This study readdresses the loss of Negative Concord (NC) in Standard English. A detailed study of negation in Late Middle English and Early Modern English reveals that the loss of NC was a case of a natural change triggered by some internal factors. A close study of n-words in negative contexts and their ultimate replacement with negative polarity items (NPIs) in a number of grammatical environments shows that the decline of NC follows the same pattern across contexts in a form of parallel curvature, which indicates that the loss of NC is a natural change. However, this study reveals that the decline is not constant across time (see Contra Kroch's Constant Rate Hypothesis [CRH], 1989). Context behavior suggests an alternative principle of linguistic change, the context constancy principle. A context constancy effect is obtained across all contexts, indicating that the loss of NC is triggered by a change in a single underlying parameter setting. Accordingly, a theory-internal explanation is suggested.I would like to thank the reviewer of this article for his/her comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper and for pointing to some crucial theoretical misconceptions in the previous literature. His/her comments are very much appreciated.

Many researchers have investigated the copula for possible links between African American Vernacular English (aave) and Atlantic Creoles, a connection that has served as the foundation of the Creolist Hypothesis in the on-going debate over the origins of aave. One variety that has been of particular interest in this debate is Gullah, which has been hypothetically linked to aave since some of the earliest statements of the Creolist Hypothesis. To date, however, very little research has been done on copula variability in Gullah itself. This study, therefore, provides an analysis of copula variability in present affirmative contexts in Gullah. Variation is found among full, contracted, and zero forms in 1st person singular, plural/2nd person singular, and 3rd person singular environments. The analysis also reveals some parallels between Gullah and aave that offer support for the theory of an aave/creole connection.I would like to acknowledge the Department of Linguistics and the Center for African Studies at Ohio State University for covering the cost of some of the fieldwork for this study. I would also like to acknowledge the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina for providing several hours of recordings used for the study. My sincerest thanks to research assistants Jason Sellers and Cherlon Ussery for help with transcriptions and data tabulation and to the following friends and colleagues for their help and support during various stages of this project: Emily Bender, Eugenia Deas, Vennie Deas-Moore, Brian Joseph, Michele Nichols, Terence Odlin, John Paolillo, Donald Winford, and Walt Wolfram. And, finally, my thanks to James Walker and an anonymous LVC reviewer for their helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. I accept full responsibility for any remaining errors.

Individual-level variation is a recurrent issue in variationist sociolinguistics. One current approach recommends addressing this via mixed-effects modeling. This paper shows that a closely related model with fixed effects for individual speakers can be directly estimated using Goldvarb. The consequences of employing different approaches to speaker variation are explored by using different model selection criteria. We conclude by discussing the relation of the statistical model to the assumptions of the research design, pointing out that nonrandom selection of speakers potentially violates the assumptions of models with random effects for speaker, and suggesting that a model with fixed effects for speakers may be a better alternative in these cases.

Several western Swiss German dialects roughly grouped around the nation's capital Bern show /l/ > [u] vocalization in various contexts. The spatial boundaries of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German are suspected to have been expanding since being described in the Linguistic Atlas of German-Speaking Switzerland in the middle of the 20th century. The present study assesses the overall expansion of /l/-vocalization by means of a rapid anonymous survey in 20 urban regional centers situated just beyond the traditional boundaries of /l/-vocalization highlighted by the Atlas. Results show that the expansion of /l/-vocalization mainly progresses in southeasterly, southerly, and westerly directions, but with much less success to the north and northwest, where the equally influential dialectal areas of Basel and Zürich seem to exert opposing influences. Further analysis of the data indicates that somewhat differing constraint hierarchies are at work in the different places to which vocalization has diffused.

In the study of past be, most researchers have assumed a two variant distinction for negative forms (i.e., wasn't and weren't). In Warren County, North Carolina, evidence suggests a three variant distinction (i.e., wasn't, weren't, and wont). Throughout the history of sociolinguistic investigation, two types of variants have been noted: a sociolinguistic variant and a linguistic variant. In Warren County, wont functions as both types, as demonstrated through acoustic, morphophonological, and sociolinguistic evidence. Through the analysis of negative past be, guidelines are suggested for determining a particular form as a separate linguistic and sociolinguistic variant.

Brazilian Portuguese has a vowel harmony rule which consists of the optional raising of the pretonic e and o vowels to i and u, respectively, if there is a high vowel in the following syllable. This is an old rule, the origin of which can be traced back to the Latin of the 4th century a.d. Because the rule is subject to multiple conditioning by both linguistic and social factors, it can be treated as a variable rule.

