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Constraints on verbal -s/zero marking: New insights from Norwich Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-11 David Britain, Laura Rupp
Here we investigate present tense verbal -s/zero variability in a dialect of Eastern England in which -s marking can only appear in third-person singular contexts. Our objective is to explore constraints on -s/zero marking, and to consider the grammatical function of -s in such a variety. In order to investigate this, we reanalyzed verbal -s/zero marking in 63 sociolinguistic interviews found in Peter
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The jet set: Modern RP and the (re)creation of social distinction Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-29 Sophie Holmes-Elliott, Erez Levon
While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely undisputed, there is less consensus about class-based divisions. This paper investigates this question through an updated analysis of the variety emblematic of Britain’s upper class: Received Pronunciation (RP). While previous studies have suggested levelling in RP to a broader standard southeastern norm
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Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German? Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-20 Andrin Büchler, Lars Bülow, David Britain
This paper shows (a) how the concept of the linguistic market can be operationalized as an index to enable its inclusion as a factor in variationist analysis and (b) how this index helps to explain sociolinguistic variation in a diglossic situation. To do this, sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in Swiss Standard German among 16 L1-dialect-speakers aged between 19 and 40 from Biel/Bienne in
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Quantifying transitivity: Uncovering relations of gender and power Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-14 Jessi Elana Aaron
Transitivity has come to be recognized as a promising heuristic tool for uncovering implicit ideologies in a wide range of areas. Though it has been used to explore worldviews in several kinds of discourse, nearly all have relied solely on qualitative analyses. Statistical analysis can offer a fuller understanding of past societies. This study applies a gradient, discourse-based understanding of transitivity
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Variation in the production of Basque ergativity: Change or stable variation? Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-19 Ager Gondra, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, Eukene Franco-Landa
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
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[bɪt] by [bɪʔ]: Variation in T-glottaling in Scottish Standard English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Zeyu Li, Ulrike Gut
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
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TH-stopping in Philadelphia Puerto Rican English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Abigail E. Patchell, Grant M. Berry
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
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Possessive pronouns in Welsh: Stylistic variation and the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Katharine Young, Mercedes Durham, Jonathan Morris
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
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Early acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Pablo E. Requena
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
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Subject dislocation in Ontario English: Insights from sociolinguistic typology Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Sali A. Tagliamonte, Bridget L. Jankowski
Subject dislocation (SD) is common across languages. In French, it is a vernacular norm. In English, it is comparatively rare. This article examines English SD in a unique contrastive situation in Ontario, Canada: two communities where SD is a community norm, one where individuals speak both English and French (Kapuskasing), and the other where the population speaks English only (Parry Sound). Dislocated
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Form and function covariation: Obligation modals in Australian English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Catherine E. Travis, Rena Torres Cacoullos
Shifts in the frequencies of English modals of obligation have been linked to shifts in modal function and changing interpersonal authority. Interpretation of over 2,000 tokens in spontaneous speech data recorded in Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s and 2010s establishes a replicable classification of obligation meanings, based on source of obligation, with a three-way distinction between Hierarchical
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Phonological emergence and social reorganization: Developing a nasal /æ/ system in Lansing, Michigan Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Monica Nesbitt
Phonological rule innovation is thought to come about via reanalysis of some phonetic variation (e.g., Bermúdez-Otero, 2007; Hyman, 1975; Ohala, 1981; Pierrehumbert, 2001). Yet, empirical evidence suggests instead that the role of phonetic variation during phonological rule innovation is minor (Fruehwald, 2013, 2016). This paper adds to this ongoing debate an empirical analysis of an emergent allophonic
