The Indo-Portuguese (IP) creoles display a well-known and uniform manner of marking the simple past and present continuous with the preposed particles ja (<Ptg. já ‘already’) and tE (<Ptg. esta ‘is’), respectively. Moreover, n3 (<Ptg. no ‘in the’) and d3 (<Ptg. de ‘of, from’ or do ‘of, from the’) are typically used as prepositions to express goal or location. Those creoles with Neoaryan adstrat languages, of which Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) is one, theoretically possess the option of deleting these markers or prepositions if they are contextually or otherwise redundant. Using data from several sources spanning approximately 100 years, it is shown that ja, tE, n3, and d3 in KP have undergone or are undergoing gradual deletion. It is argued that this development is part of a much larger SVO → SOV shift. The status of the typological shift indicators of verb-object/complement, adposition, and adjective-noun order are shown to corroborate the findings regarding deletion.

English has a class of “semiweak” verbs, which in the past tense have root-vowel ablaut as well as reflexes of the apical stop suffix, for example, kept, told. This study traces the development of this class in a sample of speakers aged 4–65. The evidence is derived from the variable rates of occurrence of the final -t,d in these words in the speech of individuals of different ages. The rate of -t,d absence in semiweak verbs systematically declines with increasing age. We identify three ontogenetic stages in the development of the class. In children's speech, these segments rarely appear, suggesting they are underlyingly absent. In young adults they appear but undergo the variable -t,d deletion process of English at the same high rate as noninflectional -t,d in words like west, old, implying that such speakers do not treat them as affixes. Finally, some adult speakers show a lowered deletion rate, suggesting that they accord the final stops separate morphemic status. The age distribution of this pattern implies that speakers only arrive at this analysis in adult life, after the age when acquisition is often assumed to be complete.

Auditory phonetic transcription is a stock-in-trade of sociolinguists; it is transcriptions, not actual speech, that form the raw data of much of sociolinguistics. Given its importance, it is surprising that phonetic transcription has rarely been examined by sociolinguists from the point of view of its validity and its reliability — despite the existence of a certain amount of discussion in the phonetic literature. Rather, it has been treated as a pretheoretical notion. In this article, we report an experiment that compares the auditory transcriptions of trained phoneticians with physiological data on the same utterances, using the technique of electropalatography. The experiment shows that (a) there are intervening factors of a psycho-acoustic nature that impinge on a phonetician's transcription, thus affecting validity; and (b) there is considerable inconsistency, both between phoneticians and between a single phonetician's different attempts at transcribing the same token. Both of these latter factors show that a high degree of reliability cannot be assumed.

This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of the prosodic system of Québec French in a variationist framework. However, major problems have to be resolved before one can give a comprehensive view of this system, one of these concerning stress assignment. In order to examine the validity of the traditional view claimed for French by most linguists, which states that stress is always superposed on the final syllable of lexical words, different perceptual tests were devised and carried out with two groups of students. The results of these tests show the effect of structural factors on the perception of stressed syllables in Québec French and demonstrate that this canonic rule does not always hold for varieties of Québec French. On the basis of these results, a subset of stress rules is then proposed and illustrated with examples of words tested in the perceptual tests. Counterexamples to these rules are thereafter discussed, and a reconsideration of the principles of syllabification that are usually taken for granted for French is proposed in light of variable rules.

Catalan sociolinguistics has investigated in depth the uses of Catalan and the attitudes toward it but has only analyzed very sporadically the mechanisms of linguistic change in this language. The study presented in this article is an attempt to describe an ongoing linguistic change that has been observed in a speech community (E1 Pont de Suert) of the Alta Ribagorça, a region in Catalonia (Spain) where the borderline between Catalan and Aragonese, a variety of Spanish, can be delimited. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, the article seeks to demonstrate that a gradual substitution of the autochthonous variant [t∫] by the normative [3] of the phoneme /3/ appears to be taking place in El Pont de Suert, and to determine, at the same time, the linguistic and social factors that favor this substitution. Second, its purpose is to analyze the variation of this phoneme in relation to not only geographic but also social and linguistic variables; this is because a study that considers only geographic factors would describe the characteristics that differentiate the Ribagorca speech from other Catalan speech varieties but would not account for the existing variation in the use of both the voiceless affricate and the voiced fricative.

