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 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.

This article examines the assibilation of the vibrant /-r/ in word final position in Mexican Spanish in an urban and a rural community in Moroleón (Guanajuato, Mexico) and Kennett Square (Pennsylvania, United States). The data was collected according to traditional sociolinguistic methodology during 1995 and 1996. The analysis of the data uses linguistic factors combined with socioeconomic factors that include movement seen as social mobility and/or migratory tendencies in the population. Through the intertwining of these factors interesting tendencies can be observed: female preference for the innovative and prestigious variant as a way to acquire power in a society where women do not have a voice to claim or seek social mobility and power; the influence of the linguistic market in the community, and the effects of accommodation.My thanks go to the anonymous reader who reviewed this paper. I am responsible for any shortcomings found here.

This article investigates the grammaticalization process of liao as a main verb in 10th-century vernacular texts to le as an aspectual particle in modern Chinese. I propose that two processes are involved. First, with the “resultative construction” coming into existence in the language, some instances of liao were reanalyzed as the phase complement of the new morphological construction. Second, other instances of the verb began to lose their verbness by taking sentential subjects and occurring in temporal clauses only. These processes gave rise to the positional change of liao from after the complement of the verb to before the complement of the verb of le.

This article is the first variationist analysis of speakers of an analytic language acquiring an agglutinative language: we investigate the acquisition of the rich Hungarian verbal morphological system by adult Chinese immigrants to Budapest. Multivariate analyses of data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with nine untutored Chinese learners of Hungarian suggest that the acquisition of verbal morphology is systematic. Factors that have been identified as significant in studies of the acquisition of other languages, such as frequency, perceptual salience, morphophonological regularity, and semantic complexity, all play a significant role in the acquisition of Hungarian as a second language. The marking of definiteness or indefiniteness of the object on the verb, a rare aspect of verbal morphology, also has a significant effect. Chinese learners are more likely to mark definite than indefinite forms of the verb, despite the fact that these forms express largely redundant functions and that indefinites are more frequent. Hence, our data allow for an analysis of relative weights of factors affecting acquisition and address the issue of the relative weight of frequency over other factors.

Few acoustic studies of the intervocalic consonant lenition in central Italian dialects (a process known as Gorgia Toscana) have been undertaken. This study examines speech data from Florentine Italian in order to describe the process of Gorgia Toscana quantitatively and to assess the roles of physiological, perceptual, phonological, and social factors in the process. Results of acoustic and statistical analysis indicate gradient and variable output, with certain patterns occurring in the variation. The observations that emerge from the data cannot all be accounted for if Gorgia Toscana is characterized as a purely phonetic, phonological, or socially driven process of sound change. Rather, different aspects of the process are attributed to different motivators: gradience and velar preference to articulator movements, resistance of nonvelar lenition to perceptual constraints, targeting of a natural class and categorical weakening to abstract featural representations, and intersubject variation in velar lenition to external social factors.

The present study analyzes present be leveling with pivot is (as in I is, we is, the old dogs is) in Tristan da Cunha English, a variety of South Atlantic English that developed in geographic isolation and under intense contact conditions. The findings, based on data from a total of 45 speakers born throughout the 20th century, indicate that community-wide variation correlates with social history; whereas present be was subject to (near-)categorical leveling until the 1940s, an opening-up phase after World War II saw interaction with speakers of other dialects on the island, which triggered an increase of a standard am/is/are concord pattern. Variability began to increase from the 1950s onward and the community has now frayed out widely in its usage of leveled is forms (ranging from 10% to over 90% in speakers of the youngest generation, born in the 1980s). The internal constraint ranking for preceding environment in younger generations was partially restructured, which suggests that the social changes affected the grammatical variable. Three outliers represent exonormative orientation and outward mobility.

This paper examines individual differences in constraints on linguistic variation in light of Labov's (2007) proposal that adult change (diffusion) disrupts systems of constraints and Tamminga, MacKenzie, and Embick's (2016) typology of constraints. It is shown that, in pooling data from multiple speakers, some of the complexity in structured community variation may be overlooked. Data on rhoticity from speakers of Bristol English are compared to 34 previous studies of rhoticity in varieties of English around the world. Constraints found to be consistent across varieties are also found to be consistent across speakers of Bristol English, whereas those that differ between varieties also differ between individuals, implying that only those which differ are truly part of the grammar, and that these are indeed disrupted by diffusion.

