bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Domestic Political Preconditions of US Trade Policy: Liberal Structure and Protectionist Dynamics
Authors: Nelson Douglas
Published: November 2008

This paper examines the set of norms, rules and institutions (the regime) which regulate the domestic politics of international trade policy in the US. It is particularly concerned to explain the simultaneous occurrence of successful participation in multilateral trade liberalization in the GATT and rising levels of protection via the administered protection mechanisms (e.g. anti-dumping and countervailing duty, and escape clause). The explanation of this phenomenon is the development of a new institutional definition of trade policy that permitted executive dominance of trade policy, in conjunction with a changed perception of the role of trade policy by the executive branch. Specifically, it is argued that post-war executives (at least until Reagan) came to associate trade policy with broader foreign policy goals.
Aging, Savings, and Pensions in the Group of Seven Countries: 1980—2025
Authors: Heller Peter S.
Published: November 2008

In the next 30 to 40 years, past changes in fertility and mortality will lead to a significant increase in the share of the elderly. This study suggests that these demographic trends may lead to a decline in the G–7 private savings rate after 2000, compounding the impact of social expenditure pressures on the government's deficit. Moreover, public pensions may decline as a share of the consumption needs of the elderly, leading to financial pressures to reduce their consumption. The reduced burden of child support on the working population will not offset the increased burden of societal support for the elderly.
Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy: Lessons from the U.S. Foreign Policy Arena
Authors: Durant Robert F. , Diehl Paul F.
Published: November 2008

This essay extends John Kingdon's work on predecision policy processes in US domestic policy to the foreign policy domain. While Kingdon's insights have significantly improved our understanding of predecision processes, further development is necessary for extension across both domestic and foreign policy domains. Kingdon's incremental evolutionary metaphor for alternative specification has to be revamped to include both gradualist and nonincremental policy types. Scholars must also make more explicit, elaborate, and thorough use of Cohen, March and Olsen's ‘garbage can’ model of decision making. To these ends, we offer a typology of policy alternatives that incorporates alternative metaphors premised on recent developments in evolutionary theory. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda amenable to pursuit in both national and cross-national contexts.
The Evolution of a Movement
Authors: Andrews Frank M.
Published: November 2008

The Social Indicators Movement which emerged in the late 1960s was motivated by a broad and appealing idea. It is important to monitor changes over time in a wide range of quality of life, both for a population as a whole and for its significant subgroups, because such information, when combined with other data, can generate new knowledge about how to increase quality of life through more effective social policies.
Problems of Theory and Measurement
Authors: Bulmer Martin
Published: November 2008

Social indicators have not fulfilled their promise, or at least have not lived up to the expectations held of them in the late 1950s and 1960s. Despite the continued growth of social statistics, produced both by governments and other organisations, the aim of producing precise, concise and evaluatively neutral measures of the state of society and of change in society has apparently eluded some of the best minds of the social science and governmental statistics communities. Whereas a wide range of economic indicators and data are readily available, if not without their problems (cf. Johnson, 1988), and integrated into the concepts of economic theory, standard measures of crime, health, well-being, education and many other social characteristics have proven much more difficult to construct and establish as standard yardsticks of social conditions. This note considers some of the reasons for these difficulties. It relates specifically to the aspiration to construct social indicators, not to social statistics more generally (as reviewed in, for example, Carley, 1981).
Whatever Happened, Indeed!
Authors: Ferriss Abbott L.
Published: November 2008

We're told a story of how American Indians taught their young to swim: They tied a rope around the youngster and tossed him in the water. Social indicators were tossed into the water without the rope! Without the rope of adequate Federal or private funds for support, social indicators were forced to learn to swim. And swim, they did.
Social Indicators and Social Reporting in Germany
Authors: Glatzer Wolfgang , Noll Heinz-Herbert
Published: November 2008

Social indicators research developed in the United States at the end of the 1960s and the principal ideas and approaches were received by West German social scientists soon thereafter. It became common usage to speak of a social indicators movement, an expression which is rather unusual in regard to a scientific approach.
Some Reflections on the United States
Authors: Johnston Denis F.
Published: November 2008

In retrospect, I think that the fate that befell the social indicators ‘movement's rich array of economic statistics and related measures were simply inadequate indicators of emerging developments and issues under prevailing conditions of rapid social change and severe social strains. The felt need was for more adequate monitoring and reporting of social conditions and processes – implying a need to develop improved measures of these phenomena, together with expanded data collection capabilities. Thus the dual goals of the social indicators movement were apparent from the start: to establish an improved social reporting capability as soon as possible, and to encourage longer-term research and development in the general area of social, measurement and model-building. It may be helpful, therefore, to consider the outcome of these two efforts separately.
Policy Indicators: a Continuing and Needed Field
Authors: Macrae Duncan
Published: November 2008

