Addressing the dearth of variation research in nonurban, noncoastal regions of California, this study examines the extent to which speakers in Redding, an inland community just north of the Central Valley, participate in the California Vowel Shift (CVS). We acoustically analyze the fronting of the back vowels boot and boat, the raising of ban and backing of bat, and the merger of bot and bought, in sociolinguistic interviews with 30 white lifelong residents. Results reveal a change in apparent time for all analyzed variables, indicating the CVS's progression through the community, though not as robust as in urban, coastal areas. Additionally, we provide evidence that shifting patterns for different vowels are structured by the ideological divide between town and country. Thus, as the CVS spreads through Redding, speakers utilize particular features of the shift differently, negotiating identities relevant in California's nonurban locales.

This paper is a quantitative study of the emergence of negative concord in Santa María Chiquimula K'ichee’, apparently the only known case of negative concord in the Mayan stock. It is the latest development in a series of recent changes in the syntax of negative clauses in K'ichee’ (Romero, 2012). Using apparent time and comparative cross-dialectal data, I show that negative concord in this variety is a change in progress that started no earlier than the turn of the 20th century.

In recent years, the typological and geographic range of languages subjected to sociophonetic study has been expanding, though until now Australian Aboriginal languages have been absent from this subdiscipline. This first sociophonetic study of an Australian language, Murrinh Patha, shows a type of consonant lenition that is notably distinct from the better known examples in Standard Average European languages, effecting /p/ and /k/ primarily in the onset of stressed, usually word-initial syllables. Young men lenite more frequently than older men do, and paternal heritage from the neighboring Marri language group also predicts more frequent lenition. The latter influence may be the result of intense language contact brought about by recent settlement of diverse language groups at the Catholic Mission of Port Keats.

I offer a diachronic perspective on English ellipsis alternation, or the alternation between inclusion and omission of prepositions from remnants under sluicing and bare argument ellipsis. The relative freedom to omit prepositions from remnants has not been stable in English; this freedom is connected to the strength of semantic dependencies between prepositions and verbs. Remnants without prepositions are first attested, but remain less frequent than remnants with prepositions, as late as Early Modern English and gain in frequency following this period. I demonstrate that three constraints—correlate informativity, structural persistence, and construction type—predict ellipsis alternation in Early and Late Modern English. However, predicting ellipsis alternation in present-day English requires semantic dependencies in addition to the three constraints. The constraints can be subsumed under principles of language processing and production (considerations of accessibility, a tendency to reuse structure, and a conventionalized performance preference for efficiently accessing constituents that form processing domains), permitting a unified processing account of ellipsis alternation with cross-linguistic coverage.