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.

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.

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.

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.