When 17th century personal correspondence was studied, it was observed that women used the evidential expression I THINK more often than men. A closer analysis showed that women also used other 1st person evidential verbs as well as the 1st and 2nd person pronouns more frequently than men. This male/female difference was maintained even in different registers, although both sexes have higher frequencies of I THINK in more intimate circumstances, such as when the informants are writing to their friends or close family members. The male/female differences in frequencies are explained as a difference in the style of communication. Women's style is more “involved” and interactive: personal point of view is frequently expressed, and both the writer and the addressee are overtly included in the communication situation. Interestingly, similar differences have also been found in Present-Day English.

A comparison of Old Spanish and present-day Spanish data provides evidence that reductive change in grammaticizing forms may be manifested not only as a diachronic process but also as a synchronic difference between formal and informal registers. Clitic climbing frequencies in Spanish auxiliary + gerund sequences have increased diachronically as part of a series of reductive changes and in tandem with construction frequency increases. In calculating construction frequency, both the token frequency of auxiliary + gerund sequences and their frequency relative to lone-standing gerunds turn out to be important. Differences between present-day conversational and written data show that clitic position is stylistically stratified. Register differences in clitic climbing are found to be linked to construction frequency as well, suggesting that frequency effects operate on a more general synchronic level as well as on the level of particular texts. These text-level frequency effects may be related to parallel structure “birds of a feather” effects.

Traditional dialect boundaries in the United States have received renewed attention (Labov, 1991, 1994). Labov outlined three dialects of English (the Northern Cities Chain Shift, the Southern Chain Shift, and the Third Dialect), the boundaries of which are defined by chain shifts in the vowel system and roughly correspond to traditional dialectal boundaries defined through the bundling of lexical items (Kurath, 1949) and phonological isoglosses (Kurath & McDavid, 1961). Other research has suggested that the Third Dialect may be the most heterogeneous of these dialects, with speakers in different areas displaying widely disparate behaviors (see, e.g., Clarke, Elms, & Youssef, 1995; Di Paolo, 1988; Di Paolo & Faber, 1990; Labov, 1996; Moonwomon, 1987). The present article contributes towards a richer picture of the Third Dialect by offering the first systematic variationist analysis of speech in Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on three phonological processes: vocalization of /l/, laxing of /i/ before /l/, and laxing of /u/ before /l/. I argue that Veatch's (1991) model of English syllable structure provides a unified account of these seemingly unrelated phonological changes in Pittsburgh; the implications of this argument for further research on Pittsburgh speech are also noted.

Brazilian Portuguese possesses two forms used as 1st person plural pronouns: nós and a gente, both meaning ‘we’. The form nós has always been pronominal, whereas a gente is derived diachronically from the noun phrase a gente ‘the people’. In accord with this historical evolution, the standard language prefers the use of the 1st plural verb desinence -mos with nós, as in nós falamos ‘we speak’ or ‘we spoke’. The 3rd person desinence 0 is reserved for a gente, giving a gente fala ‘we speak’ as the preferred form. In popular speech both nós fala and a gente falamos are used frequently. We examine the use of these variable forms across four generations in Rio de Janeiro. In the older generations, phonic salience is the principal controlling factor for both nós and a gente. Since preterit desinences are stressed more frequently than present desinences, this induces a biased surface distribution, with -mos occurring more frequently with past tense reference. Nonetheless, for older speakers tense does not play a statistically significant role. In younger speakers, tense becomes statistically significant as a determining factor in the use of the desinences, with preterit favoring -mos for both subject forms. So far, there has been no change in the grammar itself, but the locus of determination of the use of -mos seems to have shifted from saliency to tense across the generations. One can speculate that some time in the future -mos may become a preterit marker.

This article focuses on the directionality observed in the processes of change and acquisition of the prepositions that replaced Latin cases in the speech of Rio de Janeiro and in the Contact Portuguese spoken by Brazilian Indians in the region of Xingu. In Brazilian Portuguese, it is possible to delete the indirect case preposition of some verbs. The system loses and maintains prepositional nexus in a cyclic process motivated by the semantic transparency and the iconicity of the preposition, the adjacency between verb and complement, and the degree of transitivity of the verb. The variable use in Contact Portuguese shows the same effects observed in the Rio de Janeiro variety, in a process that includes a gradual filling up of categorical and variable contexts. We argue that the forces that guide acquisition of the Portuguese prepositional subsystem in the Xingu variety act in the same way as those that constrain variation in urban language.