Chapter 8 examines the typologically rare three-way laryngeal contrast found in Korean. As also noted in Chapter 2, the manner contrasts in the Korean obstruent inventory have been the point of departure for many descriptive and theoretical contributions to the typology of laryngeal contrasts and related issues, such as feature theory. More recently, a diachronic change characterized by the redistribution of cue weights from the consonantal to the vocalic portion of the signal, mirroring the common historical process of tonogenesis, has sparked renewed interest in the Korean laryngeal contrasts. The opportunity to observe such a change in vivo, and to compare its progression across different dialects, provides an ideal testing ground for theories of sound change. This chapter provides a review of the literature on the phonetic and phonological characterizations of the stop-laryngeal contrast, as well as a survey of dialectal and diachronic variation in its phonetic realization. The chapter closes with an apparent-time study documenting dialectal variation and change in the use of three acoustic cues to the contrast (VOT, f0, and H1-H2) in three dialects of Korean.

The chapter explains the basic principles of linguistic change from a sociolinguistic variationist perspective. It begins with an explanation of the inextricable relationship between linguistic variation and change, and proceeds to demonstrate how language change can be observed, investigated, and explained. Sociolinguists can document and analyse language change using either the real-time method or the apparent-time construct; these methods and their advantages and pitfalls are explained and exemplified.

In this chapter the editors introduce the book and its aim of showing how the study of comparative and historical data from the Romance languages can illuminate general linguistics. After a brief presentation of the volume and its structure, the editors reflect on how their personal experiences of working with data from the Romance languages have led them to reflect on wider issues in general ling uistics. Recurrent themes in their work have been, respectively, morphosyntactic change (Ledgeway) and sound change and its morphological consequences (Maiden). Among the topics whose theoretical implications are explored are: parametric variation, universals, typological variation, pro-drop, word order, linguistic theory and philology, complementizer systems, the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in morphologization, the problem of defining a language family, and the perils of ‘standard language bias’ in the practice of historical linguistics. While these may appear a quite heterogeneous set of issues, they are treated in a way that prompts some major shared fundamental conclusions, in particular that Romance linguistics can make its most powerful contributions to general linguistics when Romance linguists exploit to the maximum the extraordinary wealth of historical and comparative data which the Romance languages and dialects offer them.

This chapter examines sex differences in the data on General North American English and also considers LGBT speech in film and television performances.

This chapter examines correlations between phonetic measures and performance year, thereby identifying the progress of sound change in General North American English across eight decades. It also presents the phonetic qualities of modern General North American English and traces the evolution of those qualities in the speech of four Californian actors from the early and late periods.

This chapter examines variation and change in the speech of performances by African American, Latino, Asian American, and Indigenous actors.

This chapter examines variation and change in the speech of performances by actors from the South, the Inland North, and Canada.

This chapter examines variation and change in the speech of performances by actors from the New York City region.

The first study reveals that GOAT exhibits a higher F2 when it occurs in the context of smiling, which suggests that some sound changes may be advancing during moments when the body is used to express heightened affect. The second study illustrates that the more durative embodied practice of maintaining an open-jaw setting has had lowering consequences across the vowel system of California English – even for GOAT, which is typically described as undergoing fronting rather than lowering.

Why does a sound change spread faster among one group of people than another? While variationist sociolinguistics was founded on the idea that a variant’s social meaning might be part of the answer, the proposal is still the source of active debate. Eckert (2008, 2012) calls for a renewed focus on social meaning, articulating the core interest of ‘third wave’ research. Here, we join some recent work that highlights the benefits of combining analytic perspectives from all of Eckert’s (2012) three waves, particularly with respect to the study of sound change. By directly comparing insights from parallel analyses of the same data, we argue that all sound change researchers can potentially benefit from considering a third-wave perspective, in the sense that social change results in indexical change, and this may explain the trajectory of a sound change. Our data come from white and Chinese American residents of San Francisco’s Sunset District, recorded in 2008. As with the COT-CAUGHT merger (Hall-Lew 2013), focus on social change over time suggests that the individuals who came of age during the peak of social change are key to mapping the trajectory of GOAT-fronting.

Relative to the first- and second-wave traditions of variationist sociolinguistics, language change has not been a central concern of work in the third wave. Indeed, most research in the third wave has not mentioned language change at all, focusing instead on social meaning and on language’s role in the construction and performance of identities, styles, and stances. Nonetheless, research in this tradition that has addressed language change (e.g., Hall-Lew et al., this volume; Zhang, this volume) makes evident that the approach has a great deal to contribute, particularly in accounting for the social motivations underpinning change.