Language Variation and Change最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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 mam fi ‘my mum’ is used at much higher rates than the traditional literary fy mam and sandwich variants fy mam i. 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.

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.