The emergence of être comme as a quotative verb in Canadian French is easily construed as a case of contact-induced change by virtue of its superficial similarity to the rapidly diffusing be like quotative (Tagliamonte & D'Arcy, 2007). We pursue the inference of contact-induced change by undertaking a quantitative analysis of French and English quotatives recorded from speakers in the bilingual city of Ottawa between 2008 and 2010. A series of real-time cross sections enables the longitudinal development of the quotative system of each language to be tracked. Analysis of the data confirms that être comme is a change in progress, but not a wholesale replication of its English counterpart. Although the results do not refute the role of external causation in the emergence of être comme, the available evidence suggests that an external source is neither the sole, nor even the preferred, motivation for the emergence of this innovation.

This article contributes to a growing body of theory that posits language-external, social factors as a primary motor in diachronic change. Politeness theory and the use of variationist approaches enable us to posit, and test, the hypothesis of a type of pragmaticalization, which I call Politeness-Induced Semantic Change (PISC). Historical data on quand même are presented that give tentative credence to such a model. Moeschler and de Spengler's (1981) and Waltereit's (2001) speech-act theoretic analyses of quand même are reinterpreted within the framework of politeness theory and sociopragmatics. The ensuing corpus investigation of the grammaticalization and pragmatico-semantic evolution of quand même from 1500–2000 highlights the fact that not only the innovation but also the propagation of a new form–function configuration depend on social factors; politeness theory may have explanatory power in capturing the ever-changing social patterning of linguistic features and the conditions that favor the spread of innovation.I wish to acknowledge the very helpful and detailed comments of Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and anonymous reviewers from Language Variation and Change on a draft version of this article. Remaining inadequacies are, of course, entirely my own. I also recognize a debt of gratitude to the Research Committee of the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences of the University of the West of England, Bristol, who granted me the research leave required to complete the article.

This paper reports on a large-scale diachronic investigation into the timing of New Zealand English (NZE), which points to changes in its rhythmic structure. The Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) was used to measure the mean variation in duration, intensity, and pitch of successive vowels in the speech of over 500 New Zealanders, born between 1851 and 1988. Normalized vocalic PVIs for duration have reduced over time, after allowing for changes in speech rate, supporting existing findings that stressed and unstressed vowels are less differentiated by duration in modern NZE than in other varieties of English. Rhythmically, syllable duration may be playing a reduced role in signalling prominence in NZE. This is supported by the finding that there have been contemporaneous changes in pitch and intensity variation. We discuss external and internal influences on the timing of NZE, including contact with Māori, the emergence of Māori English, and diachronic vowel shift.

Previous studies have shown that speakers have difficulty interpreting the sounds of another dialect when they are heard in isolation or reduced context, and that this difficulty is greater in areas of dialect contact where exposure to mergers or near-mergers is experienced (Labov & Ash, 1997; Labov, Karen, & Miller, 1991). A cross-dialectal comprehension test was conducted at Ohio University and three of its branch campuses. Responses were elicited to seven words digitally excerpted at three levels of reduced context from a story read by a third-generation resident of southern Ohio. Results indicated that vowel changes occurring in southern Ohio were generally interpreted by the respondents in terms of their own vowel systems, and that limited exposure to the local dialect by outsiders led to recognition only of the more salient or stereotyped sounds. Moreover, students from southern Ohio had difficulty with the same words that outsiders did, presumably reflecting semantic confusion caused by their increased exposure to other dialects. A new boundary for the South Midland dialect area is proposed on the basis of these findings.

Bislama allows phonetically overt and phonetically null noun phrases (NPs) in argument positions. This article explores constraints on the occurrence of null NPs in direct object position. Discourse factors (given/new status of referent, antecedent's form) and syntactic factors (antecedent's grammatical role, identification by a transitive suffix) are investigated. Morphosyntactic and semantic features that might transfer from substrate languages (referent's animacy, (in)alienable possession) and social factors (age, sex, language of education) are also examined. Strong priming effects for grammatical role of the antecedent and form of the antecedent are identified. Also salient are inalienable possession and semantic type of the verb. The effect of inalienable possession shows the highly abstract transfer of substrate features, raising questions about the modularity of grammar. It is argued that a key motivation for such transfer is not just linguistic availability, but the social and cultural significance of different kinds of possession in Melanesia.

