Focusing specifically on the speech act of advice, the present study investigates the role of democratization, or the flattening of social hierarchies, in the use and development of modal verbs in Present-Day spoken British English. In contrast to previous research, which so far has investigated English modality across a variety of speech acts, this study provides a more controlled environment for testing the democratization hypothesis through its focus on modality in only one speech act. Advice is an appropriate testbed because of its sensitive nature. Based on spoken diachronic data from the London-Lund Corpora, the results show a shift toward not only more equal but also more informal advice-giving strategies, as evidenced by an increase in need to and can, and in constructions involving possibility modals with the inclusive we, and a decrease in must, have got to, might, and would. While by and large the results mirror those of earlier studies, there are also some differences that call for more detailed investigations of the shifts and changes in English modality in specific speech act contexts.
This study examines the use, evolution, and pragmatic functions of bloody in British teen talk from the 1990s to 2016. Drawing on spoken data from four corpora representing different time periods, the findings reveal a marked decline in the use of bloody among teenagers, greater than that observed among older speakers during the same span. Rather than reflecting language innovation, this is interpreted as a generational change. Two main factors may account for this trend: (i) the rise of fuck , whose extreme multifunctionality has taken over many of the roles of bloody , and (ii) the weakening of bloody ’s status as a strong swear word for both teens and adults. Syntactically, bloody is now more often used as a noun intensifier than as an intensifier of adjectives, adverbs, or verbs. Pragmatically, beyond expressing frustration, anger, and irritation, bloody in teen talk is also adopting new pragmatic functions such as conveying surprise, disbelief, and humor.
The study examines lexico-grammatical variation among English texts within registers, empirically testing the claim that linguistic variation among texts is attributable to the situation of use. To this end, the study relies on prototype theory and identifies linguistically central texts, that is, representative of the register central trend, and peripheral texts that deviate linguistically from the central tendency. The study then identifies the basis for this linguistic variation. The findings show that register texts vary in their prototypicality, and linguistic variation among texts is explained in functional terms through communicative differences among texts. The identified patterns of functional correspondence between linguistic and communicative variation are demonstrated consistently in four registers.
Recent studies have documented the retreat of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) in the Inland North, as well as the advance of a split between pre-nasal and pre-oral /ae/ (BAT/BAN Split) and a merger of /alpha/ and /(sic)/ (cot and caught, Low-Back Merger) in dialects throughout North America. The present study investigates the status of these three changes-in-progress for fifteen speakers in an urban neighborhood of Rochester, New York, located in close proximity to a university. Our analysis draws on a series of oral history interviews collected in collaboration with a neighborhood organization, alongside participant observation in the community. We describe the clear progression in apparent time of the three dialect features within one Rochester family, then zoom out to the sample as a whole. In the larger sample we find evidence for the presence of both the "new" and "old" dialect features but find that it is not as simple as advance and retreat in apparent time. Rather, we conclude that the social meaning of the NCS is undergoing incipient change and displays a great deal of variability as a marker of localness in the community. Our findings also highlight an underexplored social factor in the study of language change: interaction with higher education, particularly as it relates to sense of place. Rather than analyzing education as a proxy for social class, we propose that higher education impacts sound change in a more nuanced way: through its impact on local culture and social networks, as well as its influence on speakers' access to and awareness of local and supralocal features and evaluation of what it means to be local.
In this introductory paper we outline the aims of the special issue on epistemic and evidential expressions in English across time, the main areas of research within this field and give a summary of the papers included in the special issue, while also highlighting how they contribute to the overarching research aim and how they intersect.
The MOAN-MOWN merger (i.e., the merger of the Middle English sources of GOAT) is an ongoing sound change in Lowestoft English, a variety of East Anglian English spoken at the intersection of the region's northern and southern sub-zones. This study examines the merger's progress across three generations in apparent time, using 2615 tokens of spontaneous and word list speech-analyzed dynamically with generalized additive mixed models-alongside perception data from a binary forced-choice identification task. The analysis addresses how phonemic mergers diffuse into areas of stable resistance and whether the target vowel in Lowestoft assimilates to southeastern British varieties where moan and mown are merged under goat. Results suggest a gradual merger by approximation, progressing via incremental stages with different intergenerational targets of assimilation. Change is linked to demographic shifts following the collapse of Lowestoft's fishing industry, but the merger's diffusion differs from that of other mergers triggered by social change into areas of resistance, both in terms of mechanism and timeframe. The diffusion of goat fronting is reported, affecting both moan and mown where a contrast is maintained, without a loss of distinction in perception. This demonstrates how phonetic diffusion can operate, despite differences in phonological structure between donor and recipient varieties. However, mown lags behind moan, highlighting how local divergence can accompany long-term convergence toward supra-local norms.
This article analyzes the frequency of three clause-level coordinating conjunctions, and, but, and or, in addition to a wide range of subordinating conjunctions across the Transhistorical Corpus of Written English (TCWE). This resource includes five genres covering seven centuries: sermons and statutes dating from the fifteenth to twenty first centuries, personal letters dating from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, and emails and WhatsApp messages dating from the twenty-first century. The study engages with three key developments in the history of English: the increase in the inventory of subordinators between 1500 and 1700, the development of expository and non-expository registers in English between 1650 and 1990, and the increase in colloquialization moving into the Present-Day English period. It finds that there is more substantial genre-conditioned variation in relation to all three developments than has previously been acknowledged. Its results also contribute to knowledge about shifts in the generic conventions of English sermons and statutes over time, and language use within email and instant messaging, most notably a preference for causal as over because in the instant messaging sample.
