The variety of middle-class speakers in St. John’s conforms to some degree to mainland Canadian-English pronunciation norms, but in complex and distinctive ways (Clarke, 1985, 1991, 2010; D’Arcy, 2005; Hollett, 2006). One as yet unresolved question is whether speakers of this variety participate in the Canadian Shift (cf. Clarke, 2012; Chambers, 2012), a chain shift of the lax front vowels that has been confirmed for many different regions of Canada (e.g. Roeder and Gardner, 2013, for Thunder Bay and Toronto, Sadlier-Brown and Tamminga, 2008, for Halifax and Vancouver). While acoustic phonetic analyses of St. John’s English are rare, some claims have been made that urban St. John’s speakers do not participate in the shift, based on two or six speakers (Labov, Ash & Boberg, 2006; Boberg 2010). Other researchers with larger data sets suggest that younger St. John’s speakers participate in mainland Canadians innovations to different degrees than mainlanders (e.g. Hollett, 2006). The Canadian Shift has not been uniformly defined, but agreement exists that with the low-back merger in place, BATH/TRAP retracts and consequently DRESS lowers. Clarke et al. (1995), unlike Labov et al. (2006), assert that KIT is subsequently lowered. Boberg (2005, 2010), however, emphasizes retraction of KIT and DRESS and suggests unrelated parallel shifts instead. In this PhD thesis, I demonstrate the presence of the Canadian Shift in St. John’s, NL, conforming to Clarke et al.’s (1995) original proposal. In my stratified randomly-sampled data (approx. 10,000 vowels, 34 interviewees, stratified as to age, gender, socioeconomic status, and “local-ness”), results from Euclidean distance measures, correlation coefficients, and linear, as well as logistic, mixed-effects regression show that (1) young St. John’s speakers clearly participate in the shift; and that (2) age has the strongest and a linear effect. Continuous modeling of age yields even more significant results for participation in a classic chain shift (6% decrease in lowering per added year). My findings also confirm that the change seems to have entered the system via formal styles (cf. Clarke, 1991, 2010, for TRAP in St. John’s). Traditionally, the linguistic homogeneity on a phonetic level of the Canadian middle class has been explained by Canada’s settlement and migration patterns of the North American Loyalists from Ontario to the west (cf. Chambers, 2009). Newfoundland’s settlement is distinct, in that the British and the Irish were the only two relevant sources. If settlement were the only crucial reason for a shared pronunciation of Canada’s middle class from Vancouver to St. John’s, the Canadian Shift should be absent in the latter region. I suggest three reasons for middle-class St. John’s’ participation in the Canadian Shift: 1) Newfoundland’s 300-year-old rural-urban divide as a result of its isolation, through which British/Irish features are attributed to rural und lower social class speakers; 2) the development of the oil industry since the 1990’s, through which social networks changed according to the perception of social distance/closeness; and 3) the importance of the linguistic marketplace, which is high in St. John’s due to 1) and 2).

This project uses corpus linguistics and geostatistics to test the sociolinguistic typological theory put forward by Peter Trudgill on the history of Norwegian. The theory includes several effects of societal factors on language change. Most discussed is the proposal that ‘intensive’ language contact causes simplification of language grammar. In the Norwegian case, the claim is that simplificatory changes which affected all of the Continental North Germanic languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) but not the Insular North Germanic Languages were the result of contact with Middle Low German through the Hanseatic League. This suggests that those simplificatory changes arose in the centres of contact with the Hanseatic League: cities with Hansa trading posts and kontors. The size of the dataset required would have made it impossible for previous scholars to test this prediction, but digital approaches render the problem tractable. I have designed a 3.5m word corpus containing nearly all extant Middle Norwegian, and developed statistical methods for examining the spread of language phenomena in time and space. The project is made up of a series of case studies of changes. Three examine simplifying phonological changes: the rise of svarabhakti (epenthetic) vowels, the change of /hv/ > /kv/ and the loss of the voiceless dental fricative. A further three look at simplifying morphological changes: the loss of 1.sg. verbal agreement, the loss of lexical genitives and the loss of 1.pl. verbal agreement. In each case study a large dataset from many documents is collected and used to map the progression of the change in space and time. The social background of document signatories is also used to map the progression of the change through different social groups. A variety of different patterns emerge for the different changes examined. Some changes spread by contagious diffusion, but many spread by hierarchical diffusion, jumping first between cities before spreading to the country at large. One common theme which runs through much of the findings is that dialect contact within the North Germanic language area seems to have played a major role: many of the different simplificatory changes may first have spread into Norwegian from Swedish or Danish. Although these findings do not exactly match the simple predictions originally proposed from the sociolinguistic typological theory, they are potentially consistent with a more nuanced account in which the major centres of contact and so simplifying change were in Sweden and Denmark rather than Norway.

