The present study is an attempt to investigate Japanese as it is spoken in Tokyo within the variationist framework, focusing on the variable (ng). The results of earlier research and observation have shown that this variable has been in the process of change. Speakers at younger age levels favor the newer variant [g], while those at older age levels favor the older variant [ŋ]. Results of quantitative analyses of the data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews with 62 native speakers of Tokyo Japanese allow us to establish the case under investigation as one of diffusion from above. The findings of the present investigation add to the body of research conducted within the variationist framework; they confirm the existence of inherent variation and orderly heterogeneity.

Our study presents a variationist analysis of subject doubling in the French of Ontario, Canada. Two principal variants are distinguished: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. In our analyses, both linguistic and social factors are taken into account and analyzed using goldvarb2. It is proposed that subject clitics are marked for default features, and that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP; lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant. Discussion of linguistic factors for the present study, therefore, is limited to those factors which can be explained in terms matching. The principal social factor studied is restricted language use (cf. Mougeon & Beniak, 1991). Our results show that the greater the restriction, the fewer doubled subjects one finds.

This article investigates the constraints on variable deletion of short vowels in word-final unstressed syllables found in the variety of Latvian spoken in Riga. The affected vowels are almost always inflectional endings. Results from a variable rule analysis of 8 native speakers from Riga indicate that internal phonological and prosodic factors (especially distance from the main word stress) act as the strongest constraints on vowel deletion, along with the educational level of the speaker. The functional constraint of the recoverability of the deleted vowel is not significant.

This article discusses the notion of regional standards of a language with regard to modern Danish. A regional standard is defined relative to a spectrum of varieties ranging from the national standard to the classical local dialects. We define the national standard, in accordance with Brink (1988), as the variety which has no localizable features. A local dialect is defined, in accordance with Danish dialectological tradition, as a combination of features which are inherent and not derived from the national standard. With evidence from studies of Danish regional variation we show that, for a geographical entity, a statistically determined boundary can be established in the range between these two extremes. On the scale of varieties between the two, the regional standard is posited as the range closest to the national standard. Local varieties that are not strictly classical dialects may no longer be active in some areas — a phenomenon illustrated by the variation in an area relatively close to Copenhagen, the center of gravity of new national standard developments. The development of features is described in terms of Bailey's wave model (1973).

In a near-merger, speakers produce two contrasting words differently, without reliably being able to discern the contrast in their own speech or in the speech of others. Acoustic measurements typically reveal small differences between the elements of near-merged minimal pairs along several acoustic dimensions. We argue that statistical evaluation of the potential distinctiveness of these near-merged elements must simultaneously take into account all of these dimensions. For this reason, discriminant analysis is used to assess the differences between near-merged/il–Il/, /el–εl/, and /ul–υl/ for five Utah speakers. In contrast with independent univatiate analyses of variance of F1, F2, f0, and spectral slope, the multivariate discriminant analyses suggest that all three contrasts are preserved by all five speakers. However, hompohones like heel and heal are not distinguished by the discriminant analyses. Discriminant analysis is thus a powerful technique for assessing whether a reliable basis exists for the claim that two potentially contrastive items are in fact distinctive.

When one language has a grammatical category that is rare or lacking in another, this “orphan” category may constrain the types of structures employed when the two languages are combined in bilingual discourse. We systematically examine the effect of categorial nonequivalence on language mixture in two corpora of spontaneous bilingual speech—Wolof—French and Fongbe—French—exhibiting different typological contrasts in adjectival modification structures. Focusing on lone French-origin items in otherwise Wolof or Fongbe discourse, the most frequent, if the most contentious, type of intrasentential language mixture, our method reveals that superficially identical items pattern in markedly different ways in each corpus. In Wolof, their patterns are consistent with Wolof adjectival elements (i.e., verbs), revealing them to be loanwords, while in Fongbe, they pattern with code-switches. We show that this difference is linked to the degree of categorial mismatch in the languages involved. Where categorial equivalence exists (Fongbe-French), code-switches involving French adjectives may occur, as long as structural equivalence between the two languages is maintained at the switch site. Where categorial equivalence is lacking (Wolof–French), code-switching is inhibited, and language mixture is effected via borrowing. This illustrates how, at code-switch sites, both structural and categorial equivalence are maintained.

This article addresses the question: In dialect contact, is there a difference in degree of convergence at different phonological levels? Data are taken from three experimental studies on British English. The first, a comparison of alveolar assimilation and l-vocalization, tests the hypothesis that the phonologization of connected speech processes involves increasing phonetic discreteness. The second provides evidence of the phonological restructuring of final /1/ in speakers who consistenly vocalize it and who, hypercorrectly, occasionally use “clear” /1/. This anomalous behavior, which may be due to underlying phonological differences, is explained in terms of a clash between nonstandard and standard speech. The third experiment looks at the “clarification” of /1/ before vowels in environments such as peel it, as well as the glottaling of /t/. Data are collected from the speech of two teenagers, native to Reading. It is argued that the phonetically subtle differences between them are due to quite different underlying processes. These data are interpreted in light of Labov's speech community model; it seems necessary to differentiate between levels of analysis and to explain convergence in terms of salience.