This article interrogates the line taken in studies of Northern Ireland English that Catholic/Protestant ethnicity is sociolinguistically irrelevant. Using data from Derry/Londonderry English, gathered with the objective of answering the question of whether ethnicity matters in sociolinguistic terms, it examines the relative importance of a set of social factors for language variation. The strength of these factors (ethnicity, class, sex, and age) varies, but where change is occurring, ethnicity has an effect on the adoption of innovations. In particular, changes originating in the (predominantly Protestant) east of Northern Ireland tend to be adopted primarily by Protestants, whereas Catholics tend to be more conservative. This fits well with a general pattern of diffusion of change suggested by a reading of the sociolinguistic literature from the region.

In analyzing not-negation variation in English it becomes clear that specific strategies are used for prosodic emphasis and reduction of not in different social situations, and that contraction strategies vary independently of prosodic reduction. This article focuses on the factors influencing contraction strategies that are clearly dialect related and attempts to tease out those factors that are related to register and speaker stance. First, we review background information critical to an adequate analysis of not-negation and not-contraction. We then describe the corpora chosen for the present study, the research methods employed in the analysis, and the results of the analysis. The variable under analysis is the choice between uncontracted and not-contracted forms and between not-contracted and Aux-contracted forms in well-formed declarative sentences, for verbs which permit both. We end with some suggestions for corpus composition that will enable meaningful comparisons between social situations and between speakers, or characters, within one corpus. As researchers we can assure that future corpora will permit increasingly inclusive and interesting comparative studies; we close with some suggestions for those who wish to carry out studies.

The present study analyzes the speech of a radio presenter in a local station in Murcia and compares it to the audience's linguistic behavior as shown in the phone calls received during the program. We also analyze the data obtained in an interview with the radio presenter. Our results, which show a radical divergence between the presenter's speech and that of his audience, are contrasted with both Audience Design and Speaker Design theoretical tenets, using the explicit knowledge of the presenter's attitudes and opinions to contrast theory and fact. We conclude that neither model offers a completely satisfactory explanation of the patterns found. Finally, we reflect on the need to consider not only performance, but also the script (in the form of a professional voice used following a particular linguistic policy based on sociolinguistic norms and attitudes to language) that condition the individual linguistic behavior, thus suggesting the need to consider community-specific factors in the explanation of stylistic variation.We are very grateful for Peter Trudgill, David Britain, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Dennis Preston, Dagmar Scheu, Rafael Monroy, and José Jiménez-Cano for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

In line with a growing body of literature suggesting that mergers are reversible given the adequate dialect contact and social context, the present study examines the phonetic split of the Andalusian Spanish merger of ceceo into the Castilian Spanish feature of distinción. Specifically, the study analyzes 19,420 coronal fricatives produced by 80 Western Andalusian speakers from the city of Huelva and the nearby town of Lepe using a reading passage and wordlist. The analyses find that leaders of this change are younger speakers, women, those with more educational attainment, those of service and professional occupations, and those from Huelva. The implications are that large-scale societal changes have allowed for the split of the ceceo merger into distinción in both speech communities, albeit at different rates of change due to their unique socioeconomic histories, demonstrating that a split is possible given the right social context.

This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen's Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.

Using the variationist comparative method, the status of ambiguous lone Spanish-origin nouns in Catalan discourse is determined by analyzing their distribution and conditioning and by comparing them to their counterparts in unmixed Spanish or in multiple-word code-switches. Some areas of the nominal grammar have been selected for contrastive purposes (determination, complementation, gender, number) because they represent sites of coincidence as well as conflict between the two languages in contact, Spanish and Catalan. The main conclusion of this research is that Spanish-origin nouns in an otherwise Catalan context present grammatical variability similar to that of Catalan nouns, and that they behave differently from Spanish nouns in a monolingual context. In short, the grammar of these nouns is Catalan, and their categorial status is that of loanwords and not that of code-switches.

One of the challenges in characterizing non-native varieties of English is accounting for variant uses of ostensibly standard English forms. The present corpus study examines both quantitative and qualitative aspects of pluperfect use in Indian English (IndE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE). IndE is found to differ from native usage by associating had + V-ed with present perfect and preterite meanings. Licensing of pluperfect contexts by time adverbials is also found to be significantly lower in IndE. AmE shows the lowest overall use of the pluperfect and the highest use of disambiguating adverbials. Thus, AmE and IndE show distinct patterns of divergence from BrE. Variation within IndE exhibits a tendency for greater non-nativeness in regional (vs. national) press and in bureaucratic (vs. press) registers, suggesting a multidimensional distribution of IndE nonstandardness in India. These nonstandard uses are shown to convey new pragmatic meanings deriving from ambiguity in the native system and reinforcement from substrate languages. Finally, these changes are evaluated in relation to the broader tense–modality–aspect system of IndE as well as those of other non-native Englishes which exhibit similar characteristics.

