British Sign Language is a language exhibiting extensive regional variation and undergoing rapid change, in a period of changing attitudes to the language and the community of signers. Fingerspelling (a representation of written English) is an aspect of BSL that reflects these variations strongly. Analysis of interviews with Deaf signers appearing on BBC television shows that use of fingerspelling may vary according to various demographic factors and the signers' use of voice. There has also been a decrease in the overall use of fingerspelling in BSL over the last 10 years. Strong evidence is presented to support the claim that fingerspelling in BSL is of two distinct linguistic types. Some fingerspelling involves code-mixing with English, whereas some has become incorporated into the language itself. Further evidence for such a “discontinuity” between the code-mixing and borrowing is presented and discussed.

Whereas the alternation between the s-genitive (the New Year's message) and the of-genitive (the message of the New Year) is well documented, our study offers a more accountable analysis of genitive variation by including noun-noun (NN)-genitives (the New Year message). We consider four different variable contexts (s versus of, NN versus of, NN versus s, and NN versus s versus of ), which we analyze using regression analysis. The dataset consists of 10,054 variable genitives drawn from the Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. The material covers the period between 1650 and 2000, thus enabling us to track the evolution of variable genitive grammar in real time. We report that there is an overall drift toward the NN-genitive, which is preferred over other variants when constituent noun phrases are short, possessor constituents are inanimate, and possessum constituents are thematic. In addition to these substantive contributions, we showcase methods of dealing with a complex dataset covering nonbinary grammatical variation.

This paper examines the acquisition of the variable rules constraining Spanish syllable-final /s/-lenition in Chilean Spanish–speaking children, and whether adult-to-adult speech differs from child-directed speech in the production of s-lenition. The data of 10 children (ages 2;04–5;09) and their caregivers is presented. Tokens of syllable final /s/ were coded for pronunciation and a variable-rule analysis examining the effect of various linguistic and extralinguistic constraints was carried out. The results show that child and caregiver use of s-lenition is similar to that found in adult-to-adult speech; however, two of the youngest children showed near-categorical behavior. This paper highlights the important role of caregiver input on acquisition of s-lenition and proposes that production of s-lenition in utterance-final position in the input (caregiver's speech) is linked to young children's acquisition of s-lenition; young children exposed to an input with high rates of [s] in utterance-final position acquire s-lenition earlier.

Drawing on terminology, concepts, and ideas developed in quantitative morphological typology, the present study takes an exclusive interest in the coding of grammatical information. It offers a sweeping overview of intralingual variability in terms of overt grammatical analyticity (the text frequency of free grammatical markers), grammatical syntheticity (the text frequency of bound grammatical markers), and grammaticity (the text frequency of grammatical markers, bound or free) in English. The variational dimensions investigated include geography, text types, and real time. Empirically, the study taps into a number of publicly accessible text corpora that comprise a large number of different varieties of English. Results are interpreted in terms of how speakers and writers seek to achieve communicative goals while minimizing different types of complexity.

In this article, I conduct a quantitative analysis of negative concord in Buckie, a relic dialect from the northeast of Scotland, and compare these findings with transported varieties of English in North America. Two major results arise from the analysis. First, Buckie has high rates of use of negative concord to indeterminates within the same clause, as do all the dialects included in the study. Second, negative concord in other environments is found in certain varieties in the New World that have no counterparts in the Old World. I suggest that the quantitative similarities can be explained in terms of the primitive status of negative concord in vernacular varieties of English, in combination with a shared linguistic heritage during the colonial period. The qualitative differences demonstrate that contexts of linguistic heterogeneity in North America during the early colonization period led to an extension and restructuring of the original rules.

This article provides evidence from a small city in the northern United States for Canadian raising, the raising of /au/ and /ai/ to [AU] and [Ai]. As hypothesized, /ai/-raising is much more frequent and regular, but /au/-raising also occurs. Speech style is statistically significant only for /ai/-raising. The raising of /ai/ is not significant for gender or age, but /au/-raising seems to be led by young women. This evidence suggests that, while /ai/-raising has been fully entrenched in this phonological system for some time, /au/-raising is a new and separate change in progress. The /au/-diphthong is also often fronted when raised, a finding similar to several Canadian studies (Chambers, 1981a; Hung, Davison, & Chambers, 1993). This suggests that the Canadian varieties studied may not, as previously suggested (Chambers, 1981b), be conforming to the U.S. norm, but instead that the two varieties are converging.