Electronically available corpora have inevitably enhanced access to historical texts, but building historical corpora can often, unintentionally, distort historical language. This paper discusses how issues of faithfulness and sampling can impact the reliability of a historical corpus-based analysis, with recommendations provided for both corpus users and corpus builders. First, by comparing the Beowulf manuscript with the language found in a historical corpus, this paper shows how seemingly innocent editorial changes such as spacing, punctuation, and spelling can have linguistic consequences for phonological, morphological, syntactic, and socio-historical analyses. The removal or addition of elements is argued to have both theoretical and methodological implications. Second, this paper discusses how sampling issues can lead to erroneous conclusions by corpus users about historical language. Recommendations are provided regarding supplementation and mixed-method approaches.
British classical choirs are thought to use a prestige accent when singing in English. In Scotland there are two available prestige accents, local (SSE), and supralocal (SSBE). Does local consonant phonology affect choral phonology? Here, I investigate regional accent effects in a real-time study of choral singing in commercially released recordings of choirs from Glasgow and Cambridge. Postvocalic /r/ is auditorily coded and analyzed using Bayesian models. Rhoticity is widespread in Glasgow reflecting the phonology of Scottish varieties; however, it declines over time, perhaps reflecting change to an SSBE referee, or the impact of the choir director's accent or preferences.
Recent evidence from production studies and meta-linguistic commentary suggests that the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) is rising above the level of consciousness to become negatively evaluated, thus prompting its reversal in apparent time. This study probes Chicago-area adolescents' social evaluations of salient NCS-implicated vowels via a matched guise task. Since the social meanings of linguistic features are determined through their co-occurrence with other features in styles, NCS vowels are examined in combination with (dh)-stopping, itself a cue to lower socioeconomic status. Results suggest that adolescents are aware of the community-level distribution of these variables, reflecting the class- and age-linked patterning of NCS reversal in Chicago, and that the social meanings of this change in progress are evaluated in the context of broader styles.
Turning text into numbers-and ultimately into an interpretable result-typically involves a processing pipeline. Whether explicit or hidden inside code, each step in that pipeline involves a host of decisions. This article follows a pipeline and unpacks some of the attendant decisions that analysts face at various stages, highlighting the specific challenges that confront analysts investigating historical data. Data, for example, can be less available; the quality of those data can be poor; and the development of tools and models can lag when compared to what is available for present-day English. In the face of such challenges, options are explored, but no argument is made for a particular approach or method-results and their interpretation will be shaped by analysts' epistemic commitments and expertise. An argument is made, however, that an effective processing pipeline will be generative. It will be one that not only can be explained and defended but also can help us see the histories of English-its structures, its uses, and its users-in new ways. In that spirit, a processing pipeline can be understood not as a series of immobilizing decisions, but as an invitation.
This essay introduces a special issue exploring strategies for complicating corpus methods in historical English language studies: both the ways that corpus methods can accommodate the complications of historical work and the ways that scholars can productively complicate the tools in order to enrich our use of digital archives. It highlights limitations of data, issues of variable orthography, and deductive versus inductive approaches. The essay also addresses why it is valuable to use mixed methods, statistical models, LLMs, and interdisciplinary approaches in corpus work-insights that may benefit scholars working with language from any historical period, including the present day. This introduction provides brief summaries of the three research articles in the special issue.
The pronunciation of words in the bat, bet, and bait classes before /g/ (hereafter bag, beg, and bagel) is well-documented in production studies of Pacific Northwest English and beyond, yet there remains a lack of consensus as to whether the phenomenon involves only phonetic raising, measurable on the acoustic dimension, or whether this raising involves partial reduction in phonemic contrasts, characteristic of merger. We argue that perceptual evidence is crucial to investigating the possibility of phonemic merger and explore the bag-bagel phenomenon through an ambiguous vowel categorization experiment. Listeners from three West Coast cities with different established production patterns with respect to the phenomenon-Seattle and Portland (where the phenomenon is established) and San Francisco (where it is not)-categorized resynthesized vowels on a continuum from bag to bagel. Perceptual differences emerge that mirror production observations. Yet, listener behavior does not support a raising characterization as Seattle and Portland listeners do not show a higher switchpoint on the continuum for bag than San Francisco listeners. Instead, Seattle and Portland listener groups demonstrate less sensitivity to phonemic contrast overall, with more variable categorization for the most canonical tokens at both ends of the continuum. Finally, many individual listeners from Seattle and Portland lack a switchpoint altogether, demonstrating both categorical and highly variable responses. The findings suggest that the phenomenon may involve a conditioned phonemic merger of bag-bagel in the Seattle and Portland communities, a perspective relevant for future studies of bag, beg, and bagel.
When people move to a new location, the way they speak often changes to become more similar to the variety spoken in the area. Rates of second dialect acquisition (SDA) have been shown to be affected by a number of factors, including exposure and the relative prestige of the varieties involved. The current study investigates SDA in speakers of American and Australian English who have moved to Australia and the USA respectively. The participants completed picture-naming, lexical decision, and wordlist reading tasks. We found similar rates of SDA in picture-naming, no SDA in wordlist reading, and some differences in terms of when the SDA features are acquired in lexical decision between the two groups. The results suggest that SDA can manifest in non-mobile participants and be triggered through exposure.