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Post-educator relaxation in the U-shaped curve: Evidence from a panel study of Tyneside (ing) Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 James Grama, Johanna Mechler, Lea Bauernfeind, Mirjam E. Eiswirth, Isabelle Buchstaller
Age-grading—a cornerstone of sociolinguistic theorizing—is hypothesized to follow a U-shaped pattern. Vernacular forms peak in adolescence, abate in middle age, and increase again in retirement, forming a vernacular tail. A complete understanding of age-grading has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence across the entire adult trajectory and a relatively narrow understanding of speakers’ motivations
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A question of change: Putting five complementary measures to the test with French polar interrogatives Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Nathalie Dion
This paper explores how five key complementary features of variable systems—overall rates, variant conditioning, productivity, contextual dispersion, and diffusion in the community—must be marshaled to provide a more comprehensive characterization of change in progress. We illustrate by revisiting a robustly variable sector of Canadian French morphosyntax whose variants are known to be in flux: the
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Why do we say them when we know it should be they? Twitter as a resource for investigating nonstandard syntactic variation in The Netherlands Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Stefan Grondelaers, Roeland van Hout, Hans van Halteren, Esther Veerbeek
Two Twitter-based corpus studies are reported to account for the increasing preference in The Netherlands for the stigmatized subject use of the object pronoun hun ‘them.’ Twitter data were collected to obtain a sufficient number of hun-tokens, but also to investigate the validity of two hypotheses on the preference for hun, this is, that subject-hun is a contrast profiler which thrives in contexts
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Quotation in earlier and contemporary Australian Aboriginal English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Glenys Dale Collard, Madeleine Clews, Matt Hunt Gardner
We examine constructed dialogue in a longitudinal corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (AE) spoken in Perth, Australia. We conduct a variationist analysis of naturalistic data from forty-six L1 speakers of AE born 1907–2005. We ask, regarding the use of quotative frames, whether AE has changed in line with settler colonial Englishes. We examine whether a division of labor exists in the use of quotative
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Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Margaret E. L. Renwick, Joseph A. Stanley, Jon Forrest, Lelia Glass
The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS
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Cumulative exposure to fast speech conditions duration of content words in English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-21 Earl Kjar Brown
This paper tests the idea that the speech rate with which surrounding words are spoken affects the mental representation of words and conditions production of words. This possibility is operationalized by measuring a word's ratio of occurrence in speaker-relative fast speech. Other variables shown in the literature to influence speech rate are controlled for in a 10,000-iteration bootstrapping procedure
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Where did wer go? Lexical variation and change in third-person male adult noun referents in Old and Middle English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 James M. Stratton
The present study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the evolution of the semantic field of third-person male adult noun referents from Old English to Middle English, covering a time depth of approximately six hundred years. Results show a shift from the favored variant wer in Old English to man in Middle English, with the diachronic change in frequency following a prototypical s-shaped
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Extraverted innovators and conscientious laggards? Investigating effects of personality traits on language change Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-05-18 Carina Steiner, Péter Jeszenszky, Viviane Stebler, Adrian Leemann
Although personality-related factors play a crucial role in sociolinguistics as conceivable sources of language variation and change, there is insufficient quantitative evidence on such relationships. Using a large and balanced sample (n = 1000), this study investigated effects of personality traits on the use of a Swiss German plural marker in its early stages of diffusion. Besides age and region
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“I can't see myself ever living any[w]ere else”: Variation in (HW) in Edinburgh English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Nina Markl
Sociolinguistic research across Scotland in recent decades has documented an erosion of the phonemic contrast between /ʍ/ (as in which) and /w/ (as in witch). Based on acoustic phonetic analysis of 1,400 realizations produced by eighteen Edinburgh women born between 1938 and 1993, I argue that in the context of Edinburgh this is best understood as a complex sociolinguistic variable (HW) encompassing
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Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Cynthia Lukyanenko, Karen Miller
