This article investigates the Southern Vowel Shift—a possibly interrelated series of rotations in vowel space currently affecting the dialects of southern speakers—in terms of examining its classification as a chain-shift process and, more generally, providing a descriptive account of the phonetic character of the changes in each individual vowel class. Based on the work of Labov (1991, 1994) and Feagin (1986), it has been suggested that the Southern Shift involves changes in both the front vowels and the back vowels, with the tense and lax front vowel nuclei essentially switching places and the back vowels moving forward. The relationship of these changes in the front vowels and those in the back vowels has not been firmly established, but they appear to be driven by different social and linguistic forces. What is happening to the low front, the mid, and the low back vowel classes in the Southern Shift has only been superficially explored. A detailed instrumental analysis of the vowel systems of 25 native Memphians of selected ages, socioeconomic classes, and genders is presented, revealing the movement of vowel classes which seem to be playing an important role in the instigation or perpetuation of the Southern Shift. This analysis points out discrepancies about how previously cited vocalic changes are embedded in mid-southern speech and provides a picture of how these changes are affecting other changes in the system. The results suggest that, while many of the changes cited in the literature are indeed present in the sample, the interrelatedness of these changes and their prognosis to move to completion are not so clear.

It is usual to study a number of linguistic variables in a single speech community. The present study, however, focuses on a single phonological variable in a number of speech communities—the vocalization of /l/ in nine Australian and New Zealand cities—in order to (1) strengthen and extend the quick and anonymous field method by designing an instrument to include all relevant phonological environments; (2) demonstrate the strategic potential of moving from a unilocality to a multilocality sociolinguistics; (3) conceptualize a variationist isogloss that extends rather than displaces the core methodology of sociolinguistics; and (4) propose a conception of geography that offers mechanisms (space and place effects) to help distinguish language change processes that are universal from those that are not. Place and space represent a system of contrasts within geography. Place effects refer to the ensemble of sociolinguistic conditions within a speech locality, whereas space effects refer to the relationship between speech localities. Place effects provide a potential explanation for why spatial models fail to account adequately for the facts: that is, why some places resist the spread of innovation while other places welcome innovation.

The analysis of letters written by 19th-century African Americans shows constraints on verbal -s marking which parallel those found in the writing of Scotch-Irish immigrants in the same time period and region, specifically a subject type constraint and a proximity to subject constraint. This correlation is highly suggestive for the study of the development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This study finds no support for a basis from a creole or from Standard English for AAVE in verbal concord and concludes that some, perhaps many, African Americans used varieties of English with little or no creole influence. Earlier studies have assumed that standard dialects of English constituted the superstrate in colonial and antebellum America; this analysis makes it clear that we must examine the features of the local varieties, black and white, before making any claims about the influences of language contact on a given variety. Further, the consistent patterns of inflections found in this study show that written documents, in particular letters written by semiliterate African Americans, are a good source for further linguistic study of 19th-century language.

However the variable context is defined, it is standard variationist practice to exclude tokens outside this context from further quantitative analyses. The role of occurrences of forms in contexts that lie outside the shared space of grammaticizing constructions in variation, ranging from highly infrequent occurrences to vast and diverse territories, has yet to be adequately explored. Spanish Synthetic Future (SF) in epistemic contexts does not overlap functionally with Spanish Periphrastic Future (PF). Four Goldvarb analyses of SF-PF variation since 1600, alongside quantitative analysis of epistemic SF, reveal an intimate relationship. Beyond a parallel rise in frequency of PF and epistemic SF, a connection between epistemic SF patterns and SF-PF variation is found in shifts in relative magnitudes of effect. It is argued that quantitative analysis of frequently occurring contexts that fall outside the envelope of variation may provide valuable explanatory insight regarding diachronic shifts within the variable context.

This article examines the historical evolution of subject–verb concord in New Zealand English. We investigate the usage of the singular form of be with plural NP subjects (existentials and nonexistentials) over the past 150 years. The results demonstrate that the New Zealand English subject–verb concord system has undergone considerable reorganization during this time. Singular concord in nonexistentials occurred in early New Zealand English, but is now largely absent. In existentials, it steadily declined during the late 19th century, and then reversed this trajectory to become a well established feature of modern New Zealand English. Singular concord in New Zealand English existentials is now conditioned by a range of social and linguistic factors, and largely resembles other varieties in this respect.We are indebted to the ONZE team, particularly Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, and everyone involved in the collection and transcription of the corpora over the years. Thanks also to the students of Ling 203 2002 for their preliminary analysis of the data and lively discussion. Helpful feedback on this paper has been provided by David Britain, Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, Peter Trudgill, Heidi Quinn, the audience at the New Zealand Linguistic Society conference, and three anonymous referees. The authors are listed in alphabetical order.

