In our study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese we found disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in our corpus of recorded speech data. Disfluencies have very little effect on the rate of marking. When fluency is included in a variable rule analysis as a factor group containing categories for different types of disfluency, as well as for data without any disfluency, it is not selected as statistically significant. Furthermore, separate analyses of all data, only fluent data, and only disfluent data revealed no significant changes in the numerical results obtained for other factor groups. We conclude that, at least insofar as the variable phenomena we studied are concerned, speech is not overly laden with errors; there is nothing in the data to mislead the language learner.

This article gives a detailed analysis of devoicing of the voiced fricatives /v/, /z/, /y/ in two varieties of Standard Dutch: Southern Standard Dutch (as spoken in Belgium) and Northern Standard Dutch (as spoken in The Netherlands). The study is based on archived recordings of radio broadcasts from 1935 to 1993. First, our study shows a divergence between Southern and Northern Standard Dutch in the pronunciation of voiced fricatives in this period. In The Netherlands there is a strong tendency towards devoicing, but in Belgium this tendency is very weak. Second, this study offers insight into the linguistic path of this change: partially voiced compromise variants play an important role, and devoicing is favored in word-initial position. Finally, our study shows the benefits of a retrospective trend study on the basis of radio recordings. In comparison with traditional real-time studies, it offers more insight into the social and linguistic embedding of changes in progress. Its results are also more reliable than those of apparent-time research.

The article models the spread of linguistic change by taking precise account of the ages of the acquirers and transmitters of change. Several studies, some original, are reviewed in order to address the following questions: “What types of linguistic feature can an individual acquire at different ages?” “How much influence do people of different ages exert on the speech of other individuals?” The article is organized around three key interlocutor combinations: parent-infant/young child, peer group-preadolescent, and older adolescent/adult-adolescent. The studies suggest that borrowings are the easiest to acquire, while lexically unpredictable phonological changes are the most difficult. In between are Neogrammarian changes and morphologically conditioned features. The age of the speaker is critical; only the youngest children acquire the “hardest” features. However, adolescents may be the most influential transmitters of change. A difficulty hierarchy for the acquisition of second dialect features is then presented; it is suggested that this predicts the nature of linguistic change found under different sociolinguistic conditions. The approach presented here allows for a more detailed understanding of the spread of linguistic change.

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.

Neither historical nor linguistic records reveal exactly when the shift from Negerhollands to English and English Creole began in the Danish West Indies. In order to assess phonological continuity and change in the last stage of this moribund creole, the following discussion (1) contrasts earlier and current views of Negerhollands and sketches language contact in the Danish West Indies; (2) examines the language history and the vowel systems of the last speaker; and (3) assesses variation in a Negerhollands corpus produced by 10 elderly bilinguals. The article demonstrates how using a variety of approaches can enhance the investigation of an underdocumented language.

This study examines the use of object relative pronouns by native (NS) and nonnative (NNS) speakers of Standard American English. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) relative pronoun choice by NNSs will differ from that of NSs, principally because of prescriptive grammar instruction abroad; (2) wh, that, and zero froms will be used variably by both NSs and NNSs, depending on the function of the object and the human/nonhuman status of its antecedent; and (3) increased exposure to native speaking environments will cause a shift toward NS norms of use by NNSs. Half the subjects were given a preference task and asked to mark the relative pronoun variants they would be most likely to use in speech and in writing. The other subjects were given a production task in which sentences were combined to produce relativization. The data and varbrul2 analyses supported all three hypotheses: NNSs used all forms roughly equally in speaking but preferred Wh in writing, whereas NSs favored That or no pronoun. A shift away from Wh was also evident in NNSs after extended exposure to NS English.

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.

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.

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.

In this article, we report on the results of a study of the diphthongs EAR and AIR, which are merging for many New Zealand speakers. Each stage of the study, which has been repeated at five-year intervals since 1983, involves the analysis of word lists and sentences read by over 100 14- and 15-year-old school pupils. The results show a clear trend toward a merger to the EAR diphthong. This is also confirmed in a study carried out in 1994 of 79 speakers (selected according to age, sex, and socioeconomic class) reading six word pairs. The results from both of these studies differ from those reported by Holmes and Bell (1992). We suggest the reasons for the different results could be methodological, and that the mechanism of the merger is merger by approximation after the AIR diphthong became involved in the New Zealand front vowel chain-shift raising.