This paper explores the synchrony and diachrony of differential object marking in Paraguayan Guaraní on the basis of a quantitative study of a corpus of naturally occurring data of the modern language and an investigation of object marking in a 17th-century catechism. We show that both animacy and topicality, but not definiteness, affect whether a direct object is marked in modern Guaraní, a finding that has implications for cross-linguistic theories of differential object marking, not all of which recognize topicality as a factor. We also find no categorical constraints on differential object marking in Guaraní, contrary to Bossong (1985b). Our study of the 17th-century catechism provides further support for Bossong's (1985b, 2009) claim that Guaraní did not have differential object marking when it came into contact with Spanish. The paper concludes with a discussion of the hypothesis that differential object marking in Guaraní resulted from contact with Spanish.

Hogg (2004), Levin (1958), and Ogura (1999) have shown the existence of dialectal differences as regards Old English (OE) negative contraction. This study reassesses the traditional view that OE showed optional use of negative concord (NC), and finds instead that variation in NC was dialectal, based on an analysis of 260 instances of indefinites in OE (prose) negated clauses. Standard West Saxon (WS) texts systematically accompanied a negated indefinite (NI) with the particle ne. In non-WS texts ne use was systematic with a postverbal negated indefinite but variable with preverbal NIs. A sample of 389 NIs in Middle English (ME) verse texts from around 1300 from selected dialect areas showed a similar dissociation. These two sets of findings lend support to the notion of a persisting dialect split in early English whereby symmetrical NC characterized the South/Southwest area while Midland regions of England had asymmetric NC. West Saxon texts may thus represent a regional vernacular tendency as regards NC, not merely a standardized scribal dialect.The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful comments of anonymous referees. All remaining errors and misinterpretations are my own.

The use of the nominative 1sg pronouns in co-ordinate NPs in object position, most famously between you and I, has received much attention from prescriptivists and formal linguists, but it has never been the object of a variationist study that compares its usage to that of other variants. This article seeks to fill the gap, based on a data set of co-ordinate NPs in object position, gathered through observation of everyday speech as well as in experimental sociolinguistic interviews. Arguing that the choice of NP case and of NP order is inseparably related, we identify three major patterns of co-ordinate NPs: Vernacular me and X and two post-Vernacular patterns, Standard X and me and Polite X and I. We then examine social and linguistic factors that constrain the usage of individual patterns. We conclude that all three patterns are robust and that they exist in stable ternary variation.This article, which we authored jointly, arose from a paper we presented with Cecilia Cutler and Keith Fernandes at NWAVE–XXVII in Athens, Georgia. Cece and Keith worked with us in gathering the data and participated in extensive discussion with us concerning the phenomenon under study. We are grateful to them. The NWAVE paper itself grew out of a project in a linguistic variation class at NYU. The other participants in the class project were Tiffany Dugan and Agnieszka Rakowicz, and we thank them for their help. We benefited from discussions with Arto Anttila, Jeff Parrott, and Sharon Klein and from audiences at NYU and Stanford. E. W. Gilman called our attention to several relevant articles, and Maryam Bakht-Rofheart, Erik Falkensteen, Bill Haddican, and Ken Lacy provided us with relevant examples from the media. We also thank Sandra Singler Harding, Tom Leu, Erez Levon, Pat Reilly, and Arnold Zwicky. The quotation from an Episcopal missionary appears courtesy of The Archives of the Episcopal Church USA. We thank Jennifer Peters, archivist, and her staff for their assistance.

Four vowel variables are investigated in the speech of 50 rural, nonmigrant children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years in the Syrian village Oyoun Al-Wadi. Contrary to previous studies, the children initially acquire the urban and later the rural forms of these vowels. This process of acquisition shows the following. First, children show reversal in the acquisition of forms, and thus the rules associated with them; instead of acquiring the local forms first, they acquire the supralocal forms. Second, children can acquire the rules of the second dialect after the age of 8. Third, gender emerges as significant as boys and girls exhibit different linguistic behavior. Fourth, preadolescents emerge as the age group that is most active in building a social identity. Fifth, social-psychological factors motivate the shift from urban to rural forms. These include local identity, gendered social meanings of the variants, and the growth of the children's sociolinguistic competence throughout their preadolescence and adolescence.

