Perfect grammaticalization has been much researched across languages (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994; Harris, 1982, among others), however, debate continues about the role of continuative and experiential perfects (e.g., Stage II of the proposed path) and how extension to perfective contexts occurs (Schwenter, 1994a, 1994b; Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, 2008; Squartini & Bertinetto, 1995, 2000). This study examines data from three centuries of Peninsular Spanish dramatic texts in order to track the linguistic factors constraining Present Perfect (PP)-Preterit variation. In the 15th century, the PP was employed in very recent temporal reference contexts, where it had developed a “hot news” function. Use in nonspecified (irrelevant and indeterminate) temporal reference was concentrated in semantic classes associated with resultative use. With time, the PP extended to all semantic classes in irrelevant temporal reference while simultaneously strengthening in perfective, but temporally indeterminate contexts, and finally, hodiernal contexts. Nonspecified temporal reference is believed to play a special role in the PP's grammaticalization: the irrelevant temporal PP function helps to solidify the event focus introduced by the hot news perfect, whereas its use in indeterminate contexts strengthens associations with perfectivity.

A major issue in the study of language change is the degree to which individual speakers participate in ongoing linguistic changes as these progress over time. In this study, we examine the hypothesis, suggested by research based on the apparent-time model, that in any given period most people are neither progressive nor conservative with regard to ongoing changes, but rather fall between these polarities. Our data come from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which spans over 270 years. A computational model was developed to establish which language users were progressive and which conservative with respect to several ongoing changes that progressed in real time between the early 15th and late 17th centuries. The changes studied ranged from morpheme replacements to more abstract structural patterns. Our results indicate that the degree to which language users participated in changes in progress depended on the type of language change analyzed, the stage of development of the change, and the rate of diffusion of the process over time. The model also enabled the identification of groups of leaders of linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart England.

The rise of the periphrastic future (PF) at the expense of the inflected future (IF) is an established historical trend in Québécois French over at least the past 150 years. Previous research has also found higher rates of PF among younger speakers, many displaying categorical use in affirmative contexts. Because an apparent time interpretation of the synchronic data fits the historical record, we expected concomitant speaker stability across the lifespan. On the contrary, our panel study of 60 Montréal speakers (1971–1984) reveals age grading in a retrograde direction. As they aged, two-thirds of the speakers we studied increased their frequency of IF, an effect heightened for members of higher socioprofessional groups. Though not sufficiently robust to stem the historical tide, increased IF use by older speakers may retard the change somewhat, providing continuing IF input to child L1 acquisition. Rather than vitiating an apparent time interpretation, these results indicate that the rate of change may be slightly overestimated if age grading acts in a retrograde direction.

This study examines cross-generational changes in the vowel systems in central Ohio, southeastern Wisconsin, and western North Carolina. Speech samples from 239 speakers, males and females, were divided into three age groups: grandparents (66–91 years old), parents (35–51), and children (8–12). Acoustic analysis of vowel dynamics (i.e., formant movement) was undertaken to explore variation in the amount of spectral change for each vowel. A robust set of cross-generational changes in /ɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ/ was found within each dialect-specific vowel system, involving both their positions and dynamics. With each successive generation, /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ become increasingly monophthongized and /ɑ/ is diphthongized in children. These changes correspond to a general anticlockwise parallel rotation of vowels (with some exceptions in /ɪ/ and /ɛ/). Given the widespread occurrence of these parallel chainlike changes, we term this development the “North American Shift,” which conforms to the general principles of chain shifting formulated by Labov (1994) and others.

This paper examines the status of the low back caught-cot merger in Upstate New York. Most of this region is subject to the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and therefore, according to Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), ostensibly “resists” the spread of this merger. It is found that the phonology of this region is indeed trending toward the merger in apparent time, in terms of both phonetic distance between the two phonemes and speakers' explicit judgments. It is argued that the fronting of the cot vowel in the NCS region is not sufficient to withstand the spread of the merger because fronting a low vowel is a “reversible” sound change (Labov, 2010). It is further argued that the expansion of a merger to new communities may take place indirectly, through launching a sound change in the direction of merger rather than causing merger to take place immediately in the new community.

This paper introduces a method for the analysis of regional linguistic variation. The method identifies individual and common patterns of spatial clustering in a set of linguistic variables measured over a set of locations based on a combination of three statistical techniques: spatial autocorrelation, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. To demonstrate how to apply this method, it is used to analyze regional variation in the values of 40 continuously measured, high-frequency lexical alternation variables in a 26-million-word corpus of letters to the editor representing 206 cities from across the United States.

Although formulated by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog in 1968, the actuation problem has remained an unsolved problem in understanding sound change: if sound change is conceived as the accumulation of coarticulation, and coarticulation is widespread, how can some speech communities resist phonetic pressure to change? We present data from American English s-retraction that suggest a partial solution. S-retraction is the phenomenon in which /s/ is realized as an [ʃ]-like sound, especially when it occurs in an /stɹ/ cluster (‘street’ pronounced more like [ʃtɹit] than like [stɹit]). The speech of English speakers judged not to exhibit s-retraction shows a large coarticulatory bias in the direction of retraction. Further, there is also substantial interspeaker variation in the extent of this bias. We propose that this interspeaker variation, coupled with the coarticulatory bias, facilitates the initiation of sound change. In this account, sound change begins when a listener accidentally interprets an extreme case of a phonetic effect as an articulatory target and then adjusts her own speech in response. This adoption of a new target requires phonetic variation that predates the change. Thus, sound change is predicted to be biased toward phonetic effects that exhibit interspeaker variability, and if sound change requires an accident that is rare, then sound change itself is correctly predicted to be rare as well.

