{"title":"Dialect change and language attitudes in Albania","authors":"Josiane Riverin-Coutlée, Enkeleida Kapia, Michele Gubian","doi":"10.1017/s0954394524000103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394524000103","url":null,"abstract":"This study is concerned with attitudes of Albanian listeners toward the two main dialects spoken in Albania: Gheg and Tosk. The study seeks to establish a connection between attitudes and speech features which have been shown to be changing in Gheg, and other features found to be stable. Ratings of four speech features on visual analog scales (VASs) pertaining to dialect identification, status, and solidarity were collected from 125 Albanian listeners and modeled with Bayesian regressions. The results revealed lower status for variants of features found to be changing in Gheg, contrary to stable variants, suggesting a connection between attitudes and dialect change, and highlighting the relevance of both language-external and internal factors in understanding change. All stimuli were also rated as more friendly than unfriendly, which could be related to sociocultural specificities of Albania. The study finally identifies methodological challenges to do with modeling responses from VASs.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142256557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constraints on verbal -s/zero marking: New insights from Norwich","authors":"David Britain, Laura Rupp","doi":"10.1017/s0954394524000115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394524000115","url":null,"abstract":"Here we investigate present tense verbal -s/zero variability in a dialect of Eastern England in which -s marking can <jats:italic>only</jats:italic> appear in third-person singular contexts. Our objective is to explore constraints on -s/zero marking, and to consider the grammatical function of -s in such a variety. In order to investigate this, we reanalyzed verbal -s/zero marking in 63 sociolinguistic interviews found in Peter Trudgill’s (1974) corpus from Norwich. The results show not only a significant role for subject animacy (animate subjects mark -s less than inanimates) and lexical (punctual verbs mark -s less than duratives) and structural aspect (punctual and habitual events mark less -s than durative ones), but also an interaction between animacy and aspect. To account for the findings, we draw upon the notion of differential subject marking (e.g., Aissen, 2003), which considers the role of the canonicity of arguments in accounting for morphological marking.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142225034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The jet set: Modern RP and the (re)creation of social distinction","authors":"Sophie Holmes-Elliott, Erez Levon","doi":"10.1017/s0954394524000097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394524000097","url":null,"abstract":"<p>While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely undisputed, there is less consensus about class-based divisions. This paper investigates this question through an updated analysis of the variety emblematic of Britain’s upper class: Received Pronunciation (RP). While previous studies have suggested levelling in RP to a broader standard southeastern norm, our findings indicate that the most recent advances in the variety show it (re)differentiating itself from other varieties in the region. Investigating both individual vowel movements and broader system-wide properties, we argue that the changes observed in RP today result from speakers adopting a particular articulatory setting (lax voice), which has subsequent ramifications on vowel realizations. We suggest that speakers make strategic use of this articulatory setting as a way of embodying an elite persona in the British context, an interpretation that resonates with the social distributions of similar changes in other varieties.</p>","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141173171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Quantifying transitivity: Uncovering relations of gender and power","authors":"Jessi Elana Aaron","doi":"10.1017/s0954394524000085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394524000085","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Transitivity has come to be recognized as a promising heuristic tool for uncovering implicit ideologies in a wide range of areas. Though it has been used to explore worldviews in several kinds of discourse, nearly all have relied solely on qualitative analyses. Statistical analysis can offer a fuller understanding of past societies. This study applies a gradient, discourse-based understanding of transitivity, which lends itself nicely to corpus-based analysis, to data from 16th-century New Spain. In colonial Mexico, female behaviors were often strictly circumscribed. This paper uses a quantitative, corpus-based framework to examine how gender inequality is reflected in patterns of transitivity. It is found that female subjects are significantly associated with imperfective contexts, nonfinite constructions, akinesis, and low affectedness of the object—all markers of lower transitivity. Thus, for the most part, in these data, women are represented as inactive, inert, and powerless.</p>","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140927081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Variation in the production of Basque ergativity: Change or stable variation?","authors":"Ager Gondra, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, Eukene Franco-Landa","doi":"10.1017/s0954394524000048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394524000048","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the extent to which the Basque ergative <jats:italic>-k</jats:italic> marker is undergoing change in the Basque Autonomous Community. The inclusion of Standard Basque in the education system since 1982 has brought a significant generational change in the mode of language acquisition: older speakers had no formal education in Basque, whereas younger speakers were educated in the Basque immersion program. Contrary to popular belief, results provide no evidence of ergative loss in apparent time; rather, they are consistent with linguistic stabilization. We claim that the differences in social constraints of gender and language use among the younger group reflect social changes, in which mode of language acquisition is responsible for the social stabilization and further stratification of ergativity. We conclude by arguing that minoritized contexts undergoing language revitalization provide important implications for sociolinguistic change, whereby social changes are embraced in assessing linguistic change.