The influence of linguistic and social factors on (r) in Boston and two New Hampshire towns is described. The preceding vowel and geographic, ethnic, and age-related differences were found to have strong effects. In comparison to Bostonians, New Hampshire speakers exhibit a higher rate of rhoticity, and fewer factors constrain their variability. Younger speakers are more rhotic than older speakers, as are more educated speakers and those in higher linguistic marketplace positions. This study demonstrates that these patterns fit the transmission (within Boston) and diffusion (to New Hampshire) framework (Labov, 2007) only with the addition of accommodation theory (Niedzielski & Giles, 1996), which connects our linguistic findings to evidence that many New Hampshire residents do not identify with Boston. The effects on (r) in other studies are compared to determine which effects are particular to individual communities (nonuniversal) and which occur across all communities examined. The nonuniversal effects are therefore available as measures of contact-induced change. This study introduces a method for quantitatively comparing the amount of change between communities.

À partir de deux ensembles de données recueillies principalement auprés des mêmes locuteurs à 13 ans d'intervalle, le cheminement de cinq marqueurs discursifs dans la communauté francophone de Montréal est analysé. II s'agit de alors, tu-sais, je-veux-dire, tu-sais-veux-dire et disons. L'alternance des formes restrictives juste, rien que et seulement est aussi examinée. Les résultats obtenus montrent clairement que la différenciation selon l'âge observée à partir de données synchroniques peut (a) correspondre à des emplois qui se modifient au cours de la vie des locuteurs: c'est le cas de alors dont le taux augmente en vieillissant; (b) indiquer un changement en cours: c'est le cas de tu-sais qui a connu une augmentation significative entre les deux années, et de juste qui tend a supplanter les autres variantes; (c) traduire une mode associée à une génération spécifique (cf. disons). Par ailleurs, certaines variables connaissent une progression importante dans la communauté sans être associées à un sousgroupe social particulier (le marqueur tu-sais-veux-dire).

Three analyses of /-t,d/ deletion are undertaken to investigate whether convergence with the matrix regional dialect has taken place in Los Angeles Chicano English. Two superficial analyses mistakenly find convergence. A third emic multivariate analysis finds no phonological convergence. It is argued that sonority of adjacent consonants accounts for most of the variation. In order to give an account of the degree and direction of the /-t,d/ deletion processses in Chicano English, Clement's (1988) model of nonaffixal syllabification, which is also based on sonority, is extended to this affix-affecting delection process.

Much recent work on English direct quotation assumes that the system is undergoing rapid and large-scale change via the emergence of “innovative” forms such as be like. This view is supported by synchronic evidence, but the dearth of diachronic evidence forces reconsideration of this assumption. Drawing on data representing the full history of New Zealand English, this paper presents a variationist analysis of the quotative system, providing a continuous link between present-day quotation and that of the late 19th century. It reveals a longitudinal and multifaceted trajectory of change, resulting in a highly constrained variable grammar in which language-internal contextual factors have evolved and specialized, the effects of which reverberate throughout the sector.

Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the analysis of twelve interviews sampled from the Sankoff-Cedergren corpus, we have isolated the following punctors: là ‘there’, tu sais, vous savez ‘you know’, n'est-ce pas ‘isn't it so’, hein ‘eh’, je veux dire ‘I mean to say’, moi ‘me’, osti ‘[communion] host’, vois-tu ‘do you see’, and il/elle dit, j'ai dit ‘he/she says’, ‘I said’ (used in reported discourse). Our main concern in this article is to present the distribution of punctors, within the sentence and within the discourse, and to suggest an explanation of some aspects of their conditioning in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints.

Although English relative clauses have been the subject of considerable research, few quantitative studies have traced their development over an extended period of time. The present study focuses on factors governing the choice of relative markers in restrictive relative clauses with relativized subjects from the 16th century to the present day, using both spoken and written data, and including non-standard and regional varieties. The study examines claims by Romaine (1982) that the wh-strategy has not affected spoken English, and that no major qualitative changes have occurred in the relative system since the early 16th century. The results, however, show that these claims are not correct: a major event occurred in the 17th century which had a significant impact on spoken and written English. Many areas are identified which merit further research.

This article investigates the sociolinguistic distribution of palatalization in Uruguayan Portuguese (UP), based on data collected in a bilingual town on the Uruguayan–Brazilian border. It shows that palatalization of /di/ /ti/ has entered UP as a result of recent urbanization, which has allowed greater reception of and sensitivity to urban Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Following the tradition of variationist studies, this study identifies internal and external variables that determine the distribution of palatalization in the community, and argues that the groups that acquire BP do so as a reflection of an urban orientation, different from the border cultural and linguistic tradition. Qualitative data support the idea that this process is indirectly accelerated by exposure to Brazilian television, which provides a linguistic model for the groups that seek one. This is a new interpretation, in that previous studies have claimed that UP, as an oral minority language, is monostylistic dialect with no linguistic model.Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the 2001 American Association of Applied Linguistics and 2002 NWAVE meetings.

Two male speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese varied the endpoints of High Rising and Mid-Low Rising tones and merged them in both directions under experimental conditions. The variation and merger of the two rising tones raise the possibility that at least four tonal subsystems may coexist within the Hong Kong Cantonese speech community. Sociolinguistic research over the past 20 years has documented variation and change among Cantonese sound segments but not the tones. Tonal variation in Hong Kong Cantonese appears to be a potentially important sociolinguistic variable.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 33rd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics in Trang, Thailand, on October 5, 2000. The research reported here was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. PolyU 5249/99H Linguistics) and by Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Grant G-YB57.

