This study reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the linguistic factors conditioning several variables within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. Previous studies have focused only on the opposition between Ø and -s in the present tense, ignoring other morphosyntactic constructions. Expanding the variable context to present temporal reference, I demonstrate that different constructions convey different aspects: the previously noted association between -s and habitual aspect is confirmed, but Ø is also associated with an aspectual distinction—that of duration. The progressive is used most often with nonstative verbs to denote durative aspect, whereas its much rarer use with statives appears to reflect an older stage in its “grammaticization.” Combining variationist analysis with the comparative method, this reconstruction provides linguistically meaningful explanations of the observed variability and places it within the context of the development of the English language.

In this article, I conduct a quantitative analysis of negative concord in Buckie, a relic dialect from the northeast of Scotland, and compare these findings with transported varieties of English in North America. Two major results arise from the analysis. First, Buckie has high rates of use of negative concord to indeterminates within the same clause, as do all the dialects included in the study. Second, negative concord in other environments is found in certain varieties in the New World that have no counterparts in the Old World. I suggest that the quantitative similarities can be explained in terms of the primitive status of negative concord in vernacular varieties of English, in combination with a shared linguistic heritage during the colonial period. The qualitative differences demonstrate that contexts of linguistic heterogeneity in North America during the early colonization period led to an extension and restructuring of the original rules.

One striking feature of Vimeu Picard concerns the regular insertion of epenthetic vowels in order to break up consonant clusters and to syllabify word-initial and word-final consonants. This corpus-based study focuses on word-initial epenthesis. It provides quantitative evidence that vowel epenthesis applies categorically in some environments and variably in others. Probabilistic analysis demonstrates that the variable pattern is constrained by a complex interplay of linguistic factors. Following Labov (1972a, 1972b) and Antilla and Cho (1998), I interpret such intricate grammatical conditioning as evidence that this variation is a reflection of a grammatical competence that generates both categorical and variable outputs, and I propose an account within the framework of Optimality Theory. An analysis of individual patterns of epenthesis by members of the community reveals that, even though all speakers share the same basic community grammar, their use of epenthesis differs qualitatively as well as quantitatively. I show that individual grammars can be derived from the community grammar, and that Optimality Theory allows us to formalize the idea that individual grammars constitute more specific versions of community grammars.

Reporting the results of an instrumental acoustic examination of the vowel systems of ten Jamaican Creole (or basilect-) dominant and nine Jamaican English (or acrolect-) dominant speakers, this article links phonetic features with sociolinguistic factors. The nature and relative role of vowel quantity and quality differences in phonemic contrast are considered. The question of whether contrastive length operates in speakers' phonological systems is addressed by comparison of spectral and temporal features. Intraspeaker variation in vowel quality is found to play an important role in stylistic variation, demonstrating the complexity of variation in Jamaican varieties. The complex vowel quality (spectral) and quantity (temporal) relations reported here extend our understanding of the spectral and temporal characteristics of vowels involved in phonological contrasts in Jamaican varieties, the range of phonetic variation to be found within a postcreole continuum, and the interaction of phonetic factors in the expression of stylistic variation.

It is usual to study a number of linguistic variables in a single speech community. The present study, however, focuses on a single phonological variable in a number of speech communities—the vocalization of /l/ in nine Australian and New Zealand cities—in order to (1) strengthen and extend the quick and anonymous field method by designing an instrument to include all relevant phonological environments; (2) demonstrate the strategic potential of moving from a unilocality to a multilocality sociolinguistics; (3) conceptualize a variationist isogloss that extends rather than displaces the core methodology of sociolinguistics; and (4) propose a conception of geography that offers mechanisms (space and place effects) to help distinguish language change processes that are universal from those that are not. Place and space represent a system of contrasts within geography. Place effects refer to the ensemble of sociolinguistic conditions within a speech locality, whereas space effects refer to the relationship between speech localities. Place effects provide a potential explanation for why spatial models fail to account adequately for the facts: that is, why some places resist the spread of innovation while other places welcome innovation.

Before the advent of Optimality Theory (OT), quantitative variation patterns were usually regarded as the outcome of a selection between categorical grammars (see Bailey, 1973; Bickerton, 1973, among others). In a constraint-based approach, like OT, one is able to account for variation without resorting to a separate grammar for each variant, since the framework allows for variation to be encoded in (and therefore predicted by) a single grammar, through variable ranking (or crucial nonranking) of constraints. Along the lines of Reynolds (1994) and Anttila (1997), this study supports the view that, from the predictions determined by a language-specific set of variably ranked constraints, it is possible to establish quantitatively the probability of application of each variant inherent to the variation process. As a consequence, the analysis of across-word regressive assimilation in Picard attempts to incorporate into the grammar of the language both abstract knowledge and quantitative patterns of language use.