The aim of the present study has been to investigate how titles of social rank used in Tudor and Stuart England are modified by attributive adjectives in pre-adjacent position and the implications that become possible to observe. Using the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) the present work set out to examine adjectival modification, gender perspectives and MI (Mutual Information) scores in order to gain a deeper understanding of how and why titles were modified in certain ways. The titles under scrutiny are Lord, Lady, Sir, Dame, Madam, Master and Mistress and these have been analysed following theories and frameworks pertaining to the scientific discipline of sociohistorical linguistics.    The findings of the present study suggest that male titles were modified more frequently than, and differently from, female titles. The adjectives used as pre-modifiers, in turn, stem from different semantic domains which reveals differences in attitudes from the language producers towards the referents and in what traits are described regarding the holders of the titles. Additionally, a type/token ratio investigation reveals that the language producers were keener on using a more varied vocabulary when modifying female titles and less so when modifying male titles. The male terms proved to be used more formulaically than the female terms, as well. Lastly, an analysis of MI scores concludes that the most frequent collocations are not necessarily the most relevant ones.    A discussion regarding similarities and differences to other studies is carried out, as well, which, further, is accompanied by suggestions for future research.

The variety of middle-class speakers in St. John’s conforms to some degree to mainland Canadian-English pronunciation norms, but in complex and distinctive ways (Clarke, 1985, 1991, 2010; D’Arcy, 2005; Hollett, 2006). One as yet unresolved question is whether speakers of this variety participate in the Canadian Shift (cf. Clarke, 2012; Chambers, 2012), a chain shift of the lax front vowels that has been confirmed for many different regions of Canada (e.g. Roeder and Gardner, 2013, for Thunder Bay and Toronto, Sadlier-Brown and Tamminga, 2008, for Halifax and Vancouver). While acoustic phonetic analyses of St. John’s English are rare, some claims have been made that urban St. John’s speakers do not participate in the shift, based on two or six speakers (Labov, Ash & Boberg, 2006; Boberg 2010). Other researchers with larger data sets suggest that younger St. John’s speakers participate in mainland Canadians innovations to different degrees than mainlanders (e.g. Hollett, 2006). The Canadian Shift has not been uniformly defined, but agreement exists that with the low-back merger in place, BATH/TRAP retracts and consequently DRESS lowers. Clarke et al. (1995), unlike Labov et al. (2006), assert that KIT is subsequently lowered. Boberg (2005, 2010), however, emphasizes retraction of KIT and DRESS and suggests unrelated parallel shifts instead. In this PhD thesis, I demonstrate the presence of the Canadian Shift in St. John’s, NL, conforming to Clarke et al.’s (1995) original proposal. In my stratified randomly-sampled data (approx. 10,000 vowels, 34 interviewees, stratified as to age, gender, socioeconomic status, and “local-ness”), results from Euclidean distance measures, correlation coefficients, and linear, as well as logistic, mixed-effects regression show that (1) young St. John’s speakers clearly participate in the shift; and that (2) age has the strongest and a linear effect. Continuous modeling of age yields even more significant results for participation in a classic chain shift (6% decrease in lowering per added year). My findings also confirm that the change seems to have entered the system via formal styles (cf. Clarke, 1991, 2010, for TRAP in St. John’s). Traditionally, the linguistic homogeneity on a phonetic level of the Canadian middle class has been explained by Canada’s settlement and migration patterns of the North American Loyalists from Ontario to the west (cf. Chambers, 2009). Newfoundland’s settlement is distinct, in that the British and the Irish were the only two relevant sources. If settlement were the only crucial reason for a shared pronunciation of Canada’s middle class from Vancouver to St. John’s, the Canadian Shift should be absent in the latter region. I suggest three reasons for middle-class St. John’s’ participation in the Canadian Shift: 1) Newfoundland’s 300-year-old rural-urban divide as a result of its isolation, through which British/Irish features are attributed to rural und lower social class speakers; 2) the development of the oil industry since the 1990’s, through which social networks changed according to the perception of social distance/closeness; and 3) the importance of the linguistic marketplace, which is high in St. John’s due to 1) and 2).:List of Tables viii List of Figures x 0 Prologue – Variationist Sociolinguistics 1 1 Introduction 27 2 English-speaking Canada and its Vowel Shifts 31 3 Newfoundland and its Englishes 77 4 Data and Methodology 107 5 Analysis and Discussion 243 6 Conclusion 363 Bibliography 375 Appendices 409 A Interview Questionnaire 409 B Normality Tests per Speaker and Age Group 423 C Vowel Plot of Median Formant Values 433 D Results for the Assumptions of T-tests 435 E Results from Decision Trees and Optimal Binning 439 F Results from Regression Analyses 449 G Résumé 457 H Deutsche Zusammenfassung der Dissertation 461 I Eidestattliche Erklärung zur Eigenständigkeit 469