage (Herodotus, c. 450 B.C.) is shown to pattern in part like Homer and in part like the Koiné. More strikingly, the ratio of verb-final to verb-medial structure that best fits the distribution of clause types found in Herodotus is extremely close to an independent measure of this ratio obtained from the distribution of weak pronouns and clitics.

In this article, we develop analytical techniques to determine borrowability – that is, the ease with which a lexical item or a category of lexical items can be borrowed. The analysis is based on two assumptions: (1) the distribution of items in both the host and donor language should be taken into account to explain why certain items are, and others are not, borrowed; (2) the borrowability of a lexical category may result from a set of (underlying) operative factors or constraints. Our analysis is applied to Spanish borrowings in Bolivian Quechua on the basis of a set of bilingual texts.

Studies of concord variation in English have found subject-verb concord to be particularly low in existential sentences such as There's bridges. Noting that these sentences are unusual because the subject NP is postverbal and is generally indefinite, we hypothesized that the unusual concord variation pattern was a result of structural differences associated with the restriction on the type of determiners preceding the postverbal NP. Using variationist methodology, we analyzed natural speech data from 31 speakers of standard Canadian English and found an overwhelming preference for singular agreement in existentials. Contrary to our predictions, this was not linked to a determiner-based structural distinction, but rather to the form of the copula (i.e., full or clitic) and the speaker's level of education. Our findings have implications for those theoretical studies of existentials that assume concord, because the effect of education suggests that this assumption reflects the bias of the higher educational level of the researchers.

This article investigates the sociolinguistic variable of apical palatalization in Cairene Arabic. First, I discuss its linguistic features and then its sociolinguistic distribution. The significance of palatalization as a sociolinguistic variable is its status as a stylistic resource of Cairene Arabic. Depending on the complex interaction of a number of factors, some Egyptians use features of Classical Arabic while speaking in Egyptian Arabic for stylistic purposes. Palatalization, on the other hand, is an example of a stylistic resource that belongs to Cairene Arabic proper. The roles of gender and social class in the distribution of palatalization are explored in some detail. As in a number of other speech communities, women in Cairo seem to have been the innovators of this sound change.