Some Portuguese verbs have two past participle forms: one regular (stem + -do), and the other irregular (often identical to the first person singular present indicative). Per grammars, the perfect auxiliaries ter/haver take regulars, while irregulars appear with passive/adjectival ser/estar. To test these claims, we analyzed naturally-occurring data from Brazil (twentieth century) and Portugal (nineteenth and twentieth). We coded 1077 tokens from 21 verbs for ten predictors and performed mixed-effects logistic regressions in R. Irregulars appear with ter/haver 54% overall and in 68% of cases from Portugal. Our results demonstrate that past participle choice is determined by the interaction of several linguistic factors. While lexical verb is the most significant predictor of participle selection, verbs with irregular participles identical to the first person singular present indicative occur in the irregular significantly more than other verbs. We conclude that analogical processes underpin the variation. This conclusion allows us to adjudicate between competing accounts of past participle choice in Portuguese.

Nigerian Arabic has two structures for coding N + N relations: one in which the properties of the possessed noun are severely constrained and one in which the possessed and possessor nouns allow a full complement of modifiers. Similar to the methodology of Poplack and her collaborators (e.g., Sankoff, Poplack, & Vanniarajan, 1990), a normative distribution of nouns in the two possessive structures is established based on a corpus of monolingual (non-codeswitched) Nigerian Arabic texts. In a corpus of codeswitched texts, the distribution of English lexical insertions is found to deviate markedly from these normative patterns. The notion of iconicity is invoked to explain the skewed insertional patterns. It is hypothesized on the basis of various psycholinguistic studies that insertions from English are harder to access than are native lexemes. To compensate for slower access time, speakers match these insertions with the possessive structure that requires a minimal amount of manipulation for rapid embedding. This, it is shown, is the less iconic of the two possessive constructions. What emerges is a distinctive pattern of possessives characteristic of codeswitched Nigerian Arabic. After briefly testing the iconicity hypothesis against insertional patterns in Hausa and Standard Arabic, two other languages well attested in the codeswitched corpus, the question is addressed as to whether the codeswitched variety represents a code unto itself.

Enumeration is a figure of speech which evokes a thematic set through the concatenation of several of its elements. Its linguistic structure is variable with respect to the number of components, their syntactic nature, the use of coordinating markers and of the processes of repetition, reduction, and expansion. In studying the variation among 3,464 tokens of enumeration in Montreal French, we explain how the constitutive processes interact in terms of Slobin's (1977) charges to language: be clear, processible in real time, quick and easy, and expressive. We suggest how the six structural factors or processes contribute to the fulfillment of these charges. The data analysis evaluates the interaction of the processes and, indirectly, the pertinence of each of Slobin's four functional criteria. This analysis is a new method for attributing a pattern of process co-occurrences to a number of functions, focusing on how these processes compensate for, or cooperate with, each other.

Age-grading—a cornerstone of sociolinguistic theorizing—is hypothesized to follow a U-shaped pattern. Vernacular forms peak in adolescence, abate in middle age, and increase again in retirement, forming a vernacular tail. A complete understanding of age-grading has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence across the entire adult trajectory and a relatively narrow understanding of speakers’ motivations to change. This paper presents data from a dynamic panel dataset of Tyneside English speakers, covering successive cohorts over the entire adult lifespan. An analysis of (ing) reveals that the U-shaped curve is occupationally niched; only professional educators demonstrate clear retrenchment followed by a tail. Drawing on educational policy research, we argue this effect is largely driven by institutional (and heavily policed) expectations of UK educational policies. We are the first to demonstrate the occupationally niched nature of the U-shaped curve and provide quantitative evidence of the effect of educational policy on linguistic production.

