This is a study of the competition of linguistic systems within the speech community, tracing the opposition of distinct phonological configurations. Among younger Philadelphians oriented to higher education, the traditional short-a system is giving way to the nasal system, in which all prenasal vowels are tense. We present evidence that this shift occurs systematically in both the lax and tense allophones. The degree of conformity to each system is measured for 106 subjects by the Pillai statistic; community-wide patterns are revealed by regression modeling and bimodality diagrams. Adherence to the traditional system is greatest for White speakers who graduated from Catholic high schools, while the nasal system is strongest for graduates from elite schools with special admission requirements. African American students show no orientation to the traditional system, but parallel White students in the shift to the nasal system. The histories of students through the educational system show that the speaker's short-a system is largely determined during their middle and high school years, before entering college. Special admission interviews play a special role in this process, as brief speech events that strongly determine the person's linguistic environment for the years that follow.

This study applies multinomial regression analysis to a parallel corpus of Spanish medieval translations of the Bible in order to study the different factors that condition variation in the expression of possession in Old Spanish. Our methodology allows us to determine the degree to which less frequent possessive constructions (ART + POSS, as in la su casa ‘the his house’; GEN, as in la casa de él ‘the house of him’; and ART/BARE, as in la casa ‘the house’) can be considered competitors to the dominant POSS construction (as in su casa ‘his house’) as a function of usage context differences. In comparison to the POSS construction, the ART + POSS construction usually expresses pragmatic functions such as reverence, the GEN construction is typically used to disambiguate a reference, and the ART/BARE construction is bound to contexts in which the possessor is highly accessible. Crucially, the analysis also sheds light on historical changes in the balance between structural and contextual constraints on the use of these different variants. Whereas in the 13th century, structural and stylistic constraints are almost equally important, the importance of structural constraints diminishes in the 15th century. The study thus illustrates how in reductive processes of language change, variation due to structural constraints yields to stylistic variation.

Persistence, the tendency to repeat a recently used variant in speech, has been observed for a range of sociolinguistic variables. This paper uses quantitative data from ING and TD in Philadelphia English to show that persistence reflects morphological structure and can therefore be a useful tool for defining variables at the phonology–morphology interface. For both ING and TD, persistence arises only when prime and target belong to the same morphological category, with additional interactions between morphological category and lexical repetition. This pattern of results suggests that both the linguistic variables and cognitive processes at play are multifactorial.

To decipher for the first time what, if any, social meaning is indexed by nonstandard intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rica, such as [paza] for pasa ‘raisin’, the present study digitally manipulates 12 utterances from six Costa Rican speakers to vary only in intervocalic [s] versus [z]. Based on 106 listeners’ responses to these stimuli, I find that intervocalic [z] indexes a lower social status for all speakers but also yields higher ratings of confidence, niceness, localness, and masculinity for male speakers. Given female speakers’ limited ability to evoke positive social meanings associated with [z], I argue that accessibility to the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) conditions men's and women's differential treatment of variation. Offering a satisfying explanation for the gender paradox (Labov, 2001:261–293), this work concludes that women agentively eschew nonstandard variants that result in no positive social gains but lead linguistic innovation when their access to the indexical field is unobstructed.

This research examines pre-/l/ allophones of vowels in five lexical sets—GOOSE, FOOT, GOAT, STRUT, and THOUGHT—in Kansas City. It builds an acoustic profile from 5507 tokens drawn from interviews with 67 Kansas Citians born between 1955 and 1999. Results reveal a variety of overlap patterns among all five vowels, with the most widespread being overlap between the pre-/l/ allophones of FOOT, STRUT, and GOAT. Acoustically, overlap patterns generally do not show a trend of change in apparent time. However, responses to minimal pairs reveal substantial apparent-time increases in judgments of “close” or “same.” Speakers appear to adjust their productions of vowels to match their minimal pair judgments. The interaction of these productions and judgments indicates a different profile for these five vowels than has been observed in other communities and suggests that some of these vowels have become phonemically ambiguous in Kansas City.