The social indicator movement has always faced in two directions—toward academic disciplines that provide quality control and estimate causal relations, and toward the political system that chooses and uses indicator statistics. At worst, the movement has risked appearing to be peripheral to both theoretical social science and policy choice; such perceptions may have contributed to the movement's weakening. The use of noneconomic time series of data to guide the definition of public problems, however, did not and will not die away.
Social Indicators: A Swedish Perspective
Authors: Vogel Joachim
Published: November 2008

More than 25 years have now passed since the idea of a regular social reporting about the effects of political programmes was first introduced, i.e. a System of Social Accounts (SSA) that was to supplement the System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA could not provide answers to vital social questions pertaining to those parts of our living conditions that could not be evaluated in economic terms and consequently were not covered by the System of National Accounts, nor to questions of how welfare and living conditions differed in various population groups.
Social Indicators: a Third World Perspective
Authors: Ward Michael
Published: November 2008

Social Indicators provide data for assessing the social issues and concerns for human welfare inherent in the concept of sustainable development, particularly in the context of economic structural adjustment. They give a broader social view of development.1 The World Bank is now the only institution that regularly publishes, on an annual basis, detailed data on social conditions for all countries of the World. This information is contained in the Bank's Social Indicators of Development Report (SID), the latest edition of which came out in December 1989.2 The data published form a subset of a much broader array of social statistics of varying reliability held on file in the Bank's central data base. Since the Bank is organized according to geographical regions for operational purposes, and implements policy country by country, the data are arranged primarily on a national basis. Statistical series published by the Bank, therefore, mostly reflect country specific definitions and classifications. This has both advantages and disadvantages, but it means that in some cases international comparability may be sacrificed for national relevance. The Social Indicators Report, however, also contains several World Tables on special topics where certain selected indicators, judged to be more comparable and critical than others, are shown for all countries.
Stars to Steer By: The Political Impact of Moral Values
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: November 2008

A contrast is often drawn between ethics and expediency in politics; however the contrast might be overdrawn. We can hold firmly to the classical notion that politicians should steer society according to some higher values, while retaining the notion of democratic accountability, just so long as electors see the same stars as political leaders do and are as keen to follow them. There are grounds for thinking that this may well be so, either for broadly utilitarian reasons or for basically idealistic ones.
Is Unemployment Insurable? Employers and the Development of Unemployment Insurance
Authors: Mares Isabela
Published: November 2008

In order to shed light on the recent debates that are reinterpreting the role played by organized employers in the development of modern social policy, this paper examines the origin of the system of contributory social insurance during the Weimar period. Contrary to ‘laborist’ accounts of the origin of the modern welfare state that view the working class as the most important protagonist behind the transition from ‘assistance’ to ‘insurance’ policies, this paper argues that employers' dissatisfaction with the means-tested system of unemployment assistance and employers' endorsement of an insurance solution to the risk of unemployment remained the decisive factor leading to the introduction of the insurance system during the Weimar period. Drawing on employers' deliberations and archival material, the paper reconstructs the process of preference formation of German employers. The significance of a sectoral conflict between employers of large and small firms about the organization of the ‘risk pool’ within the system of unemployment insurance is also highlighted. While the existing literature fails to characterize employers' preferences towards social policies and to explain the variation in the degree of employers' support for particular social policies, this paper does so. Firms' preferences towards social policies can be analyzed along three dimensions: ability of social policies to redistribute risks, locus of control within alternative policy arenas and the costs imposed by different social policies.
National Macroeconomic Policy Preferences and International Coordination Issues
Authors: Willett Thomas D.
Published: November 2008

This paper stresses the importance of taking domestic economic structures and political pressures into account when considering issues of international macroeconomic policy coordination. The existence of domestic biases can cause policy coordination to increase rather than reduce macroeconomic instability. The paper offers a survey of the literature on national macroeconomic policy preferences and inflation unemployment tradeoffs. While this research is still in its infancy, it is clear that there are important differences across countries which must be taken into account in designing coordination strategies.
Organization and Cooperation: International Institutions and Policy Coordination
Authors: Kahler Miles
Published: November 2008

Systems of policy coordination since 1945 may be classified as rule-governed systems relying on decentralized national decisions (a stylized Bretton Woods system) or discretionary bargaining in which coordination decisions are taken collectively at the international level (e.g. world economic summits). The European Monetary System combines elements of these two models. National attachments to rules cannot be explained solely by the strength of international institutions. A discretionary bargaining model of coordination is more likely to be successful when national leaders share a policy diagnosis that both cuts across economic issue areas and divides their own domestic political coalitions and governments. International organizations may facilitate policy coordination under a rule-based system through provision of resources to ease adjustment costs and rule clarification, and in a discretionary bargaining system by brokering, providing information and model building.
The rightward movement of complements and adjuncts in the Old English of Beowulf
Authors: Pintzuk Susan , Kroch Anthony S.
Published: November 2008

