This paper examines how children acquire Spanish variable clitic placement (VCP), a lexically conditioned phenomenon whereby clitics may precede or follow complex verb phrases. Research on how children acquire truly syntactic variable phenomena suggests that they either generalize one variant initially or they match the variation in the input from the beginning. Here I examine how children acquire the lexical conditioning of Spanish VCP. A corpus study of naturalistic conversations between parents and young children suggests that from the earliest ages examined (2;0-3;0) children display lexically-specific patterns that seem to be fine-tuned by the early school years. Experimental results using two different elicitation techniques with children ages 4;0-7;0 provide further support for early acquisition of the lexical conditioning of VCP and some evidence for fine-tuning during this age window. Thus, methodological triangulation enables detection of variable use where children would otherwise show categorical use of variants with infrequent syntactic phenomena, such as Spanish VCP.

This paper examines possessive pronoun forms in Welsh, a feature thought to be undergoing change (Davies, 2016). First, we seek to add to the understanding about how and in which stylistic contexts these forms are used. Second, we examine whether students in Welsh-medium schools with different home language backgrounds show the same sociolinguistic competence. In contrast to what is prescribed in many grammar books, the colloquial form mam fi ‘my mum’ is used at much higher rates than the traditional literary fy mam and sandwich variants fy mam i. This is particularly the case in more casual styles. We also find differences between north and south Wales in overall rates of use, but within the two schools studied, the English home language students broadly show the same patterns and constraints as the Welsh home language students, underlining that language background does not affect the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence.

The present study investigates internal and external constraints conditioning variable T-glottaling, the realization of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ], in supraregional Scottish Standard English. Drawing on phonemically annotated speech data from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English, a total of 12,162 /t/ tokens produced by 138 speakers were extracted from eight formal speaking categories in the corpus and analyzed auditorily. The results showed that about 28% of the analyzed /t/ tokens were produced as glottal stops, with significant inter- and intra-speaker variability. The realization of T-glottaling is subject to both linguistic (phonetic context and word type) and social factors (age, gender, and speech style). Moreover, patterns of various types of T-glottaling differ from each other and constitute distinctive processes of ongoing sound change in Scotland.

Analyzing data from the Puerto Rican English in Philadelphia (PREP) corpus, we investigate participation in TH-stopping, a socially stigmatized yet stable variable documented in Philadelphia. While previous studies have been impressionistic and have considered voiced and voiceless tokens to pattern together, this work validates novel, acoustically based stopping indices: mean harmonics-to-noise ratio for voiced tokens and skewness for voiceless tokens. We apply these indices to the corpus data and analyze stopping under a Bayesian framework, and we compare results from a model built from impressionistic coding of a subset of the same data. We find convergent evidence that TH-stopping is a stable variable in the Puerto Rican English data as well. Findings are compared with those of existing studies, noting future directions for research on the variable and underscoring the importance of establishing demographically representative baselines for linguistic research in diverse urban centers.

This study examines the extent to which the Basque ergative -k marker is undergoing change in the Basque Autonomous Community. The inclusion of Standard Basque in the education system since 1982 has brought a significant generational change in the mode of language acquisition: older speakers had no formal education in Basque, whereas younger speakers were educated in the Basque immersion program. Contrary to popular belief, results provide no evidence of ergative loss in apparent time; rather, they are consistent with linguistic stabilization. We claim that the differences in social constraints of gender and language use among the younger group reflect social changes, in which mode of language acquisition is responsible for the social stabilization and further stratification of ergativity. We conclude by arguing that minoritized contexts undergoing language revitalization provide important implications for sociolinguistic change, whereby social changes are embraced in assessing linguistic change.