Variable agreement in Brazilian Portuguese is subject to social stigma. It was brought to the general public's attention in 2011 in a heated nationwide sociolinguistic debate triggered by TV Globo, the principal network. In order to isolate objective factors underlying this debate, we examine the variable education in a trend study of Rio de Janeiro speech. Relying on logistic model relative weights and their corresponding ranges, we use polarization to designate the magnitude of these ranges. Polarization of the education variable in 1980 was moderate, whereas in 2000, polarization becomes extreme in an increasingly uneven social distribution of standard marked forms. The increased effect of education is also reflected in a comparison with the statistical effect of mass media: in 1980, media contact had a stronger effect than education did, whereas in 2000, education exhibits a stronger effect. The results reveal objective correlates to speakers' subjective reactions, suggesting that public discussion of linguistic prejudice would be useful to the community, which can profit from results of sociolinguistic research in a humanistic and emancipatory way, as foreseen by Sankoff (1988a).

St. Louis, Missouri, though located in the central Midlands, is a complex city dialectally. Nevertheless, over the past 50 years most dialectologists and sociolinguists have identified the area as primarily a Northern or Northern/North Midland speech island in a sea of Southern and especially South Midland forms. This article is concerned with whether the city's strong affinity for the Northern/North Midland dialect continues into the 21st century. Small pieces of evidence presented over the last generation regarding the evolution of the area's language have shown that different features of its pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon are variously shifting both toward and away from a Northern/North Midland standard. More comprehensive evidence from a dialectological/sociolinguistic survey completed in 1982–1983 and replicated in 2001, however, suggests that overall the Northern/North Midland standard has been not only preserved, but greatly strengthened.

This paper probes the well-documented morphological effect on coronal stop deletion (CSD, also called /t,d/-deletion), by which there is more deletion in monomorphemes like mist than in regular past tense forms like missed. We observe that there are, in principle, additional morphological distinctions that could be made within each category: for instance, the “regular past” category contains perfect and passive participles; the “monomorpheme” category typically contains compounds and suffixed forms. We demonstrate that several of these newly introduced distinctions actually have significant effects on CSD rates in a corpus of Philadelphia English. And we argue that these new distinctions are worth attending to because they have consequences for two existing accounts of the basic morphological effect. In each case, we show that the existing accounts do not straightforwardly capture the additional significant distinctions we identify, calling the explanatory power of those accounts into question.

This article examines three representations of South African Indian English in print: The Adventures of Applesammy and Naidoo (1946) by Ray Rich; The Lahnee's Pleasure (c. 1972) by Ronnie Govender; and The Wedding (2001) by Imraan Coovadia. The use of dialect is a defining feature of all three texts. I show that the tools provided by variation theory are particularly useful in the analysis of literature that uses direct speech to portray characters and types. In particular, the principles of variation theory can be used to: (a) reveal the nature of stereotyping in the first text (a parody), which relies on the suppression of variation, and the generalization of linguistic and social characteristics; (b) evaluate the fidelity of a “realist” dialect representation of the community in the second text (a play); and (c) help characterize the nonrealist, nonstereotyping, imaginative use of language in the third text (a post-modern novel).An early version of the research for this article was presented at the IAWE (International Association of World Englishes) Conference, Potchefstroom University, 2001; at seminars at the University of Cape Town and University of Pennsylvania in 2002; and at NWAVE (New Ways of Analysing Variation in English and Other Languages), Stanford University, 2002. A revised and expanded version was presented at ASNEL (Association for the Study of New English Literatures), Magdeburg, 2003. I thank participants at these conferences and three anonymous LVC referees for feedback and comments, Malcah Yaeger-Dror for discussions of her related research, and Sarah and Clare Johnson for the graphics. I am especially grateful to the University of Cape Town's Research Committee for a grant that supported this research.

In this paper, I present an analysis of the pluralization of haber ‘there is/are’ in Puerto Rican Spanish (e.g., habían fiestas ‘there were parties’) as an ongoing language change from below in which the impersonal argument-structure construction (<AdvPhaberObj>) is being replaced by a personal variant (<AdvPhaberSubj>). Speakers pluralize presentational haber in about 41% of the cases, and linguistic conditioning factors are ‘typical action chain-position of the noun's referent,’ polarity of the clause, verb tense, comprehension-to-production priming, and production-to-production priming. I argue that the effect of these independent variables can be traced back to three cognitive factors: the preference for unmarked coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. Social distributions can also be modeled in constructionist frameworks, with results for social class, formality, and gender advocating in favor of considering this variation as an ongoing change from below, which allows speakers to position themselves in terms of gender and social class.

In Newfoundland French the verb does not agree in number with a plural subject in one particular construction–subject relative clauses–but rather displays default singular marking. Agreement is made with the subject relative pronoun, which does not have a morphological feature for number associated with it. This absence of a number feature results in a form consistently spelled out as homophonous with the third-person singular. Gender agreement transmitted in subject relatives containing a predicate adjective is evidence that number marking is at issue, not agreement in general. An exception to this pattern is the (variable) marking of plural agreement in the il y en a construction, explained in terms that are independent from the analysis of the default singular. Newfoundland French agreement is then compared with data from other French varieties, and the approach taken in this study is compared with those of other studies of grammatical variation.

