Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.

Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.

This study investigates some aspects of grammatical variation in vernacular Jordanian Arabic (JA), namely word order variation and pro(noun)-drop variation. Much previous research on word order and subject expression in Arabic has been hampered by the use of eclectic methodologies (Bakir 1980; Eid 1983; El-Yasin 1985; Fassi Fehri 1993; Aoun & Li 1993; Brustad 2000). Conspicuously rare in contemporary studies of syntactic variation in Arabic are systematic analyses of spontaneous speech data (Edwards 2010: 94; but see e.g., Owens, Dodsworth & Rockwood 2009; Owens, Dodsworth & Kohn 2013). The dearth of quantitative studies of word order variation, as well as pro-drop variation, in colloquial Arabic provides the primary motivation for the present investigation. Drawing on the framework of variationist sociolinguistics (Labov 1972), I conduct an accountable analysis of word order variation, as well as pro-drop variation in a corpus of vernacular Jordanian Arabic recorded in the Irbid metropolitan area in 2014. The corpus is based on over 30 hours of digitized recordings obtained from 30 speakers stratified by age, sex, education, as well as urban/rural origin. I exploit these spontaneous speech data to: (i) assess the frequency of different word order and pro-drop variants in vernacular JA; (ii) ascertain which social and linguistic factors constrain the selection of major word order and pro-drop variants; and (iii) determine whether the apparent time component incorporated into the research design reveals any evidence of change in progress. Distributional and multivariate analyses of 4500 tokens (2049 for word order and 2422 for pro-drop) coded for the aforementioned social factors, in addition to an array of linguistic factors hypothesized to constrain variant choice (e.g., morphloexical class of subject, grammatical person and number, type of clause and transitivity) confirm that word order variation, as well as pro-drop variation, are subject to multiple constraints (Holes 1995; Owens et al. 2013). A first important finding concerns the quantitative preponderance of SV(O) word order in vernacular JA, which competes with less frequent VS(O). Another important finding is that null subject pronouns are the norm in vernacular JA. Statistical analyses of the linguistic factors conditioning the observed variability reveal that transitivity and definite subject pronouns are key predictors of SV(O) word order choice, while switch reference and person and number of subject are key predictors of overt subject pronouns, as determined by the relative magnitude of these effects. Particularly compelling is the social embedding of the variation in the case of word order variation. Age- and sex-differentiations in the data (Labov 1990), in addition to urban-rural split, reveal statistically significant differences, offering provisional indications that alternation between SV(O) and VS(O) word orders is implicated in ongoing change. Younger speakers, women and urban-origin speakers lead in the use of SV(O). The results foreground the utility of empirically accountable analyses of spontaneous speech in elucidating key issues relating to syntactic variation in modern varieties of spoken Arabic. The results generated by this approach reveal new findings not previously available from the intuited, elicited or written material on which much previous work on Arabic has been based.

This project explores the social meaning potential of creaky voice using a third wave variationist approach in order to uncover what motivates speakers to deploy this vocal quality. Intraspeaker variation in the use of creak is quantitatively and qualitatively examined in case studies of one male and one female individual who come from a similar social group. In recordings from a range of casual settings, both the male and female speaker are found to use creak at similar rates, for similar purposes. However, creak is found to vary across social settings: the greater the speakers’ self-reported intimacy with their interlocutors, the lower the frequency of creak. This suggests that creaky voice is used for interactional functions, and is conditioned by conversational context. Qualitative discourse analysis of instances of creak further reveals that it has a high frequency of cooccurrence with linguistic features used for epistemic stancetaking. I suggest that creak is an interactional resource available for taking an authoritative position in interaction, especially in situations where speakers feel less intimately connected to their interlocutors. / Graduate / 2017-08-02 / 0290 / 0291 / nchildebrand@gmail.com

