bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Phonation differences and the phonetic content of the tense-lax contrast in Utah English
Authors: Di Paolo Marianna , Faber Alice 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article presents data bearing on the question of what happens at the phonetic level during a sound change of the type which Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner (1972) labeled an “apparent merger.” Our production data come from three generations of native Utahns who participated in the Intermountain Language Survey (ImLS) and four New Yorkers who served as control subjects. The phonetic subject of our study is the ongoing change in the tense-lax pairs /i-I, e-ε, u-υ/ before tautosyllabic dark [†] in Utah English. Previous studies reported that the resultant vowels are usually, but not always, perceived by both transcribers and speakers as lax. Acoustic analysis, self-categorization data, and perception data demonstrate that, after the usual F1/F2 contrast has been lost, contrasts between these and lax vowels may persist in phonation differences and that these phonation differences may be available to hearers.
The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change
Authors: Labov William 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTTwo general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous sociolinguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in linguistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of linguistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is independent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction develops gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an initial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-dominated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for the second highest status group.
Near-mergers and the suspension of phonemic contrast
Authors: Labov William , Karen Mark , Miller Corey 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn 1972, Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner reported a series of “near-mergers” that have since proved to be difficult to assimilate to the standard conception of the phoneme and that challenged our current understanding of how language production is related to perception and learning (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972). In these situations, speakers consistently reported that two classes of sounds were “the same,” yet consistently differentiated them in production. Labov (1975a) suggested that this phenomenon was the explanation for two “falsely reported mergers” in the history of English, where word classes were said to have merged and afterward separated. It appears that sound change may bring two phonemes into such close approximation that semantic contrast between them is suspended for native speakers of the dialect, without necessarily leading to merger. This article reports on further observations of near-mergers, which confirm their implications for both synchronic and diachronic issues, and presents the results of experiments that show how phonemic contrast is suspended for an entire community.
Person marking in the wake of /s/ deletion in Andalusian Spanish
Authors: Ranson Diana L. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTData on person marking in Andalusian Spanish argue in favor of a revision of the functional hypothesis, which pertains to “the tendency for semantically relevant information to be retained in surface structure” (Kiparsky, 1982:87). The first part of this study shows that subject pronouns in Andalusian are not used to disambiguate verb forms, in direct contrast to Hochberg's (1986) findings on subject pronoun usage in Puerto Rican. In the second part of the study, an analysis of contextual person markers, not undertaken in previous studies, shows that person can be indicated by means outside the surface structure. When both linguistic and contextual person markers are taken into account, only 2% of the 1,035 verbs in this sample of Andalusian are unmarked for person. Person marking is thus maintained where it is important to the speaker's message, but it is not limited to surface structure realization as the strong form of the functional hypothesis suggests.
Punctors: A pragmatic variable
Authors: Vincent Diane , Sankoff David 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTPunctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the analysis of twelve interviews sampled from the Sankoff-Cedergren corpus, we have isolated the following punctors:là‘there’,tu sais, vous savez‘you know’,n'est-ce pas‘isn't it so’,hein‘eh’,je veux dire‘I mean to say’,moi‘me’,osti‘[communion] host’,vois-tu‘do you see’, andil/elle dit, j'ai dit‘he/she says’, ‘I said’ (used in reported discourse). Our main concern in this article is to present the distribution of punctors, within the sentence and within the discourse, and to suggest an explanation of some aspects of their conditioning in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints.
Vowel deletion in Latvian
Authors: Kariņš A. Krišjānis 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the constraints on variable deletion of short vowels in word-final unstressed syllables found in the variety of Latvian spoken in Riga. The affected vowels are almost always inflectional endings. Results from a variable rule analysis of 8 native speakers from Riga indicate that internal phonological and prosodic factors (especially distance from the main word stress) act as the strongest constraints on vowel deletion, along with the educational level of the speaker. The functional constraint of the recoverability of the deleted vowel is not significant.
