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.

The literature on frequency effects in lexical diffusion shows that even phonetically gradual changes that in some cases are destined to be lexically regular show lexical diffusion while they are in progress. Change that is both phonetically and lexically gradual presents a serious challenge to theories with phonemic underlying forms. An alternate exemplar model that can account for lexical variation in phonetic detail is outlined here. This model predicts that the frequency with which words are used in the contexts for change will affect how readily the word undergoes a change in progress. This prediction is tested on data from /t, d/ deletion in American English. Finally, the effect of bound morphemes on the diffusion of a sound change is examined. The data suggest that instances of a bound morpheme can affect the rate of change for that morpheme overall.

Both Old French meters and their Modern French descendants are usually thought to lack the internal binary constituent structure of, say, English or German iambic verse. In this article, however, an underlying iambic structure for the Old French octosyllable is established through quantitative analysis of a large corpus of texts written from c. 975 to 1180 (42 distinct works, including over 22,000 lines). Because no texts conform absolutely to the grammar of English iambic verse (Halle & Keyser, 1971; Kiparsky, 1977), certain measures are proposed for the degree to which a sample deviates from the iambic pattern; these values are then compared with the (chance) deviation of normal Old French prose. A significant correlation emerges between these measures and date of composition, author, and genre: early texts are almost perfectly iambic, and late 12th-century texts approach, but do not reach, chance levels. It is concluded that the grammar of meter used by Old French authors underwent a gradual change during the 12th century, a change comparable to more familiar phonological and syntactic changes.

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.

Using a large database of familial correspondence, it is shown that NP positions in 15th-century English were essentially those of Present-Day English, contrary to claims that the syntactic structure of Late Middle English still had a position for preposed object NPs, and that 15th-century English possessed multiple subject constructions with expletive there. The only form of OV order to remain productive in familial correspondence of this period occurred in the configuration: finite verb–negated NP–lexical verb. Neither ordinary NPs nor other quantified NPs were productive in this configuration. It is also shown that negated subject NPs, but not ordinary or other quantified subject types, were commonly found in multiple subject constructions. All these phenomena can be conveniently accounted for in terms of movement to a Neg projection (Haegeman, 1995). A theoretical account of noncanonical subject and object positions in terms of Neg movement thus receives strong empirical support from the distribution of argument NPs in 15th century English.

This article examines variation in American Sign Language (ASL) signs produced with a 1 handshape, which include signs of nearly all grammatical classes. Multivariate analysis of more than 5,000 tokens, extracted from informal conversations among more than 200 signers in seven different regions of the United States, indicates that variation in the form of these signs is conditioned by multiple linguistic and social factors. Significant factor groups include grammatical function and features of the preceding and following segments, as well as a range of social constraints including age, regional origin, and language background. Two findings are especially notable. First, although the results for preceding and following segment effects show evidence of progressive and regressive assimilation, grammatical function is the first-order linguistic constraint on the use of two of the three main variants. Second, signers in all regions of the United States show similar patterns of variation, thus providing evidence that ASL signers constitute a single “speech” community.

Bislama allows phonetically overt and phonetically null noun phrases (NPs) in argument positions. This article explores constraints on the occurrence of null NPs in direct object position. Discourse factors (given/new status of referent, antecedent's form) and syntactic factors (antecedent's grammatical role, identification by a transitive suffix) are investigated. Morphosyntactic and semantic features that might transfer from substrate languages (referent's animacy, (in)alienable possession) and social factors (age, sex, language of education) are also examined. Strong priming effects for grammatical role of the antecedent and form of the antecedent are identified. Also salient are inalienable possession and semantic type of the verb. The effect of inalienable possession shows the highly abstract transfer of substrate features, raising questions about the modularity of grammar. It is argued that a key motivation for such transfer is not just linguistic availability, but the social and cultural significance of different kinds of possession in Melanesia.

Several changes in consonant and vowel pronunciations in younger generations of native speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) are currently the object of research interest. In order to further an empirically grounded description of changes in RP, the present study examines variation in weak vowels. Patterns of variation in word-final open weak syllables (happy, city) as well as in past and present/plural suffixes (waited, changes) are investigated acoustically in the interview speech of eight young (born in the late 1970s) speakers of modern RP. The data show variation in happy vowels for some speakers according to phonetic environment, a phenomenon which deserves further study. kit/schwa variation in the inflectional suffixes studied here shows a tendency to maintain kit-like values. Overall, the study indicates that acoustic analysis of such weak vowels can provide interesting data on variation.

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.

Hedges in Japanese conversation are discussed in relation to three social variables: age, sex, and formality. In the present study, hedges are defined as expressions of uncertainty, possibility, or tentativeness, all of which convey a sense of vagueness. I quantified the use of 26 Japanese hedges (e.g., toka ‘or something’, kana ‘I wonder’, nanka ‘like’, and tabun ‘probably’). Three hypotheses were posited to investigate the effect of the social variables: hedges are used (1) more often by younger speakers than by older speakers; (2) more often by women than by men; (3) more often in casual speech than in formal speech. Data of 20 single-sex dyads were collected from two age groups and from both sexes. The data supported hypotheses (1) and (2), but not (3). Most notably, younger female speakers use hedges often. Social factors of the speaker as well as context play an important role in the use of hedges in Japanese conversation.

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.

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.