We use a mathematical model to examine three phenomena involving language change across the lifespan: the apparent time construct, the adolescent peak, and two different patterns of individual change. The apparent time construct is attributed to a decline in flexibility toward language change over one's lifetime; this explanation is borne out in our model. The adolescent peak has been explained by social networks: children interact more with caregivers a generation older until later childhood and adolescence. We find that the peak also occurs with many other network structures, so the peak is not specifically due to caregiver interaction. The two patterns of individual change are one in which most individuals change gradually, following the mean of community change, and another in which most individuals have more categorical behavior and change rapidly if they change at all. Our model suggests that they represent different balances between the differential weighting of competing variants and degree of accommodation to other speakers.

The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and pronunciations typical of a wider geographical area are adopted. Within this broad pattern, however, there is evidence of parallelism between the vowels in terms of the relative proportions of their variants across speaker groups. It is suggested that pressure to maintain the symmetrical structure of the underlying phonological system is guiding this process. Labov's (1991, 1994) principles of chain shift are discussed in this connection. However, it is argued that the patterns in the data are more plausibly explained by considering the social significance of each variant instead of making reference to variants as socially neutral expressions of abstract phonological categories.

In this paper I examine how a classic feature of variationist research, coronal stop deletion (CSD), operates at the end of the 20th century in one of the most renowned vernacular dialects in the United States, English in Appalachia. Through examination of CSD in a corpus of Appalachian speech, this paper also focuses on the methodological choices available. Several methodological questions are reviewed, such as the choices concerning voicing of the codas (wind vs. went vs. west). The corpus comprises interviews with 67 Appalachian speakers, yielding 17,694 tokens of potential CSD. These were analyzed using quantitative variationist methodology to reveal that morphological categories are less influential than even the preceding phonological environment. This finding is in stark contrast with some other vernacular varieties and suggests that apparent morphological influences are actually phonological influences that present themselves as morphological trends. Overall, the following phonological environment is overwhelmingly the most influential linguistic factor on the rate of CSD. These Appalachian speakers maintain relatively high rates, in effect constraining the social distinctions within Appalachia that could possibly be made using CSD, but marking them as vernacular speakers for those outside Appalachia.

This study examines the internal and external constraints on glottal replacement of /t/ among adolescents in London and Edinburgh. Results show that phonological and stylistic constraints play an important role in determining the realizational variation of /t/, as many similar studies have shown. However, there is also clear evidence that our understanding of this phenomenon has been restricted by the limited set of factors that have been investigated previously, as results show that this feature is also constrained by word frequency and morphophonological factors. These findings raise important questions concerning the role of morphological compositionality in language change and the nature of lexical diffusion.

Linguistic parallelism (i.e., the tendency of similar forms to occur together within a stretch of discourse) has been shown to be very strong in many linguistic phenomena and in a vast number of languages. Examining the role of phrase-level parallelism on noun phrase number agreement, this article demonstrates that Puerto Rican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese exhibit more similarities than differences with regard to this constraint. A detailed analysis of Brazilian Portuguese data is presented, and the results are compared with those found by Poplack (1980a) for Puerto Rican Spanish. Guy's (1981a) and Labov's (1994) hypothesis about missing zeroes in Brazilian Portuguese is also discussed. In conclusion, it is claimed that the phrase-level parallelism effect on noun phrase number agreement is embedded in a universal principle of linguistic use: parallel processing.

Although the order of major sentence constituents at all stages of Ancient Greek is quite free, the distribution of clause types is not random over time, but changes from predominantly verb-final to predominantly verb-medial, suggesting a change in progress. Using the paradigm of Kroch (1989), in which it is assumed that syntactic change involves competition between grammatical systems, two models are constructed, one for the verb-final grammar of the Homeric period (pre-800 B.C.) and one for the verb-medial grammar of the Hellenistic Koiné (c. 100 A.D.). The language of an intermediate stage (Herodotus, c. 450 B.C.) is shown to pattern in part like Homer and in part like the Koiné. More strikingly, the ratio of verb-final to verb-medial structure that best fits the distribution of clause types found in Herodotus is extremely close to an independent measure of this ratio obtained from the distribution of weak pronouns and clitics.