Based on evidence in Zen dialogues, Bianwen and Chuanqi texts in the Tang Dynasty (a.d. 618–907), and other sources from earlier and later periods, this article, after dismissing the common misconception that during Tang ba () was frequently used in the disposal and serial-verb constructions, proposes that the grammaticalization of the jiang () serial-verb construction was encouraged by yi (), but jiang's disposal characteristic was modeled after its passive counterpart bei, and that it is via the process of lexical replacement that ba replaced jiang's prepositional functions in instrumental and disposal constructions. Ba later lost its instrumental function to na (). We thus resolve the debate between Huang (1986) and Bennett (1981). Moreover, from the recurring pattern of change in the historical development of yi, jiang, ba, and na, we observe two counteracting principles at work: functional refinement, which forces a one-to-one correspondence between a form and its function, and analogous development, which does just the opposite to create a one-to-many relationship.

This article presents data bearing on the question of what happens at the phonetic level during a sound change of the type which Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner (1972) labeled an “apparent merger.” Our production data come from three generations of native Utahns who participated in the Intermountain Language Survey (ImLS) and four New Yorkers who served as control subjects. The phonetic subject of our study is the ongoing change in the tense-lax pairs /i-I, e-ε, u-υ/ before tautosyllabic dark [†] in Utah English. Previous studies reported that the resultant vowels are usually, but not always, perceived by both transcribers and speakers as lax. Acoustic analysis, self-categorization data, and perception data demonstrate that, after the usual F1/F2 contrast has been lost, contrasts between these and lax vowels may persist in phonation differences and that these phonation differences may be available to hearers.

According to Bickerton's “bioprogram,” creole grammars from the outset contain privative oppositions in the verbal system, where zeroes can be unambiguously interpreted as contrasting with verbs bearing the marked feature. A quantitative analysis of tense and aspect in narrative texts in Tok Pisin and Sranan indicates that this is not the case in either language. Zeroes freely occur with all tense categories. Verbs occurring with no tense markers are thus not “marked with zero,” but constitute the historical residue of an earlier stage of the languages in which tense marking of the superstrate languages had not been transmitted and the Creole markers had not yet evolved.

This article examines syntactic variation in an English dialect that has emerged from the process of language shift. South African Indian English has a wide variety of relative clauses that can be categorized as follows: (a) standard, (b) almost standard, (c) substrate influenced, (d) discourse governed. Of some interest is the occasional appearance of left-branching relative clauses and correlatives normally associated with object-verb (OV) languages. Social patterning of the relative clause is examined according to the parameter standard/nonstandard and according to the use made of certain relativization strategies by specific groups of speakers.

British Sign Language is a language exhibiting extensive regional variation and undergoing rapid change, in a period of changing attitudes to the language and the community of signers. Fingerspelling (a representation of written English) is an aspect of BSL that reflects these variations strongly. Analysis of interviews with Deaf signers appearing on BBC television shows that use of fingerspelling may vary according to various demographic factors and the signers' use of voice. There has also been a decrease in the overall use of fingerspelling in BSL over the last 10 years. Strong evidence is presented to support the claim that fingerspelling in BSL is of two distinct linguistic types. Some fingerspelling involves code-mixing with English, whereas some has become incorporated into the language itself. Further evidence for such a “discontinuity” between the code-mixing and borrowing is presented and discussed.

The level of penetration of standard Italian pronunciation norms into a rural Southern Italian dialect is examined, and the factors that influenced this italianization are assessed.

Two general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous sociolinguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in linguistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of linguistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is independent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction develops gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an initial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-dominated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for the second highest status group.

Nonce borrowings in the speech of bilinguals differ from established loanwords in that they are not necessarily recurrent, widespread, or recognized by host language monolinguals. With established loanwords, however, they share the characteristics of morphological and syntactic integration into the host language and consist of single content words or compounds. Furthermore, both types of loanwords differ from intrasentential code-switching — alternate sentence fragments in the two languages, each of which is grammatical by monolingual standards from the standpoints of appropriate function words, morphology, and syntax. In a large corpus of Tamil—English bilingual speech, many words of English origin are found in objects governed by Tamil verbs and vice versa. The equivalence constraint on intrasentential code-switching predicts that no code-switch should occur between verb and object in an SOV/SVO bilingual situation, and hence that objects whose language differs from that of the verb must be borrowed, if only for the nonce. To verify this prediction, we compare quantitatively the distribution across various syntactic contexts of both native Tamil and English—origin complements of Tamil verbs, and find them to be parallel. But the strongest evidence in favor of the nonce borrowing hypothesis comes from an analysis of variable accusative and dative case marking in these complements, in which the English-origin material is shown, morphologically and syntactically, to be virtually indistinguishable from Tamil (nonpronominal) nouns. In addition, we present supporting evidence from the genitive, locative, and other cases and from nonce borrowings from Tamil into these speakers' English.