The spread of the new quotative be like throughout the English-speaking world is a change from above for each community that receives it. Diffusion of this form into Philadelphia is traced through the yearly interviews of the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, beginning with young adults in 1979 and spreading to adolescents in 1990, a generation later. The first users of be like form the Avant Garde, young adults with extensive awareness of linguistic patterns within and without the city. The use of this quotative in Philadelphia is favored by constraints that are found elsewhere, particularly to introduce inner speech that is not intended to be heard by others and to cite exemplars of a range of utterances. Not previously reported is a strong tendency to be favored for quotations with initial exclamations, prototypically expressions of surprise and alarm such as “Oh” and “Oh my god!”.

This study reports on a sociophonetic investigation of dress-lowering in a rural dialect in northeast Scotland. Previous analyses have indicated that this change is ongoing in a number of varieties worldwide, propelled by a combination of linguistic constraints and favorable associations with Anglo urban Californian varieties. In this paper we examine whether these influences play out in a relic dialect previously resistant to more supralocal changes. Through an analysis of a range of acoustic correlates, we track the progress of this change across three generations of speakers. Analysis of the constraints suggests that in this variety the change is driven by internal pressures, where it is significantly constrained by phonetic environment, specifically, following laterals. Further analysis of this environment reveals increasing distinction on the F2-F1 spectrum, where /l/s have become lighter in onsets and darker in codas. Our analyses reveal that these changes may be viewed as complementary, as they share the same acoustic correlates, suggesting that system-internal pressures are the primary driving force of dress-lowering in this variety.

The choice between pronominal and zero form for objects in the Oceanic language Vera'a is investigated quantitatively in texts from two registers with discourse topics of three different ontological class memberships. Discourse topicality is found to predict best the choice between pronoun and zero, outranking the factors of ontological class membership, antecedent form, and antecedent function. Contrary to current models of referent tracking, antecedent distance does not show any effect at all. It is concluded that (a) discourse structure and activation are not universally the most significant factors in referential choice and (b) ontological class and discourse topicality can be teased apart through appropriate text sampling, and it is the latter that is most significant. This bears important implications for the grammaticalization of object agreement and the typology of differential object marking.

It is well documented that the study of differences in grammaticality contrasts across the world's languages has implications for the synchronic study of preferential/frequency contrasts within a single language. Our paper extends this observation, arguing that the cross-linguistic study of both grammaticality and frequency contrasts can be crucial to the proper characterization of patterns of diachronic change. As an illustration of this proposal, we investigate patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation in the use of postverbal negative quantifiers (e.g., nothing, nobody, no book, etc., as in, I know nothing) versus negative polarity items under negation (e.g., not … anything, not … anybody, not … any book, etc., as in, I don't know anything) in English. We show how a detailed comparison with similar patterns found elsewhere in closely related languages can give us a better understanding of which linguistic factors condition the use of these different kinds of indefinites in Modern Spoken English and a new perspective on a well-studied proposed change in progress in the English quantificational system.

Labov's classic study, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (1966), paved the way for generations of researchers to examine sociolinguistic patterns in many different communities (Bell, Sharma, & Britain, 2016). This research paradigm has traditionally tended to focus on Western industrialized communities and large world languages and dialects, leaving many unanswered questions about lesser-studied indigenous minority communities. In this study, we examine whether Labovian models for age, sex, and social stratification (Labov, 1966, 2001; Trudgill, 1972, 1974) may be effectively applied to a small, endangered Tibeto-Burman language in southwestern China: Ganluo Ersu. Using new field recordings with 97 speakers, we find evidence of phonological change in progress as Ganluo Ersu consonants are converging toward Chinese phonology. The results suggest that when an endangered language undergoes convergence toward a majority language due to intense contact, this convergence is manifested in a socially stratified way that is consistent with many of the predictions of the classic Labovian sociolinguistic principles.