Shifts in the frequencies of English modals of obligation have been linked to shifts in modal function and changing interpersonal authority. Interpretation of over 2,000 tokens in spontaneous speech data recorded in Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s and 2010s establishes a replicable classification of obligation meanings, based on source of obligation, with a three-way distinction between Hierarchical authority, General circumstances, and Personal choice. Competing expressions for these obligation types, besides have to, have got to, and older must, include should and, recently, need to. Two sets of regression analyses provide evidence of covariation of form and function: first, the linguistic and social conditioning of forms, with meaning as one of the predictors; and second, the conditioning of function, with modal form as a predictor. Need to rises in real time and so does talk of personal obligation. However, the change in modal function is concomitant with, but independent of, shifting modal forms.

A construction very widely used in Old English and Old Germanic more broadly are correlatives introduced by an adverbial or conditional subclause, as in When you've done your homework, (then) you can come back (Old English: ‘…, then can you come back’). Correlatives originate from a paratactic clause structure, making use of resumptive adverbs such as then belonging to the Old Germanic series of demonstrative adverbs, whose syntactic niche was the clause-initial position, particularly in Verb Second main clauses. Paratactic structure in correlatives is diagnosed by the presence of a resumptive adverb. We show that the correlative use of resumptive adverbs is sensitive to both clause-internal and clause-external variables: mood, subclause-internal particles, negation, subject type, subclause weight, text type, translation. Correlatives decline from late Old English onward. Although it may seem tempting to attribute this to the loss of Verb Second in English, it resulted primarily from the loss of the original Germanic resumptive adverbs.

In Early Modern English, double comparatives were often encountered in both spoken and written language. The present article investigates the redundantly marked comparative worser in relation to its irregular, but etymologically justified, counterpart worse. My aim is to examine the diachronic development of the form as well as its distribution in the written language of the 16th and 17th centuries. Two detailed corpus studies are used to reveal the set of parameters underlying the variation between worse and worser, which include system congruity, semantics, and standardization effects. However, the focus here is on the tendency to maintain an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, known as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. This prosodic principle (which has been argued to be particularly influential in English) turns out to be responsible for most of the results obtained in the analysis of the corpus data.

This article describes five dialect-based changes in progress in the Southern Basque town of Oiartzun. Based on data collected in sociolinguistic interviews with thirteen local Basque speakers, this article examines dialectal variation in elements chosen from different parts of the grammar: two lexical items, two morphosyntactic alternations on auxiliary verbs, and a phonological process, apheresis. In particular, several claims are made about dialect contact in Oiartzun. Strong apparent-time evidence exists that four out of five of these elements are undergoing change. Older speakers tend toward forms characteristic of dialects to the east of Oiartzun, whereas younger speakers prefer western forms. In each case, male speakers appear to be leading the process of change; men show significantly higher frequencies of incoming western forms than women. The data, however, provide little support for the hypothesis that the recently introduced Basque literary standard has influenced young people's vernacular.I am deeply grateful to the people of Oiartzun for their generous support and hospitality during my stay in their beautiful town. Special thanks to Iñaki Arbelaitz for sharing with me his encyclopedic knowledge of local culture, language, and geography. Also, thanks to Larraitz Sanzberro, Katrin Abal, Inazio Retegi, Xabier Artiagoitia, Roslyn Frank, and Toki Alaiko denak. Thanks to John Singler for invaluable theoretical and methodological guidance in this study and to Renée Blake, Begoña Echeverria, Gregory Guy, John Singler, Koldo Zuazo, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts. All shortcomings are my own.

This study reports on a sociophonetic investigation of dress-lowering in a rural dialect in northeast Scotland. Previous analyses have indicated that this change is ongoing in a number of varieties worldwide, propelled by a combination of linguistic constraints and favorable associations with Anglo urban Californian varieties. In this paper we examine whether these influences play out in a relic dialect previously resistant to more supralocal changes. Through an analysis of a range of acoustic correlates, we track the progress of this change across three generations of speakers. Analysis of the constraints suggests that in this variety the change is driven by internal pressures, where it is significantly constrained by phonetic environment, specifically, following laterals. Further analysis of this environment reveals increasing distinction on the F2-F1 spectrum, where /l/s have become lighter in onsets and darker in codas. Our analyses reveal that these changes may be viewed as complementary, as they share the same acoustic correlates, suggesting that system-internal pressures are the primary driving force of dress-lowering in this variety.