Learning to talk Philadelphian: Acquisition of short a by preschool children
Authors: Roberts Julie , Labov William 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTRecent work in the acquisition of variation has shown that children begin to learn patterns of stable variation at a very early age. In fact, it appears that they acquire variable rules at about the same time as they are acquiring related categorical rules. Little is known, however, about the transmission from generation to generation of features undergoing sound change in progress. Therefore, this study examines the acquisition of the Philadelphia short a pattern by 18 3- and 4-year-old children. Even though this pattern of the raising and tensing of short a is a complex one, the children had, for the most part, acquired it. In almost all cases, the children matched the short a distribution both of their parents and a group of adult Philadelphians who were interviewed in the mid 1970s and described in Labov (1989b). These results indicate that even the youngest members of the speech community are actively participating in ongoing sound change.
Relative salience of gender and class in a situation of multiple competing norms
Authors: Cravens Thomas D. , Giannelli Luciano 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTOne of the most consistent findings to emerge from sociolinguistic research is that “men use more nonstandard forms, less influenced by the social stigma directed against them; or, conversely, women use more standard forms, responding to the overt prestige associated with them” (Labov, 1990:210). With regard to change, these findings indicate that “women lead in both the acquisition of prestige patterns and the elimination of stigmatized forms” (p. 213), apparently without exception in change from above the level of conscious awareness and in all but a few of the cases studied in change from below. An examination of the social parameters of acceptance and spread of intervocalic spirantization of /p/, /t/, /k/ in Tuscany offers the possibility for testing and refining these precepts in a situation of rule competition that is more complex than most of those studied previously, in that here there are three forms in competition. Building on established principles (e.g., Trudgill, 1972), this sociolinguistic analysis of the interaction of three options provides a more precise understanding of the significance of both gender and class as (co-)conditioners of variation and change.
Disfluencies in the analysis of speech data
Authors: Naro Anthony Julius , Scherre Maria Marta Pereira 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn our study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese we found disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in our corpus of recorded speech data. Disfluencies have very little effect on the rate of marking. When fluency is included in a variable rule analysis as a factor group containing categories for different types of disfluency, as well as for data without any disfluency, it is not selected as statistically significant. Furthermore, separate analyses of all data, only fluent data, and only disfluent data revealed no significant changes in the numerical results obtained for other factor groups. We conclude that, at least insofar as the variable phenomena we studied are concerned, speech is not overly laden with errors; there is nothing in the data to mislead the language learner.
Out of the AIR and into the EAR: Another view of the New Zealand diphthong merger
Authors: Maclagan Margaret A. , Gordon Elizabeth 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn this article, we report on the results of a study of the diphthongs EAR and AIR, which are merging for many New Zealand speakers. Each stage of the study, which has been repeated at five-year intervals since 1983, involves the analysis of word lists and sentences read by over 100 14- and 15-year-old school pupils. The results show a clear trend toward a merger to the EAR diphthong. This is also confirmed in a study carried out in 1994 of 79 speakers (selected according to age, sex, and socioeconomic class) reading six word pairs. The results from both of these studies differ from those reported by Holmes and Bell (1992). We suggest the reasons for the different results could be methodological, and that the mechanism of the merger is merger by approximation after the AIR diphthong became involved in the New Zealand front vowel chain-shift raising.
The devoicing of fricatives in Standard Dutch: A real-time study based on radio recordings
Authors: van de Velde Hans , Gerritsen Marinel , van Hout Roeland 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article gives a detailed analysis of devoicing of the voiced fricatives /v/, /z/, /y/ in two varieties of Standard Dutch: Southern Standard Dutch (as spoken in Belgium) and Northern Standard Dutch (as spoken in The Netherlands). The study is based on archived recordings of radio broadcasts from 1935 to 1993. First, our study shows a divergence between Southern and Northern Standard Dutch in the pronunciation of voiced fricatives in this period. In The Netherlands there is a strong tendency towards devoicing, but in Belgium this tendency is very weak. Second, this study offers insight into the linguistic path of this change: partially voiced compromise variants play an important role, and devoicing is favored in word-initial position. Finally, our study shows the benefits of a retrospective trend study on the basis of radio recordings. In comparison with traditional real-time studies, it offers more insight into the social and linguistic embedding of changes in progress. Its results are also more reliable than those of apparent-time research.