This dissertation is an investigation of the use, change, and status of the distinctive local dialect in rural Valdres, Norway. The Norwegian sociolinguistic situation has long been recognized as complicated by a protracted history of language planning and standardization, in which two competing written norms of Norwegian, called Bokmål and Nynorsk, are symbolically and ideologically associated with urban and rural identities, respectively. In addition, while Norwegians can choose from two written norms, no recognized standard exists for spoken Norwegian, and citizens are officially encouraged to use their native, local dialects. The present study approaches this situation through a case study of language use in Valdres today.In the summer of 2005, the distinctive dialect of the rural Valdres valley was voted "Norway's most popular dialect" on one of the country's most listened-to national radio programs, an event that both reflects and has contributed to a recent revaluation of the local dialect. Yet the results of previous dialectological research in Valdres have clearly pointed to long-term convergence toward what locals call "city language" -- the speech of nearby urban Oslo. While evidence of this decades-long trend is not contradicted by the findings of this dissertation research, the present study suggests that there may be more than one direction of dialect change in Valdres today. Despite ongoing changes in dialect morpho-lexis and phonology in the direction of urban regional speech, there is also a large number of relatively resistant dialect features in contemporary Valdresmål, and, even more importantly, evidence of a re-expansion of the dialect among younger speakers, which appears to align with forms found in written Nynorsk, the alternative "rural" norm. The simultaneous sociolinguistic trends of dialect convergence, non-convergence, and divergence in the contemporary Valdres dialect vis-a-vis urban regional norms thus provide an interesting and complicated case of language variation and change.This dissertation combines methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, ethnographic sociolinguistics, and acoustic phonetics to provide an illuminating analysis of the local relationships between standard and non-standard varieties, between written and spoken forms, and between contemporary language use and historically-rooted language ideologies.

À is the prototypical preposition used before city names in French, yet there are reports that, since the mid-20th century, sur also appears in this context in vernacular varieties of European French. To date, research on the choice between à and sur has focused on semantic and pragmatic differences between the two, and has relied on made-up examples, small participant usage surveys, or empirical datasets that were not systematically analyzed. Moreover, the influence of social factors has received only scant attention. This thesis addresses these shortcomings by providing a quantitative, variationist and longitudinal account of à/sur alternations. It asks the following question: Which factors (linguistic and social) can account for prepositional variation before city names in Hexagonal French? The data was drawn from two publicly available corpora of spoken Hexagonal French, representing three locales: the Parisian city-centre, a group of suburban cities surrounding Paris, and the midsize provincial city of Orléans. The speakers (N = 151) were born between 1878 and 1994, providing a mixture of real- and apparent-time perspectives on variation. Following variationist methods, the analysis considers all contexts where à/sur variation is possible (N = 2542) and seeks to elucidate the variable grammar. Results indicate important differences between the three areas under study, both in terms of social patterns and in terms of linguistic constraints. In Paris, the use of sur is restricted to a few speakers and a few linguistic contexts, and is overall very infrequent. In the suburbs and Orléans, sur is more widely attested across speakers and contexts, but it remains a minority variant which seems to be on the decline, especially in the suburbs. Further, in Orléans, the variable grammar is less linguistically constrained, suggesting a trajectory of geographic diffusion. Overall, the quantitative findings support some of the semantic and pragmatic hypotheses proposed in earlier work while shedding light on how geographic, social and linguistic factors combine to explain a phenomenon of variation that has never been studied using variationist methods before. / Graduate / 2022-07-19

The subject of this thesis is the French language in the Franco-Belgian borderland. More specifically, it investigates language, linguistic perceptions and language attitudes in the French-speaking part of Belgium which borders France. The study takes a variationist approach and is grounded in sociolinguistic theory, but it also draws on theories and methodologies from elsewhere in the social sciences. Two questions are at the heart of this study: how do people speak French in the Belgian borderland and why do they speak that way? To answer the research questions, speech and questionnaire data were gathered from 39 informants living in the borderland city of Tournai and its surrounding area. With this data, a variety of analyses were performed. Sociophonetic investigations were carried out on two phonological variables, namely the vocalic oppositions /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/, draw-a-map task perceptual data were analysed through a ‘visual methods’ lens, and attitudinal data were also examined. Social variation in linguistic behaviour, perceptions and language attitudes was also analysed. The notions of ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘spatiality’ were accorded considerable importance: the interactions between language and ‘space’ as the factors of ‘mobility’, ‘media consumption’, ‘sense of place’ and ‘regional belonging’ were also examined. The findings include that French in the Belgian borderland is more similar to that in France than to elsewhere in Francophone Belgium and that this is due to a number of factors. Moreover, the French in the borderland appears to be converging on that in France, although some differences persist. It was also found that spatial factors interact with both linguistic and social ones. Finally, it was concluded that whilst there is no longer a physical barrier at the national border, it persists to an extent as a psychological one, and this has ramifications for borderlanders’ behaviour: be it linguistic or otherwise.

