In line with Cheshire’s (2005a, see also Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle 1989; Cheshire and Milroy 1993) work on the geographical patterns of syntactic variation, this chapter focusses on regional and grammatical effects on the English particle verb alternation.1 We illustrate this variation in (1), which shows that, with a class of transitive verb + particle combinations, the particle may appear either immediately to the left of the verb or further to the right, following a direct object. We refer to these word orders as the VPO (verb-particle-object) and VOP (verbobject-particle) orders respectively.

This paper examines regional and grammatical effects on the English particle verb alternation. We report on an acceptability judgment experiment and a Twitter corpus study designed to address Hughes et al.'s claim that the VPO order (She turned off the light) is favoured in Scotland while the VOP (She turned the light off) order is favoured in Southern England. The results from both the judgment study and the Twitter corpus revealed no support for a North-South difference across UK dialects, but instead show a trans-Atlantic difference: respondents from the UK and Ireland favoured VOP orders, while US participants favoured VPO orders, and Canadians were intermediate between the two. Evidence from the Brown corpus and the Corpus of Historical American English suggests that this difference reflects change toward an innovative VOP order that has proceeded more quickly in Old World dialects than in North America. The results contrast with previous findings that changes toward more "colloquial" word orders across English varieties are being led by American dialects, and support scepticism toward such a process as a general principle governing divergence of global Englishes.

While the research literature on second language (L2) fluency is replete with descriptions of fluency and its influence with regard to English as an additional language, little is known about what fluency features influence judgments of fluency in L2 French. This study reports the results of an investigation that analyzed the relationship between utterance fluency measures and raters' perceptions of L2 fluency in French using mixed-effects modeling. Participants were 40 adult learners of French at varying levels of proficiency, studying in a university immersion context. Speech performances were collected on three different types of narrative tasks. Four utterance fluency measures were extracted from each performance. Eleven untrained judges rated the speech performances and we examined which utterance fluency measures are the best predictors of the scores awarded by the raters. The mean length of runs and articulation rate proved to be the most influential factors in raters' judgments, while the frequency of pauses played a less important role. The length of pauses was positively related to fluency scores, indicating a prominent cross-linguistic variation specific to French. The relative importance of the utterance measures in predicting fluency ratings, however, was found to vary across tasks.

This article proposes that Kroch’s (1989) Constant Rate Hypothesis – the generalization that contextual effects tend to be stable in processes of diachronic variation in production data – be extended to synchronic variation in controlled judgment data. Two recent, large-sample judgment experiments are discussed suggesting that shared contextual effects across speakers in acceptability judgments can be used to infer a single abstract source for patterns of variation across superficially different contexts. At the same time, the results suggest that not all sets of variants – or “ways of saying the same thing” (Labov 1972: 271) – are linguistic variables of this formally defined type.

This article proposes that Kroch’s (1989) Constant Rate Hypothesis—the generalization that contextual effects tend to be stable in processes of diachronic variation in production data—be extended to synchronic variation in controlled judgment data. Two recent, large-sample judgment experiments are discussed suggesting that shared contextual effects across speakers in acceptability judgments can be used to infer a single abstract source for patterns of variation across superficially different

Non-mobile individuals living in a community undergoing a linguistic change usually display a pattern of variation where citation styles are more advanced than naturalistic styles with respect to the change in progress. This suggests that speakers' intentions or norms, while they may shift only gradually, can do so more easily than their productions. Two groups of 'mobile' speakers—adults who grew up in one dialect area and moved to another, and children who acquired one dialect at home and another in the community—showed the opposite pattern: spontaneous speech approximated the dialect of the second community more closely than did word-list productions. Analysis of these speakers' low back vowels (the LOT and THOUGHT word classes) also suggest that most adults can at least partially learn a vowel distinction as well as a merger, though children are able to do both things more quickly and completely. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/ vol21/iss2/13 Partial Mergers and Near-Distinctions: Stylistic Layering in Dialect Acquisition Daniel Ezra Johnson and Jennifer Nycz