This paper analyzes td-deletion, the process whereby coronal stops /t, d/ are deleted after a consonant at the end of the word (e.g., best, kept, missed) in the speech of 93 speakers from Manchester, stratified for age, social class, gender, and ethnicity. Prior studies of British English have not found the morphological effect—more deletion in monomorphemic mist than past tense missed—commonly observed in American English. We find this effect in Manchester and provide evidence that the rise of glottal stop replacement in postsonorant position in British English (e.g., halt, aunt) may be responsible for the reduction in the strength of this effect in British varieties. Glottaling blocks deletion, and, because the vast majority of postsonorant tokens are monomorphemic, the higher rates of monomorpheme glottaling dampens the typical effect of deletion in this context. These findings indicate organization at a higher level of the grammar, while also showing overlaid effects of factors such as style and word frequency.

Exemplification is considered to be a rhetorical procedure used to illustrate a point. In spoken discourse, we can attribute to it an argumentative and pragmatic character. In this study, the data base is constituted of utterances marked by exemplification particles (par exemple, comme, genre, style, mettons, and disons ‘for example’, ‘like’, ‘of the (…) kind’, ‘of the (…) variety’, ‘let's say’) extracted from two corpora of spoken French in Montréal. One goal is to describe the constraints which govern the choice of discourse variant and at the same time to get the deepest insights possible into the procedure that interrelates these constraints. The main objective is to observe to what extent we can have access to the characteristics of a complex rhetorical phenomenon by using sociolinguistic data.

This study investigates the contraction of negatives in a carefully chosen corpus of discourse and writing, to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Evidence is presented that negative contraction is conditioned by interactional and other register variables. The point is made that the pragmatic as well as morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished from each other. Although a Cognitive Prominence Principle predicts noncontraction when the negative conveys semantically focal information, a Social Agreement Principle predicts contraction. This is because it would be face-threatening (and, therefore, in conversation analysis terms “dispreferred”) to focus on disagreement, which is most often the semantic information conveyed by negatives. This hypothesis is examined using corpora which differ along several dimensions. The most important of these (for this study) appear to be the interactional versus informational register dimensions (Finegan, 1994). Data from instructional (workshop presentations), confrontational (political debates), and casual conversational material are contrasted with comparable reading style materials. The following general results are predicted. The Cognitive Prominence Principle will take over in informational contexts when disagreement is acceptable or neutralized. The Social Agreement Principle will take over in more interactional contexts where disagreement is not acceptable. The results are of interest to the student of focus, the sociolinguist concerned with dialect, register, and style variation, and even the speech technician.

In many societies, dialectometry has revealed strong correlations between geographic distances and dialect differences (e.g., Gooskens, 2005; Heeringa & Nerbonne, 2001; Nerbonne, 2009, 2010). But what happens when dialectometry is applied to a small, clan-based society such as the indigenous Sui people of rural southwest China? The Sui results show a strong correlation between dialect difference and geographic distance, thus supporting Nerbonne and Kleiweg's (2007) Fundamental Dialectological Postulate. A new culturally specific computation, “rice paddy distance,” also provides a strong correlation with dialect differences. However, the study finds that some dialectometry patterns of larger societies are not “compressible” into small societies such as Sui. Clan exogamy also poses challenges for dialectometry. Nonetheless, the overall results show that basic principles of dialect variation in space can be generalized cross-culturally, even across very different cultures. This paper also suggests a “lower limit” for dialectology, that is, the smallest distance where regional dialectology may be relevant, all other things being equal.

The development of “supportive” (or “periphrastic”) DO in English suffered a curious and sharp reversal late in the 16th century in negative declaratives and questions according to Ellegård's (1953) database, with a recovery late in the following century. This article examines the variation between DO and the full verb in negative declaratives in this database, from 1500 to 1710. It is shown that both register variation and age-grading are relevant, and that the periods 1500–1575 and 1600–1710 have radically distinct properties. The second period shows substantial age-grading, and is interpreted as having introduced a fresh evaluative principle governing register variation. Negative questions supply data that suggest that the development of clitic negation may have been implicated in the development of the new evaluation. This change in evaluation accounts for the apparent reversal in the development of DO, and we can abandon the view that it was a consequence of grammatical restructuring.I want very sincerely to thank Tony Kroch for giving me an electronic version of the database used by Ellegård (1953), in an act of straightforward generosity; also Ann Taylor for her work in compiling it, and Celeste Tereszczuk who completed this task. I am also grateful to the British Academy who funded a period of research leave which gave me time to investigate this, and to audiences at ICEHL 12 (held at the University of Santiago), at the Linguistics Research Seminar at the University of York, and at NWAVE 32 for their comments.