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140626618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"[bɪt] by [bɪʔ]: Variation in T-glottaling in Scottish Standard English","authors":"Zeyu Li, Ulrike Gut","doi":"10.1017/s0954394524000024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394524000024","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The present study investigates internal and external constraints conditioning variable T-glottaling, the realization of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ], in supraregional Scottish Standard English. Drawing on phonemically annotated speech data from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English, a total of 12,162 /t/ tokens produced by 138 speakers were extracted from eight formal speaking categories in the corpus and analyzed auditorily. The results showed that about 28% of the analyzed /t/ tokens were produced as glottal stops, with significant inter- and intra-speaker variability. The realization of T-glottaling is subject to both linguistic (phonetic context and word type) and social factors (age, gender, and speech style). Moreover, patterns of various types of T-glottaling differ from each other and constitute distinctive processes of ongoing sound change in Scotland.</p>","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140057692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"TH-stopping in Philadelphia Puerto Rican English","authors":"Abigail E. Patchell, Grant M. Berry","doi":"10.1017/s0954394524000012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394524000012","url":null,"abstract":"Analyzing data from the Puerto Rican English in Philadelphia (PREP) corpus, we investigate participation in TH-stopping, a socially stigmatized yet stable variable documented in Philadelphia. While previous studies have been impressionistic and have considered voiced and voiceless tokens to pattern together, this work validates novel, acoustically based stopping indices: mean harmonics-to-noise ratio for voiced tokens and skewness for voiceless tokens. We apply these indices to the corpus data and analyze stopping under a Bayesian framework, and we compare results from a model built from impressionistic coding of a subset of the same data. We find convergent evidence that TH-stopping is a stable variable in the Puerto Rican English data as well. Findings are compared with those of existing studies, noting future directions for research on the variable and underscoring the importance of establishing demographically representative baselines for linguistic research in diverse urban centers.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139952768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Possessive pronouns in Welsh: Stylistic variation and the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence","authors":"Katharine Young, Mercedes Durham, Jonathan Morris","doi":"10.1017/s0954394523000273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394523000273","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines possessive pronoun forms in Welsh, a feature thought to be undergoing change (Davies, 2016). First, we seek to add to the understanding about how and in which stylistic contexts these forms are used. Second, we examine whether students in Welsh-medium schools with different home language backgrounds show the same sociolinguistic competence. In contrast to what is prescribed in many grammar books, the colloquial form <span>mam fi</span> ‘my mum’ is used at much higher rates than the traditional literary <span>fy mam</span> and sandwich variants <span>fy mam i</span>. This is particularly the case in more casual styles. We also find differences between north and south Wales in overall rates of use, but within the two schools studied, the English home language students broadly show the same patterns and constraints as the Welsh home language students, underlining that language background does not affect the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence.</p>","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"156 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139584678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Early acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement","authors":"Pablo E. Requena","doi":"10.1017/s0954394523000248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394523000248","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines how children acquire Spanish variable clitic placement (VCP), a lexically conditioned phenomenon whereby clitics may precede or follow complex verb phrases. Research on how children acquire truly syntactic variable phenomena suggests that they either generalize one variant initially or they match the variation in the input from the beginning. Here I examine how children acquire the lexical conditioning of Spanish VCP. A corpus study of naturalistic conversations between parents and young children suggests that from the earliest ages examined (2;0-3;0) children display lexically-specific patterns that seem to be fine-tuned by the early school years. Experimental results using two different elicitation techniques with children ages 4;0-7;0 provide further support for early acquisition of the lexical conditioning of VCP and some evidence for fine-tuning during this age window. Thus, methodological triangulation enables detection of variable use where children would otherwise show categorical use of variants with infrequent syntactic phenomena, such as Spanish VCP.</p>","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138546018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Form and function covariation: Obligation modals in Australian English","authors":"Catherine E. Travis, Rena Torres Cacoullos","doi":"10.1017/s0954394523000200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394523000200","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Shifts in the frequencies of English modals of obligation have been linked to shifts in modal function and changing interpersonal authority. Interpretation of over 2,000 tokens in spontaneous speech data recorded in Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s and 2010s establishes a replicable classification of obligation meanings, based on source of obligation, with a three-way distinction between Hierarchical authority, General circumstances, and Personal choice. Competing expressions for these obligation types, besides have to , have got to , and older must , include should and, recently, need to . Two sets of regression analyses provide evidence of covariation of form and function: first, the linguistic and social conditioning of forms, with meaning as one of the predictors; and second, the conditioning of function, with modal form as a predictor. Need to rises in real time and so does talk of personal obligation. However, the change in modal function is concomitant with, but independent of, shifting modal forms.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135412315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}