We examine constructed dialogue in a longitudinal corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (AE) spoken in Perth, Australia. We conduct a variationist analysis of naturalistic data from forty-six L1 speakers of AE born 1907–2005. We ask, regarding the use of quotative frames, whether AE has changed in line with settler colonial Englishes. We examine whether a division of labor exists in the use of quotative frames, and whether the rise of first-person-marked internal thought reporting attested in settler colonial Englishes is present in AE.

Our statistical modeling shows functional partitioning in how quotative frames are used, with AE speakers strongly encoding direct speech across time. We find that the rise of first-person-marked internal thought reporting has not been systemic in AE. Despite be like's incursion after 1983, the underlying system of AE has not changed. The cultural prerogative to encode speech remains strong despite sustained contact with non-First Nations Australia.

This paper tests the idea that the speech rate with which surrounding words are spoken affects the mental representation of words and conditions production of words. This possibility is operationalized by measuring a word's ratio of occurrence in speaker-relative fast speech. Other variables shown in the literature to influence speech rate are controlled for in a 10,000-iteration bootstrapping procedure of a mixed-effect linear regression model. The results of the analysis of 39,397 tokens of content words from 1,232 word types in English display a significant effect for a word's ratio of conditioning in speaker-relative fast speech, although the effect size is small or very small. Other variables shown in the literature to condition speech rate also significantly condition speech rate here. This paper suggests that in addition to other aspects of the context of use of words, contextual speech rate also influences the mental representation of words.

The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

The present study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the evolution of the semantic field of third-person male adult noun referents from Old English to Middle English, covering a time depth of approximately six hundred years. Results show a shift from the favored variant wer in Old English to man in Middle English, with the diachronic change in frequency following a prototypical s-shaped distribution. Although the replacement seems to take centuries to be complete, lexical frequency and written transmission are proposed as influential explanatory factors, and a homonymic clash is suggested to have accelerated the process of replacement in Middle English. Text type and text origin contribute to variation, with alliteration significantly influencing lexical choices in Old English verse texts. When combined with findings from recent synchronic work, this study highlights a heterogeneously structured semantic domain, which has undergone lexical replacement and change over time, providing some evidence for the applicability of s-shaped patterns for lexical change.

Two Twitter-based corpus studies are reported to account for the increasing preference in The Netherlands for the stigmatized subject use of the object pronoun hun ‘them.’ Twitter data were collected to obtain a sufficient number of hun-tokens, but also to investigate the validity of two hypotheses on the preference for hun, this is, that subject-hun is a contrast profiler which thrives in contexts of evaluation and qualification, and that subject-hun is propelled by its dynamic social meaning, being a tool for nonposh and streetwise self-stylization. Although the latter is not normally a predictor included in regression analyses of constructional choice, it turns out that expressively spruced up tweets with vivid contrast profiling are the prime biotope of subject-hun. Along the way, this paper reviews the potential of Twitter data for the reconciliation of macro-big-data analysis with micro-sociolinguistic focus, but it also reports and attempts to remedy three concerns.