Although it has generally been recognized that Old English was a verb-final language with verb-seconding, the existence of clauses with main verb complements and adjuncts appearing after the otherwise clause-final verb seems to contradict the hypothesis that the language was strictly verb-final in underlying structure. There are three possible analyses to explain these clauses: variable word order in the base, leftward verb movement, and rightward movement of NPs and PPs. In this article, we demonstrate that only the third analysis adequately explains the data of the Early Old English poem Beowulf. Moreover, by investigating the mapping between syntactic structures and metrical units, we provide evidence for two types of rightward movement with two distinct structures: heavy NP shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postposed NP, and PP extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much less common.
The intersection of s-aspiration/deletion and spirantization in Honduran Spanish
Authors: Amastae Jon
Published: November 2008

Spanish dialects may differ according to the behavior of voiced obstruents following r, l, s, and the glides. For most dialects, for example, Mexican, fricatives occur in these environments; in some, such as highland Colombian, stops tend to occur. Another feature distinguishing dialects is s-aspiration/deletion. Several Central American dialects are of particular interest because they are both s-aspirating/deleting and stop-conserving in the series of postconsonantal environments (Canfield, 1961/1981). Detailed examination of spirantization in these dialects, as well as of the particular question of what occurs after /s/ → [s] [z] [h] [Ø] has been nonexistent. Obviously, if s is deleted before a voiced obstruent, the resulting environment of the obstruent is intervocalic, which is a favored environment for spirantization. For this investigation, 14 Honduran speakers were interviewed using standard sociolinguistic interview techniques. Tokens were transcribed and categorized according to whether s-aspiration/deletion had applied, whether spirantization had applied, and by preceding/following environment. It is shown that (a) in Honduran Spanish the group r, l, glides, and s inhibit spirantization variably, much as they do in highland Colombian Spanish; (b) neither voicing, aspiration, nor deletion of (s) favor spirantization, despite the apparently favorable (surface) environment created when deletion applies; (c) even though an analysis of (b) that orders spirantization before deletion is apparently explanatory, a view that attributes spirantization to syllable structure offers a more comprehensive explanation of what happens when the two variable processes intersect by applying to adjacent segments.
Vowel harmony: A variable rule in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Bisol Leda
Published: November 2008

Brazilian Portuguese has a vowel harmony rule which consists of the optional raising of the pretonic e and o vowels to i and u, respectively, if there is a high vowel in the following syllable. This is an old rule, the origin of which can be traced back to the Latin of the 4th century a.d. Because the rule is subject to multiple conditioning by both linguistic and social factors, it can be treated as a variable rule.
Statistical evidence for rule ordering
Authors: Sankoff David , Rousseau Pascale
Published: November 2008

A set of ordered rules for generating variants of a variable determines (a) underlying/surface distinctions among some of the variants and (b) a hierarchical classification of the variants. In the analytical framework of variable rules, frequency data on variant occurrences in context bear only on (b) and not on (a). We provide a combinatorial characterization and enumeration of the set of classifications on n variants, the set of underlying/surface configurations, and the set of rule orders. We describe the statistical and computational techniques for generalizing variable rule analysis to the inference of rule order. These procedures are applied to the problems of the reduction of syllable-final consonants
, , and  in Caribbean Spanish (n = 3, 4, 6 variants, respectively). Previous analyses have tended to assume that successive weakenings occur in an intrinsic order determined by phonological strength. Our results show that aspiration and deletion can indeed be seen to be intrinsically ordered in both
 and  reduction, though an unordered analysis is equally likely in the case of
. On the other hand, velarization and deletion of  are unordered, while vocalization is a subsequent process, independent of the other two. Similarly, spirantization, aspiration, and lateralization of  are unordered, as confirmed by data sets from both Puerto Rican and Panamanian speakers. Furthermore, with both  and , intrinsically ordered rule schemata proved to be extremely unlikely by statistical criteria. Syllable-final consonant reduction then consists of largely independent processes, most of which occur simultaneously.
The grammaticalization of the particlelein Mandarin Chinese
Authors: Shi Ziqiang
Published: November 2008