We characterized the patterns of agreement variation and consistency in three corpora of child and child-directed US English to better understand preschoolers’ input and to compare preschoolers’ own agreement production. We examined sentences with third-person subjects and tensed forms of be in two large single-family corpora and one cross-sectional corpus collected during a Search-and-Find activity
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Intra- and interspeaker repetitiveness in Chengdu Mandarin locative variation Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Aini Li, Meredith Tamminga, Hai Hu
In producing linguistic variation, language users display a tendency to reuse the same variant. This paper compares the empirical properties of different types of repetitiveness in a single case study: locative variation in Chengdu Mandarin. Using conversational data from sociolinguistic interviews, we ask whether within-speaker repetitiveness (persistence) and cross-speaker repetitiveness (convergence)
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goose-fronting in Received Pronunciation across time: A trend study Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Sandra Jansen, Jose A. Mompean
The current study analyzes the trajectory of the goose vowel in Received Pronunciation (RP) over ten decades (1920s-2010s). Recordings of eighty-seven RP speakers were transcribed in ELAN, and vowel tokens were extracted by FAVE, measuring F1 and F2 values at the midpoint. Showing the life-cycle of a sound change from start to (almost) completion, the results confirm that goose-fronting has been an
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Part of town as an independent factor: the north-force merger in Manchester Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Maciej Baranowski
This paper investigates the question of whether, as is often popularly believed, there may be systematic linguistic differences between different neighborhoods within a city by testing the independence of “part of town” as a factor separate from social class in the north-force merger in Manchester, UK, in a sample of 122 speakers. The phonemic contrast is explored in minimal-pair tests, Cartesian distance
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The role of internal constraints and stylistic congruence on a variant's social impact Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Charlotte Vaughn
In natural conversation, multiple factors likely impact the social force of a sociolinguistic variant, yet researchers have tended to examine individual factors in isolation. This paper considers two underexamined factors together—the role of a variable's internal constraints and the role of stylistically congruent surrounding speech—to understand their combined influence on how a single variable's
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Variable grammars are variable across registers: future temporal reference in English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Alexandra Engel, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
It is widely accepted that internal constraints on variation are not modulated by social and stylistic factors (e.g., Labov, 2010:265). Is this also true for register differences as a special type of sociostylistic factor? To address this question, we investigate future temporal reference (FTR) variation in English (It'll be fun versus It's gonna be fun) via a variationist corpus study (n = 2,600 tokens)
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Medium-shifting and intraspeaker variation in conversational interviews Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Isaac L. Bleaman, Katie Cugno, Annie Helms
We investigate the impact of medium of communication (in-person versus video) on intraspeaker variation in conversation—a process we refer to as medium-shifting. To quantify the effects of medium-shifting and understand its possible motivations, we analyze three variables that show intraspeaker effects of “clear” or “careful” speech: articulation rate, density-controlled vowel space area, and (ING)
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Beyond binary gender: creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Kara Becker, Sameer ud Dowla Khan, Lal Zimman
This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However
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Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: a diachronic study Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Mary Baltazani, Joanna Przedlacka, Özlem Ünal-Logačev, Pavel Logačev, John Coleman
Asia Minor Greek (AMG) speakers cohabited with Turkish speakers for eight hundred years until the 1923 Lausanne Convention, which forced a two-way mass population exchange between Turkey and Greece and severed their everyday contact. We compare the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of first-generation AMG speakers born in Turkey with three subsequent generations born in Greece
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On competing indexicalities in southern Peninsular Spanish. A sociophonetic and perceptual analysis of affricate [ts] through time Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Matilde Vida-Castro
This paper examines linguistic, cognitive, and social factors in the development of an ongoing sound change in Andalusian Spanish related to the crosslinguistically well-known process of syllable coda lenition. The resyllabification of word internal /-s/ when followed by dental plosive /t/, in words such as lingüística [liŋ⋅ˈgujs⋅ti⋅ka] ‘linguistics’ realized as [liŋ⋅ˈguj⋅tsi⋅ka], results in an affricate