This article is a quantitative diachronic study of the object markers ba˘ and jiāng in Chinese. Traditionally, it has been claimed (Chao, 1968; Li & Thompson, 1981; Lü, 1955; Wang, 1943–44; among others) that ba˘ and Ji¯ng have undergone the same process of grammaticalization and have acquired the same function over time, so that they have become interchangeable. The present article challenges this view and provides evidence showing that, in the texts where both are used, each has its own distinctive functions. In the early stage of their grammaticalization, the major difference between them is the direction of motion relative to the agent: ba˘ tends to express motion toward the agent, whereas Jiāng tends to express motion away from the agent. Later, when both ba˘ and Jiāng become object markers, ba˘ is more likely to be used in informal texts, whereas Jiāng is more likely to be used in formal texts. I argue that it is this difference that led to the disappearance of Jiāng in written texts of modern times.

This article concerns infinitival relative clauses, such as Mary is the person to ask, and their distribution in spoken English. It analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified NP (the relative complex) in the matrix clause. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spoken British English, I show that the grammatical function of the antecedent in the infinitival relative clause depends on the function of the antecedent in the matrix clause. I argue that the distribution of antecedent functions in the matrix clause can be explained in terms of thematic properties and information structure of the clauses in which the infinitival relatives occur. A key notion is that speakers center their discourse around information that they assume to be important for the communicative event.

This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained in terms of syntactic calquing from the speakers’ left-branching L1s. However, the order GEN+N does not occur with the same frequency in all types of genitive noun phrases but is affected by several lexicosemantic and formal features of both the head and the genitive modifier. Therefore, we are not dealing with simple pattern borrowing. Rather, L1 influence strengthens certain universal tendencies that are not motivated by contact. The comparison with monolinguals’ Russian, in which prepositive genitives sporadically occur too, supports this hypothesis.

This paper examines variation in Louisiana French nasalized vowels across two time periods: 1977 and 2010–2011. Non-contrastive nasal vowels are typical of English, while contrastive nasal vowels are typical of French. Louisiana French is an endangered language variety. Instead of simplifying to a single type of vowel nasality, as might be expected in a situation of heavy language contact and language shift, Louisiana French maintains a system of phonetic and phonemic nasal vowels. Digitized interviews with 32 native speakers from lower Lafourche Parish provide 2801 data points for analysis. In contrast with previous assertions in the literature, quantitative analyses reveal that contextual nasalization operates almost exclusively within the domain of the word, not the syllable.

The existence of an allophonic split between raised onsets before voiceless consonants and more open onsets in other environments is well-established for the vowels in the price lexical set. It has also been observed—less frequently—for the vowels in the mouth lexical set. We provide evidence of this allophonic raising split in the English spoken on the Isles of Scilly (a group of islands off the southwest coast of England) where the pattern is more robust for mouth than price. We propose that the allophonic raising split on Scilly is the outcome of dialect contact and natural phonetic tendencies, as observed elsewhere. However, by reflecting on the specifics of the location studied, and drawing on a perception study, we hypothesise that the trajectory of the pattern may be the consequence of the different social and regional qualities indexed by mouth and price and the interaction of these meanings with ideologies about Scilly and its speakers.