As a so-called non-null subject language, it has been proposed that in English, unexpressed subjects occur only in registers that have specific grammatical properties. We test this hypothesis through a comparison of the conditioning of subject expression for third-person singular human specific subjects in English conversation and narrative. Despite a stark difference in the rates of nonexpression (4% in conversation vs. 22% in narratives), there is no evidence of different grammars across the registers—in both, outside of coreferential clauses conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects only occur in prosodic initial position in main clause declaratives. Within the variable context, in both registers, expression is sensitive to accessibility, priming, and temporal sequentiality. A register effect is, however, evident in the contextual distribution, with a larger proportion of the narrative tokens occurring in contexts propitious to unexpressed subjects, and it is this that accounts for the higher rate of nonexpression in this register.

Some recent research proposes that changes observed in the morphology and syntax of Vernacular Black English (VBE), combined with the failure of VBE to participate in regional changes in the pronunciation of white speech, constitutes evidence for the divergence of VBE from white and standard varieties. The present article presents quantitative evidence for a change in VBE which appears to involve increasing similarity between VBE and other varieties: a marked tendency toward higher, fronter realizations of the final /i/ in words like happy in the speech of younger blacks. Evidence for the character of the change comes from English dialectology, historical phonology, and research conducted by the author on the speech of residents of East Palo Alto, California. It is proposed that whereas black and white varieties may remain distinct, undergoing some changes separately, this need not be regarded as absolute divergence. Distinct varieties in contact may, for complex sociological and linguistic reasons, be expected more realistically to appear to diverge and converge simultaneously.

Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ranging from various frequency measures to various form-related factors and how they interact with each other. This study confirms the well-known effects of token and type frequency, finding that formal similarities can be both a driving and conservative force in language change and demonstrates that not all members (i.e., preterites and past participles) of a verb paradigm change at the same time, which is both an effect of their frequency and their formal coherence within the paradigm.

The acoustic energy of 996 tokens of word-initial /f/ in the speech of 38 speakers of Mexican Spanish was analyzed. The results suggest that the frequency with which words occur in phonological contexts favorable to reduction (Frequency in a Reducing Context or FRC) conditions the reduction of /f/, even after taking into account the immediate phonological context. Despite this, it is also found that the conditioning effect of FRC is less robust than the influence of the immediate phonological context, thus confirming the preeminence in these data of the online articulatory factors in comparison to the usage-based frequency factors.

The spread of the new quotative be like throughout the English-speaking world is a change from above for each community that receives it. Diffusion of this form into Philadelphia is traced through the yearly interviews of the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, beginning with young adults in 1979 and spreading to adolescents in 1990, a generation later. The first users of be like form the Avant Garde, young adults with extensive awareness of linguistic patterns within and without the city. The use of this quotative in Philadelphia is favored by constraints that are found elsewhere, particularly to introduce inner speech that is not intended to be heard by others and to cite exemplars of a range of utterances. Not previously reported is a strong tendency to be favored for quotations with initial exclamations, prototypically expressions of surprise and alarm such as “Oh” and “Oh my god!”.

This study reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the linguistic factors conditioning several variables within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. Previous studies have focused only on the opposition between Ø and -s in the present tense, ignoring other morphosyntactic constructions. Expanding the variable context to present temporal reference, I demonstrate that different constructions convey different aspects: the previously noted association between -s and habitual aspect is confirmed, but Ø is also associated with an aspectual distinction—that of duration. The progressive is used most often with nonstative verbs to denote durative aspect, whereas its much rarer use with statives appears to reflect an older stage in its “grammaticization.” Combining variationist analysis with the comparative method, this reconstruction provides linguistically meaningful explanations of the observed variability and places it within the context of the development of the English language.