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Re-examining the /eː-ɛː/ merger in Finland-Swedish: Regional and stylistic variation Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Janine A. E. Strandberg, Charlotte Gooskens, Anja Schüppert
This article examines regional and stylistic variation in the merger of front vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in Finland-Swedish. The study investigates the merger by comparing formant data from 141 speakers from four Swedish-speaking regions in Finland. Additionally, intraspeaker variation is explored by incorporating samples from three contextual styles. The results indicate cross-regional differences between
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A sociophonetic account of gradient /z/ devoicing among Chicanx high schoolers Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Nicole Holliday, Franny D. Brogan
This paper examines final /z/ devoicing among Chicanx teens in Southern California to investigate the degree to which devoiced final /z/ neutralizes with final /s/ in this dialect. Results indicate on the one hand that devoiced /z/ remains distinct from /s/: as expected, devoiced /z/ is significantly less voiceless than /s/ and has a significantly lower center of gravity (COG). However, unexpectedly
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The Status of ain't in Philadelphia African American English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Sabriya Fisher
This paper investigates use of ain't in a corpus of naturalistic speech from forty-two African-American Philadelphians. Use of ain't in past/perfective contexts where it varies with didn't is considered a unique feature of AAE. This use is compared in apparent time to uses of ain't in tense-aspect environments shared with other English varieties. Results show that past/perfective uses of ain't increased
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Phonological mergers have systemic phonetic consequences: palm, trees, and the Low Back Merger Shift Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-06-28 Matt Hunt Gardner, Rebecca V. Roeder
This paper provides a unified phonologically motivated explanation for the movement of trap, dress, and kit following the low-back merger in North American English (i.e., the Canadian Shift, California Shift, Low Back Merger Shift, Third Shift, etc.). The explanation puts forth that the three-way merger of lot, palm, and thought results in the loss of the [+Front] feature specification for trap, opening
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On the probability and direction of morphosyntactic lifespan change Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-05-25 Lauren Fonteyn, Peter Petré
The aim of this study is to further contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the nature of “morphosyntactic lifespan change,” defined here as observable shifts in the grammatical choices individuals make between competing morphosyntactic structures. Through a quantitative case study of competition between two types of ing-nominals in seventeenth-century English, in which we factor in the grammatical
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The influence of language shift on Sanapaná vowels: An exemplar-based perspective Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-05-16 Jens E. L. Van Gysel
This paper presents the first sociophonetic study of Sanapaná (Enlhet-Enenlhet), spoken by around one thousand people in Paraguay. It examines the effects of L2 (Spanish/Guaraní) fluency and loss of L1 exposure on vowel quality and within-category variability of /e, o/ productions in the Sanapaná /e, a, o/ system. Data from eleven native Sanapaná speakers suggest that age and multilingualism may have
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New ways of analyzing complementizer drop in Montréal French: Exploration of cognitive factors Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-03-04 Yiming Liang, Pascal Amsili, Heather Burnett
In this paper, we return to the well-studied yet still puzzling phenomenon of complementizer omission in a large spoken corpus of Quebec French, with the help of modern computational methods for annotation and mixed effects logistic regression models. Supporting previous work, our study reveals that complementizer que omission is conditioned by social factors and grammatical factors; however, we also
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A variationist analysis of first-person-singular subject expression in Louisiana French Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Aarnes Gudmestad, Katie Carmichael
In this study, we investigate first-person-singular subject expression in Louisiana French. This variety is undergoing language death and features extreme variation, with twelve first-person-singular subject forms identified within our corpus. We demonstrate that variationist methods are robust for examining such variation in obsolescing languages, and we provide a model for undertaking such analyses
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Lifespan “Changes from Above” in the Standardization of Japanese Regional Dialects: Levels of Grammar, Lexical Properties and Community Characteristics Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-02-03 Shoji Takano
This paper examines sociolinguistic properties of lifespan changes in language use from a non-Western perspective. Based on real-time studies in a change from above context (standardization) and panel surveys of prosody, the paper demonstrates that the stability of individuals’ language use over time varies along the following interwoven factors: (1) levels of grammar; (2) lexical properties; (3) progressive