This is a study of the competition of linguistic systems within the speech community, tracing the opposition of distinct phonological configurations. Among younger Philadelphians oriented to higher education, the traditional short-a system is giving way to the nasal system, in which all prenasal vowels are tense. We present evidence that this shift occurs systematically in both the lax and tense allophones. The degree of conformity to each system is measured for 106 subjects by the Pillai statistic; community-wide patterns are revealed by regression modeling and bimodality diagrams. Adherence to the traditional system is greatest for White speakers who graduated from Catholic high schools, while the nasal system is strongest for graduates from elite schools with special admission requirements. African American students show no orientation to the traditional system, but parallel White students in the shift to the nasal system. The histories of students through the educational system show that the speaker's short-a system is largely determined during their middle and high school years, before entering college. Special admission interviews play a special role in this process, as brief speech events that strongly determine the person's linguistic environment for the years that follow.

Data from fieldwork and a telephone survey is used to demonstrate that the merger of the vowels in words such as cot and caught, traditionally considered a defining characteristic of the speech of western Pennsylvania, is well established in the former anthracite mining towns of eastern Pennsylvania. Demographic and linguistic data indicate that the merger arose independently in the anthracite towns as a result of massive in-migration of speakers of Polish and other non-Germanic languages around the turn of the century. Having identified the proximate cause of the merger makes it possible to predict the presence or absence of the merger in various towns using demographic data alone.

To identify how contextual usage frequency and lexical frequency interact when controlling for traditional linguistic constraints, this study analyzes the effect of frequency on (ING), taking into account a word's frequent context of occurrence. The data consist of 13,167 tokens of (ING) from interviews with 132 speakers conducted in Raleigh, North Carolina. Results from mixed-effect logistic regression show a strong effect of frequency on the realization of (ING), and this effect interacts with phonological context of occurrence. Frequent occurrence in environments that favor -in amplify the effect of lexical frequency; conversely, frequent occurrence in environments that favor –ing dampen the effect of overall frequency. Frequency also interacts with year of birth, showing an entrenchment of high-frequency words, lagging behind the community change toward the –ing variant in apparent time. Overall, these findings support the usage-based position of frequency effects as the result of a dynamic interplay between context of use and cognitive systems.

Recipes exhibit a phenomenon that does not exist in other varieties that are commonaly studied (e.g., narrative, sentences in isolation, conversational discourse, etc.)—namely, zero anaphors as direct objects, as in Beat [ø] until stiff. The two goals of this article are to examine this phenomenon in both contemporary recipes and across time and to explore its consequences for linguistic theroy. It is found that stylistic, semantic, and discourse factors are the most important in the phenomenon, with syntax and morphology playing relatively minor roles. Furthermore, these zero anaphors pattern like overt pronouns and have in fact replaced overt pronouns over time. A preliminary model of register variation and its consequences for the synactic analysis of recipes are also presented.

Korean has a typologically unusual three-way laryngeal contrast in voiceless stops among aspirated, lenis, and fortis stops. Seoul Korean is undergoing a female-led sound change in which aspirated stops and lenis stops are merging in voice onset time (VOT) and are better distinguished by the F0 (fundamental frequency) of the following vowel than by their VOT, in younger speakers' speech. This paper compares the VOT pattern of Homeland (Seoul) and Heritage (Toronto) Korean speakers and finds that the same change is in progress in both. However, in the heritage variety, younger speakers do not advance the change, unlike their Seoul counterparts. Rather they have leveled off or are perhaps reversing the change, and there is very little sex difference among the younger heritage speakers' patterns. We consider possible accounts of the differences between the Seoul and Toronto patterns, building our understanding of how language-internal variation operates in bilingual speakers, a topic that has received relatively less attention in the variationist literature.