This article investigates the grammaticalization process ofliaoas a main verb in 10th-century vernacular texts toleas an aspectual particle in modern Chinese. I propose that two processes are involved. First, with the “resultative construction” coming into existence in the language, some instances ofliaowere reanalyzed as the phase complement of the new morphological construction. Second, other instances of the verb began to lose their verbness by taking sentential subjects and occurring in temporal clauses only. These processes gave rise to the positional change ofliaofrom after the complement of the verb to before the complement of the verb ofle.
Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change
Authors: Kroch Anthony S.
Published: November 2008

When one form replaces another over time in a changing language, the new form does not occur equally often in all linguistic contexts. Linguists have generally assumed that those contexts in which the new form is more common are those in which the form first appears and in which it advances most rapidly. However, evidence from several linguistic changes (most importantly the rise of the periphrastic auxiliarydoin late Middle English) shows that the general assumption is false. Instead, at least for syntactic cases, change seems to proceed at the same rate in all contexts. Contexts change together because they are merely surface manifestations of a single underlying change in grammar. Differences in frequency of use of a new form across contexts reflect functional and stylistic factors, which are constant across time and independent of grammar.
The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation
Authors: Eckert Penelope
Published: November 2008

Speaker's sex has emerged as one of the most important social factors in the quantitative study of phonological variation. However, sex does not have a uniform effect on variables or even on variables that represent sound change in progress. This is because sex is not directly related to linguistic behavior but reflects complex social practice. The correlations of sex with linguistic variables are only a reflection of the effects on linguistic behavior of gender — the complex social construction of sex — and it is in this construction that one must seek explanations for such correlations. Sociolinguists generally treat sex in terms of oppositional categories (male/female), and the effects of sex on variation are generally sought in linguistic differences between male and female speakers. However, because gender differences involve differences in orientation to other social categories, the effects of gender on linguistic behavior can show up in differences within sex groupings. Data on sound changes in progress (the Northern Cities Chain Shift) among Detroit area adolescents show that gender has a variety of effects on variables and that the significance of gender in variation cannot be reduced to notions of male or female speech as “more or less conservative.”
Variation in subject-verb concord in Early Modern English
Authors: Bailey Guy , Maynor Natalie , Cukor-Avila Patricia
Published: November 2008

Determining the function of verbal -s in the Black English Vernacular (BEV) has been a major problem in sociolinguistics. Linguists have offered four answers to questions about the feature's origins and function, with -s seen as a case of hypercorrection, as a marker of durative/habitual aspect, as a variable marker of present tense (with the variation stemming from dialect mixture), and as a marker of historical present regardless of person and number. This article argues that confusion about -s results largely from four mistaken assumptions about it: (1) that -s did not exist in earlier varieties of BEV, (2) that the use of -s in the plural bears no relation to its use in the singular or to other processes such as the use of is as a plural or copula and auxiliary absence, (3) that -s has always functioned simply as a person/number marker in white vernaculars, and (4) that any role white vernaculars may have played in the variability of -s was a consequence of regional variation brought to the United States. This article addresses these assumptions by examining the function of -s, both in the singular and plural, and of plural is in the Cely Letters, written between 1472 and 1488, and by comparing the results to similar data in black and white vernaculars. The analysis shows that in the Cely Letters the presence of an NP subject strongly favors the occurrence of both singular and plural -s and also plural is. The same constraint operates on the same forms in older black and white vernaculars, and it affects copula and auxiliary absence as well. In the speech of younger blacks and whites, this constraint has begun to disappear as -s has become solely a marker of person/number agreement in white speech and as -s itself has disappeared in BEV.
Linguistic change in El Pont de Suert: The study of variation of /3/
Authors: Alturo Nuria , Turell Ma. Teresa
Published: November 2008

Catalan sociolinguistics has investigated in depth the uses of Catalan and the attitudes toward it but has only analyzed very sporadically the mechanisms of linguistic change in this language. The study presented in this article is an attempt to describe an ongoing linguistic change that has been observed in a speech community (E1 Pont de Suert) of the Alta Ribagorça, a region in Catalonia (Spain) where the borderline between Catalan and Aragonese, a variety of Spanish, can be delimited. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, the article seeks to demonstrate that a gradual substitution of the autochthonous variant [t∫] by the normative [3] of the phoneme /3/ appears to be taking place in El Pont de Suert, and to determine, at the same time, the linguistic and social factors that favor this substitution. Second, its purpose is to analyze the variation of this phoneme in relation to not only geographic but also social and linguistic variables; this is because a study that considers only geographic factors would describe the characteristics that differentiate the Ribagorca speech from other Catalan speech varieties but would not account for the existing variation in the use of both the voiceless affricate and the voiced fricative.
Language shift in standard Italian and dialect: A case study
Authors: Saladino Rosa
Published: November 2008