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Contextualizing /s/ retraction: Sibilant variation and change in Washington D.C. African American Language Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Kaylynn Gunter, Charlotte Vaughn, Tyler Kendall
Recent work has demonstrated an ongoing change across varieties of English in which /s/ retracts before consonants, particularly before /tɹ/ clusters (e.g., Lawrence, 2000; Shapiro, 1995; Stuart-Smith et al., 2019). Much of this work has focused on the social and linguistic distributions of /stɹ/ within single communities, without an examination of the broader sibilant space (e.g., /s/ and /ʃ/). Meanwhile
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Word-order variation in a contact setting: A corpus-based investigation of Russian spoken in Daghestan Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-19 Chiara Naccarato, Anastasia Panova, Natalia Stoynova
This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained
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Structure, Chronology, and Local Social Meaning of a Supra-Local Vowel Shift: Emergence of the Low-Back-Merger Shift in New England Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Monica Nesbitt, James N. Stanford
The Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) is a major North American vowel chain shift spreading across many disparate dialect regions. In this field-based study, we examine the speech of fifty-nine White Western Massachusetts speakers, aged 18–89. Using diagnostics in Becker (2019) and Boberg (2019b), we find the LBMS emerging at the expense of the Northern Cities Shift (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972) and
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Aspects of change in New York City English short-a Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Bill Haddican, Michael Newman, Cecelia Cutler, Christina Tortora
This article focuses on change in the “short-a system” of New York City English (NYCE). Recent results suggest that a complex set of tensing rules traditionally described for NYCE are being replaced by several simpler systems. This article reports on a study of this change using a recently developed large audio-aligned parsed speech corpus (CoNYCE). This change is similar to the simplification reported
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New and old puzzles in the morphological conditioning of coronal stop deletion Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-31 Laurel MacKenzie, Meredith Tamminga
This paper probes the well-documented morphological effect on coronal stop deletion (CSD, also called /t,d/-deletion), by which there is more deletion in monomorphemes like mist than in regular past tense forms like missed. We observe that there are, in principle, additional morphological distinctions that could be made within each category: for instance, the “regular past” category contains perfect
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Crosslinguistic perceptions of /s/ among English, French, and German listeners Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-08 Zac Boyd, Josef Fruehwald, Lauren Hall-Lew
This study reports the results of a crosslinguistic matched guise test examining /s/ and pitch variation in judgments of sexual orientation and nonnormative masculinity among English, French, and German listeners. Listeners responded to /s/ and pitch manipulations in native and other language stimuli (English, French, German, and Estonian). All listener groups rate higher pitch guises as more gay-
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Do Creoles conform to typological patterns? Habitual marking in Palenquero—Erratum Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-01 Hiram L. Smith
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Gender separation and the speech community: Rhoticity in early 20th century Southland New Zealand English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-06-17 Dan Villarreal, Lynn Clark, Jennifer Hay, Kevin Watson
The existence of a shared constraint hierarchy is one of the criteria that defines and delimits speech communities. In particular, women and men are thought to differ only in their rates of variable usage, not in the constraints governing their variation; that is, women and men are typically considered to belong to the same speech community. We find that in early twentieth century Southland, New Zealand
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Do Creoles conform to typological patterns? Habitual marking in Palenquero Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-06-07 Hiram L. Smith
It is widely debated whether creole languages form a typological class; however, crosslinguistic generalizations from functional typology are seldom tested in creoles. Typological studies report a strong crosslinguistic tendency for asymmetries in habitual grammatical expressions across the present and past temporal reference domains (Bybee, 1994:245–8; Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994:151–60). This
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Lects in Helsinki Finnish - a probabilistic component modeling approach Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-17 Olli Kuparinen, Jaakko Peltonen, Liisa Mustanoja, Unni Leino, Jenni Santaharju
This article examines Finnish lects spoken in Helsinki from the 1970s to the 2010s with a probabilistic model called Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The model searches for underlying components based on the linguistic features used in the interviews. Several coherent lects were discovered as components in the data, which counters the results of previous studies that report only weak covariation between