The Portuguese NP a gente, meaning “the people,” is undergoing grammaticalization and is acquiring characteristics of a personal pronoun, increasingly replacing first-person plural nós, meaning “we,” in speech. In Brazilian Portuguese, this process seems to be correlated with a number of other ongoing morphosyntactic changes. In this study I compare data from Southern Brazil on the use of a gente in the 1970s and the 1990s. Quantitative analyses are conducted in terms of two methodological approaches: apparent-time and real-time studies. In the real-time analysis, two kinds of studies are discussed: a trend study, with two comparable groups of speakers, and a panel study, with the same speakers compared longitudinally. The linguistic and social embedding of this process is discussed in terms of the Labovian classification of changes as being “from above” or “from below.”I am very grateful to Gregory R. Guy for supervising this research project while I was a visiting scholar at New York University (2001–2002) and for his kind and wise assistance in the preparation of the lecture (presented at NYU on September 20, 2002), on which this article is based. I also acknowledge the valuable work of my research assistants at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil: Kátia M. L. Aires, Greice L. de Souza, Karine Q. da Silva, Patrícia da R. Mazzoca, Leonardo Z. Maya, and Melissa Schossler. This research was conducted with the support of Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), an agency of the Brazilian government dedicated to scientific and technological development, grant 200740/01-6(NV); Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS), grant 00514482; and Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

The unconditioned merger of the low back vowels and the variety of realizations found for the low front vowel have been noted as leading to greater distinctiveness across U.S. English regional dialects. The extent to which the movements of these vowels are related has repeatedly been of interest to dialectology as well as phonological theory. Here, examining production and perception data from speaker-listeners across three major regions of the United States, the relationships among these low vowels within and across regions are investigated. Participants provided speech samples and took part in a vowel identification task, judging vowels along a continuum from /æ/ to /ɑ/. Results of acoustic analysis and statistical analysis of the perception results indicate that a structural relationship between /æ/ and /ɑ/ is maintained across regions and that listeners’ own degree of low back vowel merger predicts their perception of the boundary between /æ/ and /ɑ/.

This article considers language variation within one “ethnic” group: Israelis of Middle Eastern origins. Earlier studies (Yaeger-Dror, 1988, 1991) found that singers from the dominant “koiné” -speaking social group (Blanc, 1968) use [r] in pop songs and [R] in casual interviews. This can be defined as a register distinction. On the other hand, singers from a MidEastern ethnolinguistic background, whose underlying dialect includes [r], use [R] even in songs. Given that singers whose vernacular consonant invetory does not even include [r], and who should find it easire to use it categorically, have such a difficult time maintaing [r] consistently (and appropriately) in the song register? One of the recorded variants for these singers “merges” the [r] and [R] into coarticulated [rR]. Why does this previously unattested sound arise, and what does it tell us about the linguistic and sociolinguistic situation? Data from various registers are analyzed in order to discover the answers to these questions. This analysis is concerned with the quantifiable evidence of systematic patterns in the use of these three pronunciations for [r] and uses this evidence to demonstrate that subconscious sociolinguistic pressures on members of the minority community influence them to assimilate to the dominant social group while still retaining ethnolinguistic proof of a narrower ethnic identity. For example, the use of [rR] is found to be correlated with a wish to affiliate with both an [R]-using group and an [r]-using group, showing that sociolinguistic techniques can reveal social psychological ethinc affiliation. Like Trudgill's (1986) discussions of dialects in contact, the present theoretical discussion takes advantage of proposals advanced by Giles, to explain why the data reveal both convergence (toward the dominant out-group) and divergence (toward the in-group) (Giles & Coupland, 1991). Sociolinguistic methods permit a quantitative analysis of the strength of these conflicting tendencies, both of which are subsumed under the technical term “accommodation.” Methods are proposed to determine if choice of the

[R] or [rR] variant is conscious or not, and variable rule analysis reveals that for most of the singers the less cognitive salience, the greater the degree of convergence to the Koiné norm [R]. The linguistic factors that are correlated with the relative degree of salience can be used in future studies when the relationship between convergence toward another dialect or language and relative cognitive salience is also at issue.