Object relative pronoun use in native and non-native English: A variable rule analysis
Authors: Flanigan Beverly Olson , Inal Emel 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examines the use of object relative pronouns by native (NS) and nonnative (NNS) speakers of Standard American English. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) relative pronoun choice by NNSs will differ from that of NSs, principally because of prescriptive grammar instruction abroad; (2) wh, that, and zero froms will be used variably by both NSs and NNSs, depending on the function of the object and the human/nonhuman status of its antecedent; and (3) increased exposure to native speaking environments will cause a shift toward NS norms of use by NNSs. Half the subjects were given a preference task and asked to mark the relative pronoun variants they would be most likely to use in speech and in writing. The other subjects were given a production task in which sentences were combined to produce relativization. The data and varbrul2 analyses supported all three hypotheses: NNSs used all forms roughly equally in speaking but preferred Wh in writing, whereas NSs favored That or no pronoun. A shift away from Wh was also evident in NNSs after extended exposure to NS English.
A diachronic study of relative markers in spoken and written English
Authors: Ball Catherine N. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTAlthough English relative clauses have been the subject of considerable research, few quantitative studies have traced their development over an extended period of time. The present study focuses on factors governing the choice of relative markers in restrictive relative clauses with relativized subjects from the 16th century to the present day, using both spoken and written data, and including non-standard and regional varieties. The study examines claims by Romaine (1982) that the wh-strategy has not affected spoken English, and that no major qualitative changes have occurred in the relative system since the early 16th century. The results, however, show that these claims are not correct: a major event occurred in the 17th century which had a significant impact on spoken and written English. Many areas are identified which merit further research.
Syntactic variation, parameters, and social distribution
Authors: Cornips Leonie 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article concerns the interrelation between the theoretical status and the social dimensions of syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch. I discuss syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch, which consists of (i) a range of dative constructions that are acceptable in the Heerlen dialect but unacceptable in Standard Dutch and (ii) Standard Dutch variants of the dative constructions that are rare in the Heerlen dialect. The theoretical primitive causing syntactic variation is taken to be the different values or settings of a parameter. Although all local dialect constructions in Heerlen Dutch seem superficially similar because they are construed with a dative NP or the reflexivezich, I argue that these constructions must be attributed to two distinct parameters. The different social distributions of dative constructions in Heerlen Dutch are a confirmation that two distinct parameters are involved.
Shared accents, divided speech community? Change in Northern Ireland English
Authors: McCafferty Kevin 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article interrogates the line taken in studies of Northern Ireland English that Catholic/Protestant ethnicity is sociolinguistically irrelevant. Using data from Derry/Londonderry English, gathered with the objective of answering the question of whether ethnicity matters in sociolinguistic terms, it examines the relative importance of a set of social factors for language variation. The strength of these factors (ethnicity, class, sex, and age) varies, but where change is occurring, ethnicity has an effect on the adoption of innovations. In particular, changes originating in the (predominantly Protestant) east of Northern Ireland tend to be adopted primarily by Protestants, whereas Catholics tend to be more conservative. This fits well with a general pattern of diffusion of change suggested by a reading of the sociolinguistic literature from the region.
Was/werevariation across the generations: View from the city of York
Authors: Tagliamonte Sali 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn this article, I describe a new research project on York English (YrkE), a variety in northeast England. In addition to providing the first systematic linguistic documentation of YrkE, I conduct a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature which not only is well documented in the literature, but also recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide—was/werevariation in the past tense paradigm. Two separate tendencies are observed, neither of which can be explained by any unidimensional notion of analogical leveling of the paradigm: (1) nonstandardwasin existential constructions, and (2) nonstandardwerein negative tags. Both trends can be tracked in apparent time in which the contrasting behavior of men and women reveals that women are leading both types of linguistic change. In other contexts, nonstandardwasis a synchronic remnant which can be traced to earlier stages in the history of English.