A key component of Labov's (2001:411) socially motivated projection model of language change is the hypothesis that adolescents and preadolescents undergo a process of vernacular reorganization, which leads to a “seamless” progression of changes in progress. Between the ages of approximately five and 17, children and adolescents increase the “frequency, extent, scope, or specificity” of changes in progress along the community trajectory (Labov, 2007:346). Evidence of advancement via vernacular reorganization during this life stage has come from peaks in the apparent-time trajectory of a change around the age of 17 (e.g., Labov, 2001; Tagliamonte & D'Arcy, 2009). However, such peaks do not rule out the alternative explanations of retrograde change or age-grading. This paper presents both apparent time and real-time evidence for vernacular reorganization. We observe the arrowhead formation—a counterpart of the adolescent peak—for quotative be like in a trend study of adolescents and young adults in Toronto, Canada. Our results rule out the alternative explanations for previously observed adolescent peaks.

Studies of negation in African American English (AAE) typically focus on its most salient exponents, ain't and negative concord. Because ain't arose during the development of auxiliary- and not-contraction in Early Modern English, an interesting question is whether constraints on ain't can be attributed to more general constraints on contraction. This article examines the constraints on not-contraction in three varieties argued to be representative of Early AAE. Although the analysis is complicated by the ever-narrowing variable context of ain't and by the competition of not-contraction with auxiliary contraction, results are largely parallel across the three varieties, pointing to a common origin. The parallels between ain't and not-contraction provide evidence that ain't is the extension of more general processes of contraction. The most consistent effect, the presence of negative concord, is argued to reflect a recurrent process of reinforcement in the history of English negation.The data on which this study is based were extracted from corpora housed in the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. I gratefully acknowledge Professor Shana Poplack's permission to use these data. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (Washington, DC, January 2001) and the third U.K. Language Variation and Change conference (York, U.K., July 2001). The analysis benefited from discussions with and comments from Greg Guy, Dennis Preston, Jennifer Smith, and Gerard Van Herk, as well as several anonymous reviewers. Special thanks go to Sali Tagliamonte and Malcah Yaeger-Dror, whose comments substantially improved the article, and to Anthony Warner for help with translating the Old English examples. Any remaining errors are my own responsibility.

This paper investigates interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ε/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ε/, providing quantitative evidence that the movements of these two vowels are linked. The trajectory implied by our production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. In contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. We suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants and must perceptually accommodate accordingly.

In this study, we identify the linguistic and social predictors that condition onset /s/ weakening in speech data from sociolinguistic interviews with 72 Salvadoran Spanish speakers. In addition, we compare and contrast the explanatory power of instrumental and traditional segmental approaches. We find that the instrumental approach, which identifies flanking segments, stress, and region of origin of the speaker as conditioners of onset /s/ shortening and lowering of center of gravity, does not account for observed social variation in the data. Contrastingly, an ordinal logistic regression based on a combination of instrumental measures and perceived phonetic categories identifies flanking segment, region of origin, sex, and age of the speaker as predictors of onset /s/ weakening. We conclude that an exclusively instrumental analysis examining variation of onset /s/ thus obscures the potential social meaning of onset /s/ weakening in El Salvador.

This article investigates the role of vowel duration in the front vowel system of New Zealand English (NZE), drawing on data obtained from speakers born between the 1890s and the 1930s. After providing a brief overview of the history of short vowels in NZE, a comprehensive analysis of front vowel duration in conjunction with a number of earlier results from formant frequency measurements will be presented. It will be shown that the front vowel system of NZE shows interaction between vowel duration and formant frequency. A number of implications that follow from these patterns for the front vowel system of NZE will be discussed. It will be argued that it is reasonable to divide up the class of short front vowels in NZE into a short set (consisting only of one vowel) and a “not-so-short set.” In addition, it will be concluded that phonological class membership is irrelevant to making generalizations over patterns of movements in vowel change.

This study describes prevelar merger, the raising of low-front /æ, ɛ/ and lowering of mid-front /e/ before the voiced velar /ɡ/, in Seattle, Washington. In the most advanced part of this change in progress, all twenty speakers (age 18–62, half men, half women, all white) produced /ɛɡ/ and /eɡ/ (beg, vague) as upgliding diphthongs merged in F1 and F2 directly between their nonprevelar counterparts (dress, face). /æɡ/ (bag) was also diphthongal, but its height varied between speakers, with middle-aged men showing near-complete three-way merger with beg-vague and younger speakers raising less, suggesting reversal or avoidance of this component. Previous work lacked information about vague and thus described bag- and beg-raising as failing to reach the height of nonprevelar face. This study revealed that vague is lowered, creating a merger target for both raised beg and bag within a separate diphthongal prevelar subsystem.

The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.