The level of penetration of standard Italian pronunciation norms into a rural Southern Italian dialect is examined, and the factors that influenced this italianization are assessed.
Rules of stress assignment in Québec French: Evidence from perceptual data
Authors: Paradis Claude , Deshaies Denise
Published: November 2008

This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of the prosodic system of Québec French in a variationist framework. However, major problems have to be resolved before one can give a comprehensive view of this system, one of these concerning stress assignment. In order to examine the validity of the traditional view claimed for French by most linguists, which states that stress is always superposed on the final syllable of lexical words, different perceptual tests were devised and carried out with two groups of students. The results of these tests show the effect of structural factors on the perception of stressed syllables in Québec French and demonstrate that this canonic rule does not always hold for varieties of Québec French. On the basis of these results, a subset of stress rules is then proposed and illustrated with examples of words tested in the perceptual tests. Counterexamples to these rules are thereafter discussed, and a reconsideration of the principles of syllabification that are usually taken for granted for French is proposed in light of variable rules.
The validity of phonetic transcription: Limitations of a sociolinguistic research tool
Authors: Kerswill Paul , Wright Susan
Published: November 2008

Auditory phonetic transcription is a stock-in-trade of sociolinguists; it is transcriptions, not actual speech, that form the raw data of much of sociolinguistics. Given its importance, it is surprising that phonetic transcription has rarely been examined by sociolinguists from the point of view of its validity and its reliability — despite the existence of a certain amount of discussion in the phonetic literature. Rather, it has been treated as a pretheoretical notion. In this article, we report an experiment that compares the auditory transcriptions of trained phoneticians with physiological data on the same utterances, using the technique ofelectropalatography. The experiment shows that (a) there are intervening factors of a psycho-acoustic nature that impinge on a phonetician's transcription, thus affecting validity; and (b) there is considerable inconsistency, both between phoneticians and between a single phonetician's different attempts at transcribing the same token. Both of these latter factors show that a high degree of reliability cannot be assumed.
Historical development ofbaandjiangin the Tang Dynasty
Authors: Her One-Soon
Published: November 2008

Based on evidence in Zen dialogues, Bianwen and Chuanqi texts in the Tang Dynasty (a.d.618–907), and other sources from earlier and later periods, this article, after dismissing the common misconception that during Tangba() was frequently used in the disposal and serial-verb constructions, proposes that the grammaticalization of thejiang() serial-verb construction was encouraged byyi(), butjiang's disposal characteristic was modeled after its passive counterpartbei, and that it is via the process of lexical replacement thatbareplacedjiang'sprepositional functions in instrumental and disposal constructions.Balater lost its instrumental function tona(). We thus resolve the debate between Huang (1986) and Bennett (1981). Moreover, from the recurring pattern of change in the historical development ofyi, jiang, ba, andna, we observe two counteracting principles at work: functional refinement, which forces a one-to-one correspondence between a form and its function, and analogous development, which does just the opposite to create a one-to-many relationship.
Explanation in variable phonology: An exponential model of morphological constraints
Authors: Guy Gregory R.
Published: November 2008

Variationist treatments of phonological processes typically provide precise quantitative accounts of the effects of conditioning environmental factors on the occurrence of the process, and these effects have been shown to be robust for several well-studied processes. But comparable precision in theoretical explanation is usually elusive, at the current state of the discipline. That is, the analyst is usually unable to say why the parameters should have the particular values that they do, although one can often explain relative ordering of environments. This article attempts to give a precise explanation — in the form of a quantitative theoretical prediction — of one robust quantitative observation about English phonology. The reduction of final consonant clusters (often called -t,d deletion) is well-known to be conditioned by the morphological structure of a target word. Deletion applies more in monomorphemic words (e.g., mist) than in inflected words (e.g., missed). In the theory of lexical phonology, these classes of words are differentiated by derivational history, acquiring their final clusters at different levels of the morphology. The theory further postulates that rules may apply at more than one level of the derivation. If -t,d deletion is treated as a variable rule with a fixed rate of application (p0) in a phonology with this architecture, then higher rates of application in underived forms (where the final cluster is present underlyingly and throughout the derivation) are a consequence of multiple exposures to the deletion rule, whereas inflected forms (which only meet the structural description of the rule late in the derivation) have fewer exposures and lower cumulative deletion. This further allows a precise quantitative prediction concerning surface deletion rates in the different morphological categories. They should be related as an exponential function of p0, depending on the number of exposures to the rule. The prediction is empirically verified in a study of -t,d deletion in seven English speakers.
Marking in discourse: “Birds of a feather”
Authors: Scherre Maria Marta Pereira , Naro Anthony J.
Published: November 2008

