Although orientation towards local norms is increasing in Singapore, Singapore English (SgE) is still perceived by some as a nonnative variety. Variation in attitudes towards SgE may shape acquisition of SgE features by both Singaporean and expatriate children, who increasingly attend government schools. The present study investigates how the -t/d deletion patterns of 60 children reflect their attitudes and school setting. Significant correlations are observed between deletion rate, attitude towards SgE, and accent self-perception among Singaporean children, highlighting that this variety is undergoing endonormative stabilization. However, while some expatriates in local schools delete more than peers in international schools, expatriate children generally do not acquire local -t/d deletion rates or constraints, regardless of familiarity with SgE or attitudes towards the variety. This gap between locals and expatriates reflects the persistence of ideologies that delegitimize SgE, as well as the growing prominence of SgE as a marker of local identity.

Language acquisition is a well-established avenue for language change (Labov, 2007). Given the theoretical importance of language acquisition to language change, it is all the more important to formulate clear theories of transmission-based change. In this paper, we provide a simulation method designed to test the plausibility of different possible transmission-based changes, using the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to determine precise points at which different possible changes may become plausible for children acquiring language. We apply this method to a case study of a complex change currently in progress: the allophonic restructuring of /æ/ in Philadelphia English. Using this model, we are able to evaluate several competing explanations of the ongoing change and determine that the allophonic restructuring of /æ/ in Philadelphia English is mostly likely the result of children acquiring language from mixed dialect input, consisting of approximately 40% input from speakers with a nasal /æ/ split. We show that applying our simulation to a phonological change allows us to make precise quantitative predications about the progress of this change. Moreover, it forces us to reassess intuitively plausible hypotheses about language change, such as grammatical simplification, in a quantitative and independently motivated framework of acquisition.

The paper asks whether six ongoing vowel changes in Philadelphia English show interspeaker covariation. In a sample of 66 young white women, pairwise correlations are significant only between three changes that have previously been observed to show parallel diachronic trajectories of change reversal, whereas changes that do not exhibit this diachronic pattern do not show covariation. I propose that the interspeaker covariation in this subset of the changes in progress arises from a shared social motivation for the change reversals that is not shared by the other changes.

This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen's Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.

This paper examines variation in the use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese. In Portuguese, the distribution of rhotics is determined by syllable structure (Bonet & Mascaró, 1997). However, the emerging variety of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe diverges from the standard norm and shows great variability in its use of rhotics; specifically, Santomeans often use a strong-R in positions that require a weak-r in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Sociolinguistic interviews with 56 speakers from the capital of São Tomé and Príncipe and its surroundings provide 5287 data points for analysis. Based on the apparent-time construct (Bailey, 2004; Bailey et al., 1991), variation patterns show a language change in progress in the use of the strong-R, with younger speakers using it more frequently. Results also reveal the emergence of rhotic fricatives in the speech of Santomeans born after the independence of the country.

An individual's language can change in the moment due to the topic of conversation and over time because of regional mobility. This paper investigates the relationship between these two types of shifts by asking whether speakers with substantial second dialect exposure change their pronunciation more when the topic changes in a regionally meaningful way compared to speakers with less exposure. Specifically, topic-based shifts on three phonological variables that differ between British and US English are investigated in native speakers of both dialects as a function of the migrant status of the speaker. Experience matters in that speakers only shift between variants in their repertoire, and expatriates have acquired some second dialect features that nonmigrants do not have. However, it does not appear that more exposure to, or increased rates of usage of a variant leads to more topic-based shifting toward that variant. These findings, interpreted within the existing literature, suggest that topic-based shifts are driven primarily by stereotypical sociolinguistic representations.

This study focuses on speakers who continue to use forms that are recessive in a community, and the phonological and conversational contexts in which recessive forms persist. Use of a local, recessive form is explored across males from four ex-mining communities in Northeast England. Older speakers, who lived in the area when the mines were open, frequently produce the localized variant of the mouth vowel, especially in speech produced during conversation about the locally resonant topic of mining, and, most frequently, in communities closest to the location with which the form is associated. Conversely, speakers born since the loss of mining and with little connection to the industry hardly produce the local form in any community or conversational topic. Exploring conversational topic provides evidence for the connections between shifting social contexts and sound change, specifically that speakers retain otherwise recessive features in speech concerning topics which are locally resonant to them.

A key component of Labov's (2001:411) socially motivated projection model of language change is the hypothesis that adolescents and preadolescents undergo a process of vernacular reorganization, which leads to a “seamless” progression of changes in progress. Between the ages of approximately five and 17, children and adolescents increase the “frequency, extent, scope, or specificity” of changes in progress along the community trajectory (Labov, 2007:346). Evidence of advancement via vernacular reorganization during this life stage has come from peaks in the apparent-time trajectory of a change around the age of 17 (e.g., Labov, 2001; Tagliamonte & D'Arcy, 2009). However, such peaks do not rule out the alternative explanations of retrograde change or age-grading. This paper presents both apparent time and real-time evidence for vernacular reorganization. We observe the arrowhead formation—a counterpart of the adolescent peak—for quotative be like in a trend study of adolescents and young adults in Toronto, Canada. Our results rule out the alternative explanations for previously observed adolescent peaks.