Traditional notions of dialect are qualitative, and perceived dialects are difficult to reconcile with the evidence of actual production of dialect feature. Traditional dialect boundaries are similarly tied to qualitative judgements. More recently, various quantitative approaches have been attempted to try to capture dialect boundaries, each with its won problems. We have achieved some success with an objective quantitative analysis of separate dialect features from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). Our findings suggest that a mathematical modeling of areal variation of dialect features, combined with a reassessment of traditional notions of dialect, could contribute to our knowledge of language, as well as document regional differences at the time of the LAMSAS survey.

A variationist account of how direct quotations are framed in spoken Spanish requires definition of the variable and the envelope of variation followed by investigation of linguistic, stylistic, and social constraints. The variable is defined as a set of three strategies for directly quoting the speech, gestures, and sound effects of people, animals, or things in the natural world, real or imagined, faithfully or not. These strategies involve verbs of direct report, a bare noun phrase (Y yo, “¡¿Ay qué hago?!” ‘And I, “Oh, what should I do?’), and freestanding quotation with no frame. Investigation of linguistic constraints finds influence both from within and above the sentence. These include clause type, person, number, animacy of speaker, quotation content, switch reference, and a “birds of a feather” effect. Data on stylistic constraints provide evidence for style as a function of attention to form. Social constraints reveal complicated, yet familiar influences of age, sex, and class, with teenagers showing parallels to Eckert's work on gender and variation. Evidence also emerges for both age grading and a change in progress.

To begin, we review three theoretical problem areas in the field of research into phonological variation in children. Next, we present the results of a cross-sectional study of two groups of children, aged 6 to 7 years and 10 to 12 years, relating to the deletion of post-consonantal word-final /R/ in French (production and judgments of acceptability). In an experimental study, we then examine the mechanism involved in the learning of words with a variable /R/. Finally, the interpretation of the results within the framework of a cognitive conception of variation leads us to four conclusions: (i) children have a tendency to copy adult surface forms rather than to encode a variable rule; (ii) orthography causes the late encoding of certain variable /R/s; (iii) the establishment of linguistic factors precedes that of social factors; and (iv) age-related changes are not guided by the sociolinguistic value that groups consciously attribute to the variables.

Although it has generally been recognized that Old English was a verb-final language with verb-seconding, the existence of clauses with main verb complements and adjuncts appearing after the otherwise clause-final verb seems to contradict the hypothesis that the language was strictly verb-final in underlying structure. There are three possible analyses to explain these clauses: variable word order in the base, leftward verb movement, and rightward movement of NPs and PPs. In this article, we demonstrate that only the third analysis adequately explains the data of the Early Old English poem Beowulf. Moreover, by investigating the mapping between syntactic structures and metrical units, we provide evidence for two types of rightward movement with two distinct structures: heavy NP shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postposed NP, and PP extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much less common.

Persistence, the tendency to repeat a recently used variant in speech, has been observed for a range of sociolinguistic variables. This paper uses quantitative data from ING and TD in Philadelphia English to show that persistence reflects morphological structure and can therefore be a useful tool for defining variables at the phonology–morphology interface. For both ING and TD, persistence arises only when prime and target belong to the same morphological category, with additional interactions between morphological category and lexical repetition. This pattern of results suggests that both the linguistic variables and cognitive processes at play are multifactorial.

A combination of observational and experimental data from recent research into the intonation of New Zealand English highlights generational differences in rising intonation patterns. As well as a general increase in the incidence of rising intonation in statement utterances, the data reveal a shift from late rises in mid-age speakers to earlier rise onsets in younger speakers. These differences are discussed in the context of the intonational phonology of New Zealand English and in terms of the functional need for a distinction between question and statement rises.The author would like to thank participants at the 2003 UK Language Variation and Change conference for comments on an oral presentation of the data discussed in this article, and the Royal Society of New Zealand for financial support under Marsden grant VUW604. Special thanks go to Bob Ladd for insightful observations on an earlier version of this article.

The present study focuses on the use of the three pragmatic expressions (you know, you see, and I mean) by female and male British English speakers. The aim of the study is two-fold: first, to establish actual differences in usage between men and women over a number of functions of the three pragmatic expressions; second, to find out whether such differences could be correlated to same-sex as opposed to mixed-sex interaction. The results of my investigation show that there are gender-specific differences in the use of pragmatic expressions. Some of the more salient differences were that the women tended to use pragmatic expressions between complete propositions to connect consecutive arguments, whereas the men preferred to use them either as attention-drawing devices or to signal repair work. The two groups also showed differences from the point of view of absolute frequencies, so that, generally speaking, the men used the expressions about 25% more often than the women and in some contexts up to twice as much. The results also point to the use of pragmatic expressions being largely dependent on whether the conversation takes place in a same-sex or in a mixed-sex environment, so that they tend to be used more sparingly in mixed-sex as compared to same-sex interaction.