Subject/verb agreement and subject/predicate adjective agreement in spoken Brazilian Portuguese are subject to a parallel processing effect, such that marking leads to further marking and lack of marking leads to further lack of marking. For example, semantically plural verb tokens preceded by marked plural subjects in the same clause or other marked verb tokens with the same subject in the preceding discourse are more likely to be explicitly marked for plural than similar tokens preceded by unmarked subjects or verbs. This phenomenon is in direct contradiction to the principle of linguistic economy, since marking tends to occur precisely in those contexts in which it is most highly redundant and could therefore be discarded with no loss of information. Furthermore, the marking of successive plural tokens cannot be considered statistically independent events, since the outcome of previous marking decisions effects future marking. We propose that the parallel processing principle is a universal of language use.
Variation as a feature of language acquisition in the Trinidad context
Authors: Youssef Valerie
Published: November 2008

In a longitudinal acquisition study of the development of the verb phrase (VP), a Trinidadian child who was exposed to both Standard English (SE) and Trinidadian English-lexicon Creole (TC) was found to use the verb forms of each system differentially according to addressee, discourse mode, semantic intent, and grammatical factors. Systematic variation was first recorded at age 2;7 and continued to develop through to the end of the study at age 4;9. School exposure to demands for SE production resulted in a decline in the child's productive TC competence overall and his movement into mid-range usage of SE and TC. The systems in contact appeared linked for the child in that he produced alternant forms from each one variably in apparent relation to his perception of the appropriate extent and range of their use. The weightings for variable constraints in each area modified over time.
Creoles at the intersection of variable processes: -t,d deletion and past-marking in the Jamaican mesolect
Authors: Patrick Peter L.
Published: November 2008

-t,d deletion is a well-known variable phonological process subject to the influence of both external social factors and internal structural constraints, including phonetic environmental and morphosyntactic effects. Its profile of variation has been widely investigated in American English dialects. However, it interacts with another grammatical process – the regular affixation of final /-t, -d/ as a past-tense marker – that strongly distinguishes these dialects from English-related creoles, where past-marking by this mechanism is infrequent or non-occurrent. Investigation of -t,d deletion in mesolectal Jamaican Creole (JC) thus raises important questions about the intersection of variable processes, the generality of phonetic environmental constraints, and the degree of difference between English-related creoles and metropolitan standard and non-standard Englishes.
Semantic overlaps of French modal expressions
Authors: Thibault Pierrette
Published: November 2008

Although there is no consensus on whether French has any true modal auxiliary, devoir ‘must’ is one of the very few possible candidates. Most studies of devoir concentrate on criteria for distinguishing its epistemic and root semantic values, but some also explore the subtle semantic nuances it conveys depending on context. Here, we identify discrete meanings through the analysis of semantic overlaps between devoir and other French modal expressions, such as probablement ‘probably’, être supposé ‘to be supposed to’, or falloir ‘ought to’. The analysis of data from two corpora on Montreal French, collected in 1971 and 1984, shows that:

1. There is only one root semantic value exclusively associated with devoir, namely, the notion of desirability (as in the English ‘should’).

2. There are different patterns of use of the competing modal expressions within each semantic field analyzed, according to the social class of the speaker. Moreover, some patterns characterizing a specific social group are acquired relatively late.
Contextual conditioning in variable lexical phonology
Authors: Guy Gregory R.
Published: November 2008

The variable lexical phonology proposed in Guy (1991) predicts an exponential relationship among rates of retention in word classes of different derivational histories. A class of words that satisfies the structural description of a variable rule at an early lexical level of derivation will undergo multiple operations of the rule and, therefore, exponentially reduced rates of retention, compared to a class of forms that only satisfies the structural description of the rule at the end of the derivation and thus is subject to its operation only once. For the case of English -t,d deletion, it is postulated that monomorphemic words (e.g., mist) are exposed to the deletion rule three times in a derivation, whereas semiweak past tense forms (e.g., left) are exposed twice, and regular past tense forms (e.g., missed) undergo the rule but once.