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Be that as it may: The Unremarkable Trajectory of the English Subjunctive in North American Speech Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-12 Laura Kastronic, Shana Poplack
The English subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Since then, the mandative variant was reported to have revived, while the adverbial subjunctive continued to diminish. American English is heavily implicated in these developments; it is thought to be leading the revival of the former but lagging in the decline of
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Vague eggs and tags: Prevelar merger in Seattle Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-03 Valerie Freeman
This study describes prevelar merger, the raising of low-front /æ, ɛ/ and lowering of mid-front /e/ before the voiced velar /ɡ/, in Seattle, Washington. In the most advanced part of this change in progress, all twenty speakers (age 18–62, half men, half women, all white) produced /ɛɡ/ and /eɡ/ (beg, vague) as upgliding diphthongs merged in F1 and F2 directly between their nonprevelar counterparts (dress
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Obviously undergoing change: Adverbs of evidentiality across time and space Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-04-28 Sali A. Tagliamonte, Jennifer Smith
Increasingly globalized communication networks in the modern world may influence traditional patterns of linguistic change: in contrast to an orderly sequential pathway of change, more recently a number of “mega trends” have been identified, which accelerate simultaneously in time and space. The rise of obviously within the cohort of adverbs of evidentiality—naturally, evidently, clearly, and of course—may
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Perceptual validation of vowel normalization methods for variationist research Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-04-26 Santiago Barreda
The evaluation of normalization methods sometimes focuses on the maximization of vowel-space similarity. This focus can lead to the adoption of methods that erase legitimate phonetic variation from our data, that is, overnormalization. First, a production corpus is presented that highlights three types of variation in formant patterns: uniform scaling, nonuniform scaling, and centralization. Then the
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Expression of anaphoric subjects in Vera'a: Functional and structural factors in the choice between pronoun and zero Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-03-11 Stefan Schnell, Danielle Barth
The choice between a pronoun and zero anaphor for the expression of third-person subjects is examined in a corpus of Vera'a (Oceanic). While predominantly expressed by a pronoun, subjects are found to permit zero form with referents that have low anaphoric distance. Within this context, zero is found to be preferred with a subset of verbal predicates that take a specific tense-aspect-mood-polarity
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Variable plural marking in Palenquero Creole Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-03-11 Estilita María Cassiani Obeso, Hiram L. Smith
One of the most salient putative African features of Palenquero, an Afro-Hispanic creole spoken in northern Colombia, is the prenominal plural marker ma. However, plural number is not categorically marked with ma, which alternates with bare forms in plural contexts and also occurs in singular contexts. In a principled sample of noun phrases (n = 1,186) from the spontaneous speech of twenty-seven Palenquero-Spanish
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The social embedding of a syntactic alternation: Variable particle placement in Ontario English Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-03-11 Melanie Röthlisberger, Sali A. Tagliamonte
The present work investigates the effects of social constraints on word order variation in particle placement in Ontario English, Canada. While previous research has documented numerous linguistic factors conditioning the choice of variant, social correlates have so far remained unexplored. To address this gap, we analyze 6,047 variable phrasal verbs from the vernacular speech of six communities in
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Escaping the Trap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-03-11 Anja Thiel, Aaron J. Dinkin
We examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising of trap in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robust trap-raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 of trap—a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although
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In memoriam Anthony Kroch (1946–2021) Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Beatrice Santorini
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Co-variation, style and social meaning: The implicational relationship between (h) and (ing) in Debden, Essex Language Variation and Change (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-02-17 Amanda Cole
This paper demonstrates that the differing social meanings held by linguistic features can result in an implicational relationship between them. Rates of (h) and (ing) are investigated in the casual speech of sixty-three speakers from a community with Cockney heritage: Debden, Essex. The indexicalities of h-dropping in Debden (signalling Cockney) are superordinate to and incorporate the indexicalities