Aspects of Spanish deictic expressions in Barcelona: A quantitative examination
Authors: Vann Robert E. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis sociolinguistic investigation analyzes an innovative usage of Spanish motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives in Barcelona that involves crosslinguistic pragmatic transfer. Speakers in the two social networks examined (N= 58) use these Spanish deictics following pragmatic rules that generally correspond to the rules for their Catalan counterparts. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that this innovative usage of the Spanish deictics is not predictable from the lexical form of the deictic systems in both languages. Multiple regression analysis (SPSS) demonstrates that as relative exposure to Catalan increases so does the amount of innovative usage observed, although degree of integration into a Catalan social network and degree of Catalanist ideology do not affect such usage. Qualitatively, this innovative usage is a linguistic marker of a unique contact variety of Spanish spoken in Catalonia (i.e., Catalan Spanish). In this variety, such usage represents a potential resource for performing Catalan identity.
Preferred argument structure in spoken French and Spanish
Authors: Ashby William J. , Bentivoglio Paola 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article uses the quantitative methodology of goldvarb to examine the variable distribution of lexical noun phrases representing core arguments of the verb in a corpus of spoken French and a corpus of spoken Spanish. It is shown that this distribution is not random, but instead conforms to a grammatically and pragmatically motivated pattern known as Preferred Argument Structure.
Third-person present singular verb inflection in early British and American English
Authors: Kytö Merja 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis study concentrates on the development of the third-person indicative present singular verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English. Within the framework of sociohistorical variation analysis, corpus-based comparisons focus on a number of extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of the forms over successive periods of time. During the period studied, the main line of development is the replacement of the -thby the -s ending; the zero from is clearly in decline, as is the use of the -s and the -thendings in the third-person present plural inflection. The type of the verb (notablyhaveanddo vs. other verbs) and stem-final sounds play an important role in the choice of the form. The text type, the level of formality, and the sex of the author can also be seen to influence the distribution patterns. The -s ending had already been firmly established in everyday usage before the settlers left for the New World. Contrary to what has usually been attributed to the phenomenon of “colonial lag,” the rate of change was more rapid in the colonies than in the mother country.
Variability in the use of perfect have in Trinidadian English: A problem of categorial and semantic mismatch
Authors: Winford Donald 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTSociolinguistic situations that involve interplay between standard and nonstandard varieties have posed certain difficulties for the analysis of variation at the morphosyntactic level (Harris, 1984; Milroy, 1987). In particular, there is the problem of defining the scope and relevant contexts of morphosyntactic variables—a problem closely linked to that of identifying the semantic equivalence in terms of which the variable is defined (Cheshire, 1982; Romaine, 1984). This article addresses such issues by examining variation in the use of perfect have and its alternatives in the Trinidadian creole continuum. The alternatives to have include other Standard English (SE) forms (e.g., the past), as well as forms like perfective Ø, completive done, and others which function in the Trinidadian Creole (TC) system. The analysis is based on data from a sample of speakers from different social backgrounds. The variation described here is part of a wider pattern involving different strategies for expressing the various meanings associated with the perfect in SE, namely, the “continuative,” “experiential,” and “resulative” interpretations of have. TC employs different strategies for expressing these meanings. Perfective Ø is used (along with apporopriate adverbial specifications) to convey the experiential meaning; progressive -in, Ø copula, or Ø-marked statives convey the continuative sense; and completive done competes with prefective Ø to convey the resultative sense. All of these may vary with have. I discuss at length the procedures that are used to define the variable and the equivalents of have that are identified. A quantitative analysis reveals clear patterns of variation according to class, subcategory of perfect, and predicate type. The differences in the use of have are explained in terms of varying degrees of influences from vernacular norms among the social groups, as well as the availability of alternative choices to have within the pragmatic and grammatical environments. Finally, I indicate the implications of this investigation for the study of morphosyntactic variation in other divergent dialect situations. Specifically, the findings are relevant to situations, such as AAVE, which involve variation between standard and nonstandard strategies for expressing the meanings associated with the perfect and other morophosyntactic categories.