This thesis is an articulatory investigation into phonological variation and change in English /l/-darkening. Although syllable-based accounts of /l/-darkening state that light [l] occurs in onsets (e.g. `leap') and a dark variant in codas (e.g. `peel'), numerous works linking phonology with other subfields of linguistics have shown that this simplified distinction cannot fully account for the variation found. Firstly, /l/-darkening is sensitive to morphosyntactic structure, as shown through overapplication of the process in certain morphosyntactically defined positions: e.g. word-finally in phrases such as `heal it', or stem-finally before a suffix in words such as `healing'. In addition, analyses of /l/-darkening from several phonetic studies have led to some arguing against an allophonic distinction altogether, stating that the difference between light and dark variants is merely two extremes of one continuum. Not only does this interpretation challenge the traditional categorisation of /l/-darkening but, given the clear sensitivity to morphosyntactic boundaries that /l/-darkening displays, it also raises questions for a modular architecture of the grammar if phonetics can be morphologically conditioned. This dissertation is an empirical analysis of /l/-darkening, presenting data from nine varieties of English. Given the difficulty in measuring liquid consonants reliably, ultrasound tongue imaging is used to provide a thorough account of the prime articulatory correlations of darkening processes. The present study provides hitherto absent instrumental evidence confirming the varying degrees of morphosyntactic sensitivity across different dialects. I demonstrate that, rather than being contradictory or chaotic, variation to morphosyntactic boundaries cross-dialectally makes complete sense under an analysis that pays due consideration to the diachronic evolution of phonological processes. Moreover, my data show that the majority of speakers display both categorical allophony of light and dark variants, and gradient phonetic effects coexisting in the same grammar. Therefore, an adequate account of English /l/-darkening presupposes both a theory of the morphosyntax-phonology interface, and the phonetics-phonology interface. I interpret these results by assuming the modular architecture of the life cycle of phonological processes, whereby a phonological rule starts its life as a phonetically driven gradient process, over time stabilising into a phonological process at the phrase level, and advancing through the grammar. Not only does the life cycle make predictions about application at different levels of the grammar, it also predicts that stabilised phonological rules do not replace the phonetic processes from which they emerged, but typically coexist with them. Moreover, the obvious intimate link between /l/-darkening and /l/-vocalisation can be explained in terms of the life cycle, in the way of lenition trajectories. The results here show that, as predicted, the more recent stage of the lenition trajectory is harsher in terms of its phonetic effect, as well as less advanced in the grammar, applying at a lower level than darkening when the two co-occur in the same variety. I conclude by arguing that the proposed analysis demonstrates that a full understanding of /l/-darkening in English requires an approach that considers variation under phonetic, phonological and morphosyntactic terms. The wide range of dialectal diversity, for which this thesis provides only a small subset, shows a great deal of orderliness when paying due consideration to the diachronic evolution of variable phonological processes.