Gender distinctions constitute one of the central grammatical categories in Hebrew grammar and are closely related to number distinctions. Both are acquired early on, since they apply to almost every morphological category: three major classes of content words, as well as two classes of function words. Feminine words are marked by Suffixal -α and -t, while masculine words carry either a zero or -e suffix. A small class of what might be termed “numeral nounclassifiers” are supposed to agree in gender with their head nouns, but carry a mirror-image gender marking, resulting in rule opacity. The subjects, 40 children (20 fourth graders, 20 seventh graders) from a lower middle-class background, were tested on gender markings of numerals in two situations involving monitored and unmonitored situations. The results indicate the disappearance of gender agreement in Modern Hebrew numerals and a reanalysis of numeral suffixes by speakers.

Whereas Labov (1991) made a case for the existence of three major dialects of English, this article offers Canadian evience that runs counter to the idea of a relatively homogeneous North American third dialect area in which vowel systems remain fairly stable. It shows that the lax vowels of Canadian English are undergoing a substantial shift, the pivot for which is suggested to be vowel merger in the Cot/Caught sets. This shift is to some degree conditioned by the voicing properties and the manner of articulation of a following consonant; gender differences prove significant as well. The article also examines back vowel fronting in Candian English and its relationship to the shift affecting the front lax vowels, as well as to the general principles of vowel chain shifting articulated by Labov (1994). The Canadian Shift raises the issue of internal versus external motivation of vowel change; in addition, it brings, macrosociolinguistic evidence to bear on the purely microsociolinguistic interpretation of similar patterns of vowel shifting as symbols of local group identity (Eckert, 1991b).

Recent work in the acquisition of variation has shown that children begin to learn patterns of stable variation at a very early age. In fact, it appears that they acquire variable rules at about the same time as they are acquiring related categorical rules. Little is known, however, about the transmission from generation to generation of features undergoing sound change in progress. Therefore, this study examines the acquisition of the Philadelphia short a pattern by 18 3- and 4-year-old children. Even though this pattern of the raising and tensing of short a is a complex one, the children had, for the most part, acquired it. In almost all cases, the children matched the short a distribution both of their parents and a group of adult Philadelphians who were interviewed in the mid 1970s and described in Labov (1989b). These results indicate that even the youngest members of the speech community are actively participating in ongoing sound change.

In most recent analyses of Old English syntax, the position of the finite verb is derived by different processes in main clauses (verb seconding) than in subordinate clauses (postposition, verb raising, verb projection raising). In this article, it is argued on the basis of distributional evidence that the position of the finite verb in Old English clauses reflects synchronic variation in underlying structure, INFL-medial versus infl-final, and that the syntax of main and subordinate clauses is the same. Quantitative analysis of the data shows that the frequency of infl-medial structure increases at the expense of infl-final structure during the Old English period, and that the rate of change is the same in both clause types. This result supports the structural analysis and provides further evidence for the Constant Rate Hypothesis of Kroch (1989, 1995).

Enumeration is a figure of speech which evokes a thematic set through the concatenation of several of its elements. Its linguistic structure is variable with respect to the number of components, their syntactic nature, the use of coordinating markers and of the processes of repetition, reduction, and expansion. In studying the variation among 3,464 tokens of enumeration in Montreal French, we explain how the constitutive processes interact in terms of Slobin's (1977) charges to language: be clear, processible in real time, quick and easy, and expressive. We suggest how the six structural factors or processes contribute to the fulfillment of these charges. The data analysis evaluates the interaction of the processes and, indirectly, the pertinence of each of Slobin's four functional criteria. This analysis is a new method for attributing a pattern of process co-occurrences to a number of functions, focusing on how these processes compensate for, or cooperate with, each other.

One of the most consistent findings to emerge from sociolinguistic research is that “men use more nonstandard forms, less influenced by the social stigma directed against them; or, conversely, women use more standard forms, responding to the overt prestige associated with them” (Labov, 1990:210). With regard to change, these findings indicate that “women lead in both the acquisition of prestige patterns and the elimination of stigmatized forms” (p. 213), apparently without exception in change from above the level of conscious awareness and in all but a few of the cases studied in change from below. An examination of the social parameters of acceptance and spread of intervocalic spirantization of /p/, /t/, /k/ in Tuscany offers the possibility for testing and refining these precepts in a situation of rule competition that is more complex than most of those studied previously, in that here there are three forms in competition. Building on established principles (e.g., Trudgill, 1972), this sociolinguistic analysis of the interaction of three options provides a more precise understanding of the significance of both gender and class as (co-)conditioners of variation and change.