Previous studies on the diachrony of wh-interrogation in Brazilian Portuguese have observed a replacement process of ex-situ-wh interrogatives by cleft-wh and in-situ-wh interrogatives in the twentieth century. The present study analyzes almost 19,000 wh-interrogatives from a corpus of theater plays dated between 1800 and 2016, demonstrating that not all of these frequency changes constitute actual change. The increase in the usage frequency of several types of wh-interrogatives is partially or entirely due to changes in the degree of orality of theater plays, or changes in word order. Moreover, only some of these changes can be characterized as changes from below, that is, changes in which high-orality texts are affected by the frequency increase first. This notion is also relevant for functional change in wh-interrogatives. Over time, the use of cleft-wh and in-situ-wh interrogatives spread from contexts in which the proposition is highly accessible to low-accessibility contexts. For cleft-wh, this change is moderated by orality, again indicating change from below.

This study reports on an experiment with twenty preschool children (3;1–4;7) in York, UK to investigate the earliest stage of children's socioperceptual development. The children discriminate between different groups of speakers based on their pronunciation of phonological regional variables diagnostic of the North and South of England. An improvement across the age range uncovers a developmental stage when children are able to interpret variation as socially meaningful. This is comparable with developments in sociolinguistic production during the preschool years, as previous studies have found. Three measures associated with linguistic input (children's age and gender, local versus nonlocal parents) have an impact on the children's performance. The results are interpreted through an exemplar theoretic account, highlighting the role of input and the combined storing and accessing of both linguistic and social information.

Some Portuguese verbs have two past participle forms: one regular (stem + -do), and the other irregular (often identical to the first person singular present indicative). Per grammars, the perfect auxiliaries ter/haver take regulars, while irregulars appear with passive/adjectival ser/estar. To test these claims, we analyzed naturally-occurring data from Brazil (twentieth century) and Portugal (nineteenth and twentieth). We coded 1077 tokens from 21 verbs for ten predictors and performed mixed-effects logistic regressions in R. Irregulars appear with ter/haver 54% overall and in 68% of cases from Portugal. Our results demonstrate that past participle choice is determined by the interaction of several linguistic factors. While lexical verb is the most significant predictor of participle selection, verbs with irregular participles identical to the first person singular present indicative occur in the irregular significantly more than other verbs. We conclude that analogical processes underpin the variation. This conclusion allows us to adjudicate between competing accounts of past participle choice in Portuguese.

This paper investigates the California Vowel Shift, previously characterized as a chain shift, in communities across California's Central Valley. An incremental apparent time analysis of 72 Californians’ vowel spaces provides no clear evidence of a gradual chain shift; that is, changes have not unfolded in an order that reflects an implicational chain in chronological time. Instead, we see contemporaneous movements of vowels that work against the phonological tendency of maximal dispersion typically invoked in describing chain shifts. By analyzing change in the size and dispersion of the entire vowel space, we find that ongoing sound change is instead characterized by a holistic compression of the vowel space. This suggests that, in these California communities, the shift's unfolding was driven by articulatory and social, rather than purely phonological, factors. We propose that the analysis of the size and spread of holistic vowel space can help characterize the nature and motivations for vocalic changes.

In this article we use the syntax of the noun phrase to evaluate two competing hypotheses: the traditional account, that Middle English is a West Germanic language with Old English as its immediate ancestor, and Emonds and Faarlund's (2014) proposal, that Middle English is a North Germanic language, the direct descendant of Old Norse. The development of nominal syntax shows that the Middle English noun phrase can be derived only from Old English, not from Old Norse. We examine six nominal characteristics; in each case, we find in Middle English exactly the construction that one would expect given the nominal syntax of previous Old English stages. The evidence from Old Norse shows that, although some of the same constructions did develop in the same way in the attested Norse varieties, the development occurred only at a later stage, too late to have affected the syntax of Middle English.

We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based on a corpus of transcribed interviews, the Ustja River Basin Corpus. Eleven phonological and morphological variables are analyzed across 33 speakers born between 1922 and 1996 in a series of logistic regression models. We propose three characteristics for a comparison of the rate of loss of different variables: initial level, steepness, and turning point. We show that the dynamics of loss differs significantly across variables and discuss possible reasons for such differences, including perceptual salience, initial variation in the dialect, and convergence with regionally or socially defined varieties of Russian. In conclusion, we discuss the pros and cons of logistic regression as an approach to quantitative modeling of dialect loss. Our paper contributes to the study and documentation of Russian dialects, most of which are on the verge of extinction.

This paper examines individual differences in constraints on linguistic variation in light of Labov's (2007) proposal that adult change (diffusion) disrupts systems of constraints and Tamminga, MacKenzie, and Embick's (2016) typology of constraints. It is shown that, in pooling data from multiple speakers, some of the complexity in structured community variation may be overlooked. Data on rhoticity from speakers of Bristol English are compared to 34 previous studies of rhoticity in varieties of English around the world. Constraints found to be consistent across varieties are also found to be consistent across speakers of Bristol English, whereas those that differ between varieties also differ between individuals, implying that only those which differ are truly part of the grammar, and that these are indeed disrupted by diffusion.