The present article explores the consequences of this model for other variable constraints on a rule, such as the preceding and following segment constraints on -t,d deletion. Word-internal constraints, because they are present throughout the derivation, are shown to have quantitatively different patterns than external constraints, as the latter affect the rule only in its final, post-lexical operation. Four specific quantitative predictions are derived from the model to elucidate this distinction between internal and external constraints, and empirical data are presented to confirm the predictions.
Conséquences de la sous-spécification des traits de Agr dans l'identification de Pro
Authors: Dupuis Fernande , Lemieux Monique , Gosselin Daniel
Published: November 2008

Dans le cadre de la théorie du gouvernement et du liage, cet article présente une explication du changement survenu dans la distribution du sujet pronominal et du sujet nul Pro en moyen français. Après avoir montré que cette langue de type V2 ne manifeste pas l'asymétrie principales/subordonnées caractéristique des langues germaniques, nous proposons d'identifier la position de Pro selon le principe de m-command. Pour remplacer le paramètre d'uniformité morphologique de Jaeggli et Safir (1989), qui n'a pas rendu compte des propriétés de la flexion verbale dans la langue étudiée, nous recourons à la sousspécification du trait de nombre comme procédure d'identification du contenu de Pro. Dans un modèle où le contenu de Pro est identifie selon une hiérarchie des traits de personne et de nombre, nous attribuons la perte de Pro-drop à la fin du moyen français au fait que le trait nombre est devenu inerte dans la syntaxe.
Socially determined variation in ancient Rome
Authors: Joseph Brian D. , Wallace Rex E.
Published: November 2008

Phonological and morphological variation in Classical Latin (e.g., diphthongs ae/au vs. monophthongs e/o, retention vs. loss of final consonants and initial h-, GEN SG -is vs. -us/-os, DAT SG in -ae vs. -a, etc.) has typically been treated as regional in nature. However, these seemingly “rural” features cannot be considered instances of purely geographically based variation, for they also occur both on inscriptions from within Rome and in Roman literary usage. Coleman (1990:14) hinted at “a social dimension” to this variation, but only for au versus o variation. We argue, however, that a distinctly social dimension must be recognized for much of this variation, based on: (a) instances of hypercorrection; (b) the observation that datives in -a occur only in private, primarily domestic, inscriptions and never in public or official inscriptions; (c) Augustus's use of “rural” domos for domus, in keeping with the populist image he cultivated upon his return to Rome. This dialectal/sociolectal situation can be best understood, we argue, in terms of the model of urbanization of Milroy (1980) and Bortoni-Ricardo (1985). The transformation of originally geographic variation into socially determined variation in an urban setting resulted from migrations into Rome and the expansion of Rome after the 4th century b.c.
L'influence de la loquacité de l'informateur sur la production de signaux backchannel par l'intervieweur en situation d'entrevue sociolinguistique
Authors: Laforest Marty
Published: November 2008

Les signaux backchannel sont des signaux gestuels et voco-verbaux qui constituent en quelque sorte la verbalisation de l'écoute par l'allocutaire d'une conversation. Si la fonction métacommunicative de ces signaux dans la gestion de l'interaction est connue, les facteurs de leur production ont été jusqu'à maintenant peu étudiés. L'observation de 11 entrevues sociolinguistiques réalisées dans des conditions comparables par un même intervieweur montre que celuici n'intervient pas de la même façon avec chaque informateur. La loquacité de l'informateur semble exercer une influence importante sur la production quantitative et qualitative de signaux backchannel par l'allocutaire-intervieweur.
Female and male usage of pragmatic expressions in same-sex and mixed-sex interaction
Authors: Erman Britt
Published: November 2008

The present study focuses on the use of the three pragmatic expressions (you know, you see, and I mean) by female and male British English speakers. The aim of the study is two-fold: first, to establish actual differences in usage between men and women over a number of functions of the three pragmatic expressions; second, to find out whether such differences could be correlated to same-sex as opposed to mixed-sex interaction. The results of my investigation show that there are gender-specific differences in the use of pragmatic expressions. Some of the more salient differences were that the women tended to use pragmatic expressions between complete propositions to connect consecutive arguments, whereas the men preferred to use them either as attention-drawing devices or to signal repair work. The two groups also showed differences from the point of view of absolute frequencies, so that, generally speaking, the men used the expressions about 25% more often than the women and in some contexts up to twice as much. The results also point to the use of pragmatic expressions being largely dependent on whether the conversation takes place in a same-sex or in a mixed-sex environment, so that they tend to be used more sparingly in mixed-sex as compared to same-sex interaction.
Discourse markers in the spoken Portuguese of Rio de Janeiro
Authors: de Oliveira e Silva Giselle M. , de Macedo Alzira Tavares
Published: November 2008

We analyze four major classes of discourse marker used in Brazilian Portuguese: né and other requests for feedback; aí, a sequential connector; ah, bom, and other turn initiators; and assim, a marker of explanation. The distribution of these forms is compared in argumentation, description, narration, and other genres and explained in terms of discourse function. Sociodemographic conditioning is also analyzed. An innovative component of the data analysis is an accounting for rates of occurrence per number of clauses in the speech samples studied. The results were elaborated through a series of other studies confirming the discourse function of the various markers. A comparison of the results with previous work on English and French discourse markers reveals striking parallels and raises questions about the grammaticalization of these forms.
On shear markets and sharing sheep: The merger of EAR and AIR diphthongs in New Zealand English
Authors: Holmes Janet , Bell Allan
Published: November 2008