This paper tests the idea that the speech rate with which surrounding words are spoken affects the mental representation of words and conditions production of words. This possibility is operationalized by measuring a word's ratio of occurrence in speaker-relative fast speech. Other variables shown in the literature to influence speech rate are controlled for in a 10,000-iteration bootstrapping procedure of a mixed-effect linear regression model. The results of the analysis of 39,397 tokens of content words from 1,232 word types in English display a significant effect for a word's ratio of conditioning in speaker-relative fast speech, although the effect size is small or very small. Other variables shown in the literature to condition speech rate also significantly condition speech rate here. This paper suggests that in addition to other aspects of the context of use of words, contextual speech rate also influences the mental representation of words.

Romance languages differ as regards the adjectival or article-like status of prenominal possessives. While in Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Old Spanish, they pattern like adjectives and co-occur with articles, and in French and Modern Spanish, they compete with the latter for the same structural position. The different distribution of possessives is claimed to reflect distinct stages on a grammaticalization cline (Alexiadou, 2004). This paper focuses on a variety of Central American Spanish where the Old Spanish co-occurrence of an (indefinite) article and a possessive in the prenominal domain has been maintained (as in una mi amiga ‘a my friend’). Based on a variationist study of interview data extracted from the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish for Spain and America (PRESEEA) Guatemala corpus, I will argue that it is indeed the indefinite article that shows signs of retarded grammaticalization. Yet, rather than extending to the variety as a whole, this retardation is context-specific.

The current study analyzes the trajectory of the goose vowel in Received Pronunciation (RP) over ten decades (1920s-2010s). Recordings of eighty-seven RP speakers were transcribed in ELAN, and vowel tokens were extracted by FAVE, measuring F1 and F2 values at the midpoint. Showing the life-cycle of a sound change from start to (almost) completion, the results confirm that goose-fronting has been an active sound change for many decades in RP, with F2 starting to increase in the middle of the twentieth century and accelerated changes in the 1970s and the 2010s. We observe similar predictor strengths of linguistic factors as in previous studies. The results are interpreted in light of the social changes in the social composition of the RP group in the second part of the twentieth century, involving increased dialect contact.

The results of a study of the variation between the palatal and alveolarpronunciation of the coronal sonorants /l/ and /n/ in a rural Greek communityare presented. The study integrates the methodologies of both large surveys andethnographic studies and shows that there is change in progress as youngerspeakers adopt the alveolar pronunciation through contact with urban varieties.The results of the statistical analysis indicate that the variation isdetermined by factors such as gender, education, attitude toward the localcommunity, and awareness of the variation. The responses given in the interviewsreveal that the palatal pronunciation is stigmatized as vlachika, a term that connotes rural rather than urban,uneducated rather than educated, and naive rather than sophisticated attributes.This information coupled with a closer look at the behavior of particularindividuals helps elucidate aspects of the pattern of variation that at firstappear to be counterintuitive.

The aim of this study is to further contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the nature of “morphosyntactic lifespan change,” defined here as observable shifts in the grammatical choices individuals make between competing morphosyntactic structures. Through a quantitative case study of competition between two types of ing-nominals in seventeenth-century English, in which we factor in the grammatical contexts in which the variant structures can be used, we show that individuals vary in the extent to which they participate in the contextual diffusion of a new structure. We furthermore show that there is interindividual variability with respect to whether and what kind of lifespan change—frequency, constraint, and inventory change—is attested and highlight different patterns of intraindividual change: progressive, retrograde, and “mixed.”

This paper investigates the question of whether, as is often popularly believed, there may be systematic linguistic differences between different neighborhoods within a city by testing the independence of “part of town” as a factor separate from social class in the north-force merger in Manchester, UK, in a sample of 122 speakers. The phonemic contrast is explored in minimal-pair tests, Cartesian distance, and Pillai scores. In opposition to most dialects of English, the north-force contrast is still present in Manchester, displaying a pattern of fine social stratification, with lower socioeconomic levels having a stronger distinction. The merger is in progress in the city, but it is slower in north Manchester, showing a significantly greater distinction than the rest of the city, independent of social class. The results indicate a degree of social evaluation of the vowels, with implications for the question of the social meaning of a merger in progress.