Le créole afro-portugais de Casamance reste encore méconnu. La présente étude constitue la première description des pratiques langagières des créolophones casamançais. Elle est fondée sur un corpus de première main recueilli lors de discussions spontanées entre des locuteurs créolophones dans des villes multilingues : Dakar, Thiès et Ziguinchor. Dans ce corpus, les principales langues en contact sont essentiellement le créole casamançais, le français et le wolof. Cette thèse décrit les changements induits par ce contact dans le corpus, notamment le repérage temporel et les phénomènes touchant spécifiquement les groupes nominaux (déterminants et génitifs). L’étude de ces champs m’a permis de constater que des éléments grammaticaux et lexicaux sont fournis à la fois par l’ensemble de ces langues. Ce cas de figure n'est pas souvent pris en compte dans les approches théoriques du contact de langues, lesquelles proposent souvent une séparation fonctionnelle des langues fondée sur une dichotomie entre langue matrice et langue insérée, et tendent à ignorer les situations de contact impliquant plus de deux langues. Cette thèse constitue une contribution à l’étude du contact de langues et permet en particulier de porter un regard neuf sur une situation de contact trilingue, impliquant une langue créole et deux autres langues qui en sont typologiquement éloignées. La prise en compte d’une telle configuration revêt un caractère particulièrement novateur dans le domaine des études créoles, où les chercheurs intéressés par le contact de langues se concentrent surtout sur des situations de contact entre les créoles et leurs langues lexificatrices respectives. / Casamancese Afro-Portuguese Creole is still largely unknown. The present study is the first description of the language practices of Casamance Creole speakers. The study is based on a first-hand corpus collected during spontaneous discussions among Creole speakers in multilingual cities: Dakar, Thies and Ziguinchor. In this corpus, the main languages in contact are the Casamancese Creole, French and Wolof.This dissertation describes the changes induced by this contact in the corpus, especially the temporal deixis and phenomena specifically affecting noun groups (such as determiners and genitives). The study of these domains has led me to realize that all three languages involved both grammatical and lexical elements are provided by all these languages.Such a scenario is generally not taken into consideration in the theoretical approaches to language contact, which often posit a functional separation of the languages involved based on a dichotomy between matrix language and embedded language, and tend to ignore contact situations involving more than two languages.This dissertation is therefore a contribution to the study of language contact; more specifically, it allows for the possibility to take a fresh look at a trilingual contact situation involving a Creole language and two other languages typologically distant from the former. The inclusion of such a configuration is particularly innovative in the domain of Creole studies, where researchers interested in contact languages focus mainly on situations of contact between Creoles and their respective lexifier languages