Be like as an introducer of quoted speech is innovative in many contemporary varieties of English. Recent corpus-based work on be like has suggested that as it has continued to spread, it has undergone syntactic and semantic change: be like predicates, originally used exclusively to describe states of individuals via reported thought as in (1a), have taken on an additional guise as descriptors of saying events as in (1b) (Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999, Buchstaller 2004). This paper reports on two judgement experiments with speakers of American English intended to further explore claims of syntactic and semantic change in be like quotatives. Our experimental results suggest that the direct speech and reported thought readings of be like are diffusing into American English at a similar rate. From the perspective of Kroch’s (1989) seminal constant rate proposal, this result is consistent with a view of these two guises of be like as different environments in a single abstract process of change. In particular, we relate the ambiguity between direct speech and reported thought be like in (1) to the availability of copula be in active contexts as in (2) and (3)(Partee 1977, Dowty 1979, Parsons 1990, Rothstein 1999).

A BSTRACT . Alternation among restrictive relativizers in written Standard English is undergoing massive shift from which to that . In corpora of written-edited-published British and American English covering the 1961-1992 period, AmE spearheads this change. We study 16,868 restrictive relative clauses with inanimate antecedents from Brown/LOB/Frown/F-LOB. Predictors include additional areas of variation regulated by prescriptivism. We show:

A sociolinguist who has gathered so much data that it has become difficult to make sense of the raw observations can turn to graphical presentation, and to descriptive statistics, techniques for distilling a collection of data into a few key numerical values, allowing the researcher to focus on specific, meaningful properties of the data set. A sociolinguist evaluates hypotheses about the connections between linguistic behavior, speakers, and society. The researcher begins this process by gathering data with the potential to falsify the hypotheses under consideration. Inferential statistics allow the researcher to compute the probability that a hypothesized property of the data is due to chance, and to estimate the magnitude of the hypothesized effect. This chapter compares inferential methods appropriate for sociolinguistic data in terms of these assumptions. It examines elements of qualitative analysis and methods for binary analysis, multinomial variables, and continuous variables.

This paper examines topic and focus effects on word order in English particle verb constructions. Several authors have reported that speakers often prefer the Verb-Particle-Object (VPO) order when the object has new information focus, and the Verb-Object-Particle (VOP) order when the object is discourse-given (Bolinger 1971, Svenonius 1996a, Kayne 1998, Dehé 2002). We illustrate this effect in (1) and (2) from Svenonius (1996a), who notes, nevertheless that there is considerable cross-speaker variation in these judgments, and that for most speakers, both orders are at least partially acceptable in both contexts.

Earlier intervocalic s is found in archaic inscriptions (e.g., Lases for later Lares ‘local deities’; Baldi 2002:213f.) and implicated by comparative reconstruction (e.g., Latin flōrale ‘floral’ vs. Vestinian flusare; Watkins 1970). This change was actuated no later than the 4th century BCE, as indicated by Cicero’s comment that L. Papirius Crassus, consul in 336 BCE and dictator in 339 BCE, was the first of his line to spell his cōgnōmen as Papirius rather than the ancestral Papisius. Numerous s-r alternations in Classical Latin derive from this sound change. For instance, many nouns have nominative and vocative singulars ending in s, but an intervocalic r in the singular obliques and throughout the plural.

be to the variation between speech and non-speech interpretations of be like quotatives in (1). In particular, we propose that copula be always selects for an adjectival (stative) argument, and that the availability of eventive readings as in (1b), (2) and (3) is attributable to a semantic coercion mechanism, akin to operations that make count readings out of mass nouns in the nominal domain. be like quotatives, we propose that a range of syntactic properties of be like that distinguish it from other verbs of saying, including its opacity to wh-extraction and quote-raising, are accounted for by the presence of a null SOMETHING under be. This null indefinite takes a like-headed PP which introduces the quoted material. This approach is lent plausibility by their similarity to innovative quotative constructions in Dutch with an overt indefinite quantifier (zoiets) (van Craenenbroeck 2002). The paper is organised as follows. In section two, we discuss some syntactic differences between be like and say-type quote introducers. Section three argues for an aspectual coercion approach to the ambiguity between (1a) and (1b), drawing on Rothstein (1999). Section four develops the syntactic and semantic proposals. Section five compares English be like quotatives to hebben zoiets van quotative constructions in contemporary Dutch.