It is not difficult to find grammatical and lexical markers of Fiji English. But are there any phonological features that identify an individual as a speaker of this regional variety of English? For the vast majority of Fiji Islanders, English is their second (or third) language, and their accents clearly identify their linguistic background (e.g., indigenous Fijian or Indo-Fijian). However, one pronunciation feature seems to be shared by a vast majority of speakers of English in Fiji: the deletion of yod in non-primary stressed /Cju/ syllables. This article considers variation in yod pronunciation according to ethnicity, age, gender, and education and examines whether yod deletion is a phonological shibboleth of Fiji English or merely a feature of L2 English.

One of the challenges in characterizing non-native varieties of English is accounting for variant uses of ostensibly standard English forms. The present corpus study examines both quantitative and qualitative aspects of pluperfect use in Indian English (IndE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE). IndE is found to differ from native usage by associating had + V-ed with present perfect and preterite meanings. Licensing of pluperfect contexts by time adverbials is also found to be significantly lower in IndE. AmE shows the lowest overall use of the pluperfect and the highest use of disambiguating adverbials. Thus, AmE and IndE show distinct patterns of divergence from BrE. Variation within IndE exhibits a tendency for greater non-nativeness in regional (vs. national) press and in bureaucratic (vs. press) registers, suggesting a multidimensional distribution of IndE nonstandardness in India. These nonstandard uses are shown to convey new pragmatic meanings deriving from ambiguity in the native system and reinforcement from substrate languages. Finally, these changes are evaluated in relation to the broader tense–modality–aspect system of IndE as well as those of other non-native Englishes which exhibit similar characteristics.

In this article we identify a variable context in the use of two Galician verb forms (cantei and cantara) and three Spanish verb forms used in Galicia (canté, cantara, and había cantado) with identical modal, temporal, and aspectual values: the simple past indicative. We show that the variation in question is constrained by linguistic factors, specifically pragmatic ones, and that, although the forms cantei and canté are widely preferred, contexts with low discourse focalization favor cantara and había cantado. Finally, we test this hypothesis with data from two language corpora (Galician and Galician Spanish), which are quantified and interpreted with the program VARBRUL 2S.

The organizing concept behind dialect variation is still seen predominantly as the areas within which similar varieties are spoken. The opposing view—that dialects are organized in a continuum without sharp boundaries—is likewise popular. This article introduces a new element into the discussion, which is the opportunity to view dialectal differences in the aggregate. We employ a dialectometric technique that provides an additive measure of pronunciation difference: the (aggregate) pronunciation distance. This allows us to determine how much of the linguistic variation is accounted for by geography. In our sample of 27 Dutch towns and villages, the variation ranges between 65% and 81%, which lends credence to the continuum view. The borders of well-established dialect areas nonetheless show large deviations from the expected aggregate pronunciation distance. We pay particular attention to a puzzle concerning the subjective perception of continua introduced by Chambers and Trudgill (1998): a traveller walking in a straight line from village to village notices successive small changes, but seldom, if ever, observes large differences. This sounds like a justification of the continuum view, but there is an added twist. Might the traveller be misled by the perspective of most recent memory? We use the Chambers–Trudgill puzzle to organize our argument at several points.

Linguistic parallelism (i.e., the tendency of similar forms to occur together within a stretch of discourse) has been shown to be very strong in many linguistic phenomena and in a vast number of languages. Examining the role of phrase-level parallelism on noun phrase number agreement, this article demonstrates that Puerto Rican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese exhibit more similarities than differences with regard to this constraint. A detailed analysis of Brazilian Portuguese data is presented, and the results are compared with those found by Poplack (1980a) for Puerto Rican Spanish. Guy's (1981a) and Labov's (1994) hypothesis about missing zeroes in Brazilian Portuguese is also discussed. In conclusion, it is claimed that the phrase-level parallelism effect on noun phrase number agreement is embedded in a universal principle of linguistic use: parallel processing.

In Early Modern English, double comparatives were often encountered in both spoken and written language. The present article investigates the redundantly marked comparative worser in relation to its irregular, but etymologically justified, counterpart worse. My aim is to examine the diachronic development of the form as well as its distribution in the written language of the 16th and 17th centuries. Two detailed corpus studies are used to reveal the set of parameters underlying the variation between worse and worser, which include system congruity, semantics, and standardization effects. However, the focus here is on the tendency to maintain an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, known as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. This prosodic principle (which has been argued to be particularly influential in English) turns out to be responsible for most of the results obtained in the analysis of the corpus data.

The present study explores the notion of lexical diffusion in relation to an ongoing change in Modern French nasal vowels. Data are interviews with 42 Parisians, recorded in 1972–74 and 1989–93. We start with the notion that sound change ought to be regular, according to the classification of Labov (1994): that is, being a phonetically gradual change, it should be lexically abrupt. The first part of our analysis, which includes more than 10,000 nasal vowel tokens, seems to indicate an influence of factors compatible with the hypothesis of regular sound change (i.e., stress and phonetic surroundings). A closer look at the vowel /[vowel symbol]/, however, reveals an independent lexical and grammatical conditioning, one not entirely explicable in terms of stress or phonetics. As other studies have shown (Krishnamurti, 1998; Yaeger-Dror, 1996), gradual phonetic change might show lexical irregularities, a fact which calls for a revision of Labov's classification.