Analogical leveling in progress of a potential suffix in Tôkyô Japanese is analyzed within a quantitative paradigm. The phenomenon, whereby an innovative potential and a conservative potential alternate, is shown through a multivariate analysis to be controlled by five factors: sociological variable complex, length of the verb stem, conjugation pattern of the verb, the following inflectional form, and embeddedness of the clause containing the suffix. Most of the linguistic constraints are observed crosslinguistically in language change or variation, giving further credibility to the analysis. Although traditional frequency-based theory of analogical leveling would predict stem frequency to be a possible factor, I demonstrate that it is not in this case. As a principled explanation for this apparent lack of contribution from frequency, the Revised Frequency Hypothesis is proposed.

Traditional eastern New England (ENE) dialect features are rapidly receding in many parts of northern New England. Because this ENE shift involves seven different phonological features, it provides a prime opportunity to explore different rates of change across multiple linguistic variables at the same time in the same social setting. The present study is the first acoustic sociophonetic investigation of central New Hampshire, and it is based on new field data from 51 adult speakers. Results show that young generations are discarding many traditional ENE pronunciations in favor of leveled, nonregional forms, yet the changes are affecting some variables more quickly than others. Many distinctive traditional ENE variants (nonrhotic speech, intrusive-r, fronted father, “broad-a” in bath) are quickly receding, while others (fronted start and hoarse/horse distinction) are somewhat more conservative, being “overshadowed” by the presence of (r) as a variable within the same syllable. We frame our apparent-time analysis in terms of Sankoff's (2013a) notion of “age vectors” and Labov's (2012) “outward orientation” of the language faculty, illustrating how different generations are juggling multiple age vectors within the same overall shift, and how one variable can overshadow another variable within the same syllable.

This article presents a multivariate analysis of adversative conjunction choice (among no, da, and odnako) in Russian, drawing implications for sentence production and semantic theory. The two main factors shown to influence conjunction choice are the types of the conjoined constituents and the semantic subtype of the adversative relation. One of the conjunctions, da, is favored when the conjoined elements are of different syntactic types and disfavored when they are of the same type, which is argued to suggest that the conjunction is chosen at a point in sentence production when the types of both of the conjoined constituents are known (Uryson, 2006). In addition, the conjunction da is heavily favored by the “preventive” adversative meaning (Sannikov, 1989:177; Serebrjanaja, 1976), as in I would go but I don't have the money. This quantitative meaning-construction association is argued to support the view that the preventive adversative is a distinct semantic subtype of adversativity (Payne, 1985; contra Foolen, 1991:84).

A characteristic of children's social orders is gender segregation. When children can choose, girls play more with girls and boys with boys. This begins around age three and peaks in later childhood. If children separate into same-gender groups, their interactions across the gender line will not be as frequent as those with members of the same sex. Following on Bloomfield's assertion (1933:46) that “density of communication” results in the “most important differences of speech” within a community, I predict that differences will increasingly emerge between girls and boys. I test this using two sociolinguistic variables, (dh) and (ing), in the English spoken by children in an elementary school. The prediction is supported. Results contribute to research into language socialization and the acquisition of gendered linguistic expression.

Investigations into dialect emergence are most often based on data from manuscripts and on comparative and internal reconstructions. Seldom does the opportunity arise to monitor the selection of competing norms during the emergence stage because the data to postulate the linguistic marketplace (and hence to know what forms were likely to have been in competition) are unavailable. The case of dialect emergence in Thyborøn, Denmark, over the past century offers just this rare opportunity. A historical demographic profile from the town's census data, dating back to its inception in the 1890s, enables a comparative analysis of the input dialects and variable linguistic forms that were in competition. It is possible to trace the linguistic and social variables at play during the emergence stage of this new dialect, following the tradition of research by Omdal (1977), Dorian (1981), Trudgill (1986), and Kerswill (1994b), among others. The findings contribute to an explanatory model of dialect emergence and transformation.

The relatively recent application of sociolinguistic methodology to the study of language history offers techniques for approaching regional and social variation and change in earlier stages of English. This article focuses on changes in written norms in the history of English, examining several morphosyntactic variables that were in flux in England in the 15th and 16th centuries: the third person present singular verb endings, the third person plural be, and the Northern Present-Tense Rule for third person plural verbs. These variables are significant because each of them presents two competing forms in the north of England in the Early Modern period: a local form and a supralocal form. The present analysis, after examining the correlation between the linguistic variables and gender and social function, concludes that the results may be understood through a conflict model in which variants supralocalize to accommodate the demands of alternative linguistic markets.