A social dialect survey of a New Zealand community documented a change in progress in the pronunciation of the vowels in words such as air and ear. The data support a tentative interpretation that a shift to the variant with the closer onset for AIR words was initiated by middle-aged Pakeha women. This was not followed in any strength by other social groups. More recently there has been a change in the opposite direction, with EAR words being realized by a variant with a more open onset. This is being led by young, working class Pakeha speakers, possibly the women. For some speakers, merger of the two diphthongs is close to completion. The change thus seems to have begun in the past 40 years, but its direction has been reversed in the past 20 years. With the strong following among young speakers for the downward shift toward [eə], this seems the likely direction in which change will continue.
Back to the past: The BEV/creole connection revisited
Authors: Winford Donald
Published: November 2008

This article compares the marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English (TE), with particular attention to the alternation of Ø and {ed}. The comparison reveals similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning which suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier process of shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard English pattern. Further examination of the TE data reveals that the use of {ed} is highly constrained in cases where habitual or characteristic past meaning is conveyed; in such cases, the use of Ø is near categorical. These findings may have implications for BEV which future research can clarify. The article also considers the case of stressed remoteBINin BEV and argues that it may have arisen as the result of reanalysis of an earlier creole anteriorbinunder the influence of unstressed (continuative perfect)bin, derived from Englishhave+been. This provides further support for the view that, though early BEV may not have been a fully fledged creole, it arose through a process of restructuring in which a creole substrate played a significant role. Finally, the article notes that past marking is only one aspect of the overall organization of the BEV tense/mood/aspect system, which shares other features in common with creole varieties, including resultativedoneand combinatory possibilities among auxiliaries. Future research on these aspects of the BEV verb complex can shed more light on the BEV/creole connection.
The discriminability of nearly merged sounds
Authors: Faber Alice , Di Paolo Marianna
Published: November 2008

In a near-merger, speakers produce two contrasting words differently, without reliably being able to discern the contrast in their own speech or in the speech of others. Acoustic measurements typically reveal small differences between the elements of near-merged minimal pairs along several acoustic dimensions. We argue that statistical evaluation of the potential distinctiveness of these near-merged elements must simultaneously take into account all of these dimensions. For this reason, discriminant analysis is used to assess the differences between near-merged/il–Il/, /el–εl/, and /ul–υl/ for five Utah speakers. In contrast with independent univatiate analyses of variance of F1, F2,f0, and spectral slope, the multivariate discriminant analyses suggest that all three contrasts are preserved by all five speakers. However, hompohones likeheelandhealare not distinguished by the discriminant analyses. Discriminant analysis is thus a powerful technique for assessing whether a reliable basis exists for the claim that two potentially contrastive items are in fact distinctive.
Neutralization of gender distinctions in Modern Hebrew numerals
Authors: Ravid Dorit
Published: November 2008

Gender distinctions constitute one of the central grammatical categories in Hebrew grammar and are closely related to number distinctions. Both are acquired early on, since they apply to almost every morphological category: three major classes of content words, as well as two classes of function words. Feminine words are marked by Suffixal -αand -t, while masculine words carry either a zero or -esuffix. A small class of what might be termed “numeral nounclassifiers” are supposed to agree in gender with their head nouns, but carry a mirror-image gender marking, resulting in rule opacity. The subjects, 40 children (20 fourth graders, 20 seventh graders) from a lower middle-class background, were tested on gender markings of numerals in two situations involving monitored and unmonitored situations. The results indicate the disappearance of gender agreement in Modern Hebrew numerals and a reanalysis of numeral suffixes by speakers.
Structural processes in enumeration
Authors: Dubois Sylvie
Published: November 2008

Enumeration is a figure of speech which evokes a thematic set through the concatenation of several of its elements. Its linguistic structure is variable with respect to the number of components, their syntactic nature, the use of coordinating markers and of the processes of repetition, reduction, and expansion. In studying the variation among 3,464 tokens of enumeration in Montreal French, we explain how the constitutive processes interact in terms of Slobin's (1977) charges to language: be clear, processible in real time, quick and easy, and expressive. We suggest how the six structural factors or processes contribute to the fulfillment of these charges. The data analysis evaluates the interaction of the processes and, indirectly, the pertinence of each of Slobin's four functional criteria. This analysis is a new method for attributing a pattern of process co-occurrences to a number of functions, focusing on how these processes compensate for, or cooperate with, each other.