Esta pesquisa apresenta análises sobre avaliação, produção e percepção linguística no português paulistano, por meio do exame de quatro variáveis sociolinguísticas: a realização de /e/ nasal como monotongo [e] ou ditongo [ej] (como em fazenda); a pronúncia de /r/ em coda silábica como tepe [R] ou retroflexo [õ] (como em porta); a concordância nominal de número (como em as casas/as casa); e a concordância verbal de primeira e de terceira pessoa do plural (como em nós fomos/nós foi, eles foram/eles foi). O objetivo central é analisar, em uma comunidade amplamente heterogênea de um ponto de vista sociodemográfico, as inter-relações entre a expressão de identidades sociais através de usos linguísticos e a possível influência dos significados sociais desses usos em processos de variação e mudança linguística. Para tanto, analisou-se qualitativa e quantitativamente uma amostra contemporânea do português paulistano, composta de 118 entrevistas sociolinguísticas com falantes nativos, à luz dos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Sociolinguística Variacionista (Labov, 2006 [1966], 2008 [1972]). Tais análises compreendem o encaixamento linguístico e social de cada variável, bem como seu encaixamento simultâneo na fala de cada indivíduo. Além disso, examinaram-se percepções sobre as variantes de (-r), com base na técnica de estímulos pareados (Lambert et al., 1960), a fim de melhor compreender os mecanismos subjacentes à associação de certos significados sociais ao emprego de diferentes formas linguísticas. Os resultados mostram que, embora as correlações entre as quatro variáveis sociolinguísticas e variáveis sociais sejam bastante semelhantes entre si (todas se correlacionam com o Sexo/Gênero, a Classe Social e o Nível de Escolaridade dos falantes), há diferentes tendências dentro da comunidade por exemplo, mudança em direção à variante ditongada [ej]; padrões divergentes quanto ao emprego de (-r) por parte de jovens de diferentes classes sociais; variação estável das concordâncias nominal e verbal em regiões periféricas e mudança em direção à variante padrão em regiões centrais. Para compreendê-los, o exame de seus significados sociais é fundamental. Argumenta-se que [ej] tem se difundido rápida e unidirecionalmente pelo fato de se constituir um marcador (Labov, 2008 [1972]) para paulistanos, que não revelam ter consciência da variável, tampouco apresentam um discurso metalinguístico sobre suas variantes. O forte favorecimento do retroflexo entre jovens de classes baixas foi desencadeado por uma reinterpretação de seu significado social como uma variante local e de prestígio, devido à presença maciça de migrantes do Norte/Nordeste, cuja variante fricativa é relativamente mais estigmatizada na comunidade. Ao mesmo tempo, ainda que o encaixamento social das concordâncias nominal e verbal seja bastante semelhante, a marca zero de concordância nominal (as casa) goza de maior vitalidade por indexicalizar significados como masculinidade, paulistanidade e morador da Mooca. Não obstante as diferentes tendências que se verificam na comunidade, os padrões de encaixamento das variáveis linguísticas se reproduzem sistematicamente na fala de cada indivíduo, o que permite caracterizar os paulistanos como uma única comunidade de fala (Labov, 2006 [1966]), que compartilha normas de produção e de avaliação linguística. De acordo com o teste de percepções, os moradores da cidade também são consistentes em suas reações subjetivas a variantes de (-r). Demonstra-se adicionalmente que a coesão dialetal é promovida não por amplas categorias sociais como Sexo/Gênero ou Faixas Etárias, mas pelo princípio mais fundamental de densidade de comunicação (Gumperz, 1971b,a). / This study examines linguistic evaluation, production, and perception in São Paulo Portuguese, through analyses of four sociolinguistic variables: the realization of nasal /e/ as a monophthong [e] or as a diphthong [ej] (as in fazenda farm); the realization of coda /r/ as a tap [R] or as a retroflex [õ] (as in porta door); nominal number agreement (as in as casas/as casa the houses); and first person plural and third person plural verb agreement (as in nós fomos/nós foi we went, eles foram/eles foi they went). The main goal is to investigate the inter-relation between the expression of social identities through language uses and the possible impact of social meanings on processes of language variation and change, in a highly diverse and heterogeneous community. Based on the theory and methods of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2006 [1966], 2008 [1972]), each variables linguistic and social embedding, as well as their simultaneous embedding in individual speakers speech, were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively in 118 sociolinguistic interviews with native Paulistano speakers. In addition, perceptions on the variants of (-r) were examined through an experiment using the Matched Guise Technique (Lambert et al., 1960), aimed at describing the mechanisms underlying the association of certain social meanings with different language forms. The results show that, in spite of the similarity between the social embedding of the four variables (all of them are correlated with speakers sex/gender, social class, and level of education), there are different trends within the community for instance, change towards (e) diphthongization; divergent patterns regarding (-r) in the speech of younger speakers of different social classes; stable variation in nominal and verbal agreement in peripheral areas but change towards the prestige variant in central areas. The explanation for these patterns is related to the variants social meanings. It is argued that [ej] has spread rapidly and unidirectionally because it is a marker (Labov, 2008 [1972]) for Paulistanos, who are not aware of the variable and do not present an elaborate metalinguistic discourse on its variants. The fact that retroflex /r/ is strongly favored by working class youth may be attributed to a reinterpretation of its social meaning, due to the extensive presence of migrants from the Northern and Northeastern regions of the country, whose /r/ realization as a fricative is relatively more stigmatized in the community. At the same time, although nominal and verbal agreement are very similarly stratified, the nonstandard variant of the former (as casa the houses) exhibits greater vitality as it indexes masculinities and local identities with the city and with Mooca, one of its most traditional neighborhoods. Despite different trends by different social groups in the community, the embedding of the linguistic variables is systematically reproduced in each speakers speech, which allows for the characterization of São Paulo as a single speech community (Labov, 2006 [1966]) in that its native speakers share norms of use and evaluation of the variants. According to the perception test, the city inhabitants are also consistent in their subjective reactions to the variants of (-r). It is shown that such social cohesion is promoted not by census social categories such as sex/gender or age, but by the more fundamental principle of density of communication (Gumperz, 1971b,a).