This article analyses a case of second-dialect performance as an idealised instance of second-dialect acquisition, without mitigating factors such as access, analytical ability and motivation. It focuses on the Australian English and American English speech of three young Australian actors. An acoustic analysis of their short-vowel systems shows that they can successfully adapt to perform in an American English accent, but that their second-dialect system is less stable and more variable than their native system.

A foreign-accent rating experiment on the actors’ American English with American English judges shows that the actors on average are thought to sound slightly less American than the native American English-speaker controls. The discrepancy between the acoustic accuracy and listener acceptability may be explained by judges attending to different features from those included in the acoustic study.

This study of second-dialect performance shows what is maximally possible in second-dialect acquisition. Given the difference between the two measures of success, studies of second-dialect acquisition would benefit from including subjective measures in addition to acoustic accuracy.

Tags are widely acknowledged as being an important feature of colloquial British English. In this article, I examine a type of tag that has to date received little attention in the literature beyond sociolinguistic research into its interpersonal functions: right-dislocated lone pronouns, or ProTags. Biber et al. (1999) acknowledge that the demonstrative pronoun that can be used as a right-dislocated tag in conversational British English, but corpus data reveal that other pronouns can also be used as ProTags.

Based on a range of examples, primarily taken from large-scale corpora, I examine the form of the ProTag construction and its functions, comparing it with other tags used in British English, particularly question tags. In common with other tags, ProTags are a classic case of language conveying more than straightforward propositional content. I consider to what extent proposed analyses of the functions of tag questions carry over to ProTags, and briefly whether this construction has been a feature of British English for longer than might at first be assumed.

Most speakers of Irish English use a dental stop for words containing <th>, a sound that is generally pronounced as [θ] and [ð], in other varieties of English (Wells 1982; Ó hÚrdail 1997). Alveolar stops [t,d] and dental stops [,] are articulatorily and acoustically similar, and thus it is unusual for a language to use them contrastively (e.g. Ladefoged 2001). Despite this, Irish English contrasts them and speakers of this dialect have no trouble distinguishing them. This raises the question as to whether speakers of a dialect which does not use this contrast can distinguish them. To investigate this, speakers of Irish English and American English participated in an identification task involving words produced by an Irish English speaker. American English speakers had a high accuracy but did significantly worse than Irish English speakers, and both groups did significantly worse when the contrast was in final position than when it was in initial position. A small-scale production experiment examined words with this contrast and the vowel /a/, with the finding that for speakers of both dialects, the vowel is longer in words ending in <th> than <t>. The findings are discussed in the context of linguistic experience, and the effect of surrounding consonants on vowel duration.

L2 speakers of Nigerian English in parts of northeastern Nigeria occasionally insert an alveolar coronal stop [t] or fricative [s] following another alveolar coronal pre-pausally and phrase-internally. The article discusses this typologically unusual phenomenon for the Nigerian English of speakers whose L1 is the Adamawa language Bena (ISO 639-3: yun). I also consider comparable cases of word-final consonant epenthesis in several other varieties of English, both the so-called New Englishes and Inner Circle varieties, and provide an account of the details of epenthesis with respect to which they differ. At first sight, hypercorrection of the tendency for word-final consonant cluster simplification in Bena English may seem an obvious explanation. However, I argue that hypercorrection alone falls short of explaining the observed pattern. In addition, we need to call on phonetic properties of Bena L1 such as pre-pausal glottalisation and lengthening of consonants to be able to account for both the actuation of the hypercorrection and the phonologisation of the epenthesis. Although the availability of a clear phonetic explanation makes this sound pattern conceivable as a natural rule, its typological rarity in non-contact lects highlights the positive bias induced by hypercorrection as a necessary part of the mix in creating the conditions for a reanalysis.

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of adjective phrases consisting of a grading element (‘grader’), a deadjectival adverb and an adjectival head. The interest of this pattern derives from the fact that these three constituents can occur in three different orders, as exemplified by more cognitively complex, cognitively more complex and more complex cognitively. The analysis builds primarily on the distinction between domain and non-domain adverbs. ADJPs with domain adverbs have different patterns from ADJPs with other adverbs. Whereas the adverb–grader–adjective order predominates in ADJPs with domain adverbs, the grader–adverb–adjective order is the most frequent type in ADJPs with non-domain adverbs. Within the set of non-domain adverbs, a secondary distinction is made between lexical and more grammatical types. Lexical adverbs are found to preferentially associate with the grader–adverb–adjective order while the more grammatical adverbs gravitate towards the adverb–grader–adjective order. The following five factors account for the empirical results: branching direction, the frequent-unit-first hypothesis, proximity, analogy/uniformity and modifier–head order. Structural representations are argued to draw on lexical information which is not coded by terminal nodes.

In English, some complex words can display exceptional accent preservation (EAP): they can preserve an accent from their base even when this would violate a general restriction against adjacent accents (e.g. retúrn → retùrnée). This article analyses EAP both empirically and theoretically. The analysis of a set of 291 derivatives from Wells (2008) shows that this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the relative frequency of the base and its derivative and partially also to syllable structure, and that these two factors have a cumulative effect. It is also shown that the existence of a more deeply embedded base (e.g. colléct→ colléctive → còllectívity ~ collèctívity) can increase the likelihood for a derivative to display EAP. A formal account of the phenomenon is proposed building on Collie's (2007, 2008) ‘fake cyclicity’ analysis, using weighted constraints (Pater 2009, 2016) and Max-Ent-OT (Goldwater & Johnson 2003). Finally, a model of lexical access building on Hay's (2001, 2003) model and integrating more deeply embedded bases is proposed.

Vowel nasalisation in American English has been the subject of a long discussion as to whether it is a phonological process or whether it should better be analysed as phonetic coarticulation. As a predictable allophonic process, vowel nasalisation also provides a testing ground for theories of lexical representation, since if it turns out that language users store this predictable information in long-term memory, there is no reason to assume any kind of phonological underspecification. In this article, experimental studies on this phenomenon are reviewed with these two questions in mind: is the phenomenon a phonological process at all and is this predictable information, i.e. vowel nasalisation, stored in the mental lexicon. The majority of studies provide evidence supporting the phonological view and underspecified lexical representations.

The current study examines patterns of TH variation in Hong Kong English (HKE). In particular, it examines patterns in the realization of the voiceless interdental fricative /θ/ as the voiceless labiodental fricative [f],2 a process known as TH-fronting, as well as realization of the voiceless of TH as [s]. Previous research on HKE (Bolton & Kwok 1990; Hung 2000; Deterding et al.2008; Setter et al.2010) has established that TH-fronting is a variable phenomenon in HKE, with both intra- and inter-speaker variation, though no research to date has examined the social and linguistic constraints that govern this phenomenon in HKE. The current study also examines the realization of TH as [s], which has not been documented in previous research on HKE, but was found to be a variant of TH in the current study. This article thus examines the social (defined here as non-linguistic constraints such as gender, medium of instruction and proficiency) and linguistic (syllable position, linguistic environment, stress) factors which impact the realization of TH in HKE and whether these factors differ for the realization of TH as [f] or [s].

This article focuses on a novel English construction involving control and infinitival relatives. Examples such as this is John's book to read have a head noun (book) modified by an infinitival relative clause (to read) and a prenominal possessor (John's). I argue that there is a control relation between the prenominal possessor and the PRO subject of the infinitival relative. I show that this control relation bears the structural hallmarks of obligatory control whilst at the same time permitting PRO to be interpreted as arbitrary. I discuss these empirical facts in the context of a syntactic, Agree-based theory of control.