The causation of language change is a problem with a high profile in sociolinguistics. This paper presents two contrasting models of language change: one that is based on sociopsychological factors (Kristiansen & Jørgensen, 2005) and one that rejects them (the Napoleon Principle, Brink & Lund, 1979). In a longitudinal study of individuals' changing pronunciation of the Danish aj-diphthong over 20 years, we test predictions following from the sociopsychologically oriented model. By the mid-1980s, female speakers used more aj-pronunciations that are associated with high socioeconomic status than did male speakers. However, in guise tests, females revealed a more positive attitude toward speech associated with low socioeconomic status. Our prediction that female speakers would change their speech patterns to include more aj-pronunciations associated with low socioeconomic status is supported by an analysis of the same female speakers' pronunciations as recorded in the mid-2000s.

Whereas previous studies of Spanish s-weakening have relied on impressionistic coding, the present study examines temporal and gradient acoustic details in the production of /s/ by eight females from Cali, Colombia, during sociolinguistic interviews. We propose a metric for quantifying s-realization by employing three scalar-dependent variables: s-duration, centroid, and voicelessness. The results of linear regressions indicate that the dependent variables are significantly conditioned by local speaking rate, word position, following and preceding phonological context, stress, and lexical frequency. This study sheds light on how each independent variable influences s-realization acoustically. For example, as local speaking rate increases, duration, centroid, and voicelessness decrease, which is indicative of lenition, and the same weakening tendency is observed when /s/ occurs in word-final position or is followed by a nonhigh vowel, whereas frequency contributes only to s-duration. We discuss the advantages of opting for instrumental measurements over symbolic representation.

This article reports the findings of parallel studies of variable subject presence in two closely related sign language varieties, Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL). The studies expand upon research in American Sign Language (ASL) (Wulf, Dudis, Bayley, & Lucas, 2002) that found subject pronouns with noninflecting verbs to be more frequently unexpressed than expressed. The ASL study reported that null subject use correlates with both social and linguistic factors, the strongest of which is referential congruence with an antecedent in a preceding clause. Findings from the Auslan and NZSL studies also indicated that chains of reference play a stronger role in subject presence than either morphological factors (e.g., verb type), or social factors of age, gender, ethnicity, and language background. Overall results are consistent with the view that this feature of syntactic variation may be better accounted for in terms of information structure than sociolinguistic effects.

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 paper discusses a group of Brazilian Portuguese plurals that end with the nasal diphthong [–ão] in their singular form. When pluralized, these words can take three plural forms: [–ões], [–ãos], or [–ães]. Each of these words has an etymological source that defines which morpheme should be applied to the plural form. However, in some cases, a different plural form is used instead of the etymological one. A set of psycholinguistic experiments was carried out with Brazilian Portuguese speakers. The goal was to analyze whether token or type frequency affects the choice of plural form for these words. The results show an interaction between type and token frequency, in the sense that type frequency serves as the basis for analogy, and token frequency can determine which words will be affected by the variation.

This study examines the retention of a non-native dialect feature by British Asians in London. We examine the use of one Punjabi feature (t-retroflexion) and one British feature (t-glottaling) across three groups: first-generation non-native immigrants and two age groups of second-generation British Asians. Cognitively oriented models predict that non-native features will either be innately blocked (Chambers, 2002) or reallocated by native generations. A socially oriented model allows for more gradual change. Contrary to the cognitive view, the older second generation neither blocks nor clearly reallocates use of t-retroflexion; they closely mirror the first generation's non-native use. However, they simultaneously control nativelike t-glottaling, reflecting a robust bidialectal ability. It is the younger second generation who exhibit focused reallocation in the form and function of t-retroflexion. This 20-year lag corresponds to major changes in demographics and race relations in the community over 5 decades. The study shows that acquisition of the local dialect and retention of exogenous features should be seen as independently constrained rather than as mutually exclusive.

Empirical work in linguistics often puts forward claims about the independence of two phenomena as substantive hypotheses. But, independence is always an assumption in the framework of empirical hypothesis testing, meaning independence claims are not empirically verifiable. Hence, they need to be regarded differently from truly empirical hypotheses within the substantive theories of which they are part. In this paper, a number of independence claims are illustrated, alongside their problematic consequences for empirically guided theorizing. Recommendations are made regarding the use of independence that should facilitate the empirical testing of substantive linguistic hypotheses.

The question of what constitutes an authentic speaker, particularly with regard to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), has been the subject of some debate in sociolinguistics (Butters, 1984; Labov, 1980; Sweetland, 2002) and arises anew in the case of white hip-hop–affiliated youth (WHHs) who converge toward AAVE in their speech. This paper takes a quantitative approach to this question by examining how speech style alters the relationship between the frequencies of a variable in different linguistic environments. Guy (1991b) showed that the exponential relationship in English among rates of coronal stop deletion (CSD) in several morphological categories is systematically distorted by constraints on the surface-level phonology. Because stylistic variation appears to operate at this level, such distortion provides an internal measure of a speaker's stylistic shifting away from their neutral vernacular usage. Data on CSD deletion from WHHs who style shift toward AAVE show this kind of distortion when compared with the speech of AAVE speakers. This data provide strong internal evidence in support of the idea that some WHHs are “performing” a speech style that diverges from their unmarked style.