Homophony avoidance has often been claimed to be a mechanism of language change. We investigate this mechanism in Dutch by applying two strands of research – corpus studies and experimental data – to find support for claims based on earlier historical observations. Throughout the history of Dutch, homophony avoidance has been named as the cause of language change or inhibition of change on several occasions. We build on these historical observations with an experimental study and a corpus study on a synchronic Dutch alternation, where avoidance of homophony between present and past tense can appear. Plurals of verbs with a stem ending in a dental show homophony with the present when they are used in the preterite (compare zetten ‘put’ pst-pl with zetten ‘put’ prs-pl). This homophony can be avoided by using the perfectum (hebben gezet ‘have put’). A wug-style experiment shows that verbs with dental stem are indeed used significantly more in the perfectum in the plural than in the singular, while verbs without dental stem do not show this difference. A corpus study on Dutch further corroborates these results. Combined, these studies make a strong case for homophony avoidance as a plausible mechanism of language change.

English tense/aspect-marking is an area where variation abounds and where many theories have been formulated. Diachronic studies of the preterit/present perfect alternation indicate that the present perfect (e.g. I have eaten already) has been losing ground to the preterit (e.g. I ate already) (e.g. Elsness 1997, but see Hundt & Smith 2009, Werner 2014). However, few studies have examined this alternation in vernacular speech. This article fills this lacuna by analyzing spoken data from Ontario, Canada, from an apparent-time perspective. Using a large archive of multiple communities and people of different generations, we focus on linguistic contexts known to be variable, viz. with adverbs of indefinite time. Results indicate that, in contrast with previous studies, the alternation is mostly stable. We find evidence of change only with the adverb ever. Where there is evidence of change, this change is different from the predictions in the literature, with the preterit increasing in frequency. We suggest that a minor constructionalization process operates in tandem with ongoing specialization of the preterit/present perfect contrast. Taken together, these results provide another example of the importance of including speech in research on language variation and change and of the unique contribution certain constructions make to more general systems of grammar.

The foot–strut vowel split, which has its origins in 17th century English, is notable for its absence from the speech of Northerners in England, where stood–stud remain homophones – both are pronounced with the same vowel /ʊ/. The present study analyses the speech of 122 speakers from Manchester in the North West of England. Although the vast majority of speakers exhibit no distinction between the foot and strut lexical sets in minimal-pair production and judgement tests, vowel height is correlated with socio-economic status: the higher the social class, the lower the strut vowel. Surprisingly, statistical models indicate that vowel class is a significant predictor of foot–strut in Manchester. This means that, for a speech community without the split, there remains an effect in the expected direction: strut vowels are lower than foot vowels in the vowel space. We suggest that co-articulatory effects of surrounding consonants explain this instrumental difference, as they have significant lowering/heightening effects on the acoustics but are not fully captured by our statistical model. We argue that the perplexing nature of the historical split can be partially accounted for in this data, as the frequency of co-occurring phonetic environments is notably different in foot than in strut, resulting in cumulative effects of co-articulation. We also present evidence of age grading which suggests that middle class speakers may develop a phonetic distinction as they age.

The be like quotative emerged rapidly around the English-speaking world and has quickly saturated the quotative systems of young speakers in multiple countries. We study be like (and its covariants) in two communities – Toronto, Canada, and York, United Kingdom – in apparent time and at two separate points in real time. We trace the apparent-time trajectory of be like and its covariants from inception to saturation. We take advantage of the prodigious size of our dataset to examine understudied aspects of the linguistic factors that condition quotative variation. Building on earlier suggestions (Cukor-Avila 2002; Durham et al.2012) that be like might show patterning over time consistent with the Constant Rate Effect (or CRE, Kroch 1989), we argue that the CRE does indeed apply to the rise of be like, but needs to be handled with care. Logistic modelling assumes that the top of the S-curve is located at 100 per cent of a given variable context. In the case of be like, the saturation point is nearer 75–85 per cent, with minor variants retaining small semantic footholds in the system. In conjunction with our analysis, we suggest how to adapt the predictions of the CRE to changes likely to lead to saturation but not categorical use.

Never originated as a temporal adverb expressing universal quantification over time (‘Type 1’, e.g. he’s never been to Paris). As Lucas & Willis (2012) report, it has developed non-quantificational meanings equivalent to didn’t, starting with the ‘Type 2’ use which depicts an event that could have occurred in a specific ‘window of opportunity’ (e.g. she waited but he never arrived). Subsequently, a non-standard ‘Type 3’ use developed, where never can be used with other predicates (e.g. I never won that competition yesterday). To what extent does variation in the use of never in present-day English reflect the proposed historical development of the form? This study addresses this question by integrating syntactic theory into a quantitative variationist approach, analysing never vs. didn’t in Type 2 and Type 3 contexts using speech corpora from three Northern British communities. The results show how syntactic–semantic constraints on never in Type 2 contexts persist in its newer, Type 3 uses, e.g. it is used at higher rates in achievement predicates. While Type 2 contexts are associated with the expression of counter-expectation, never has become pragmatically strengthened in its Type 3 use, where it is often used to contradict a previously-expressed proposition.

Pluricentric approaches to international varieties have been a mainstay in English dialectology since the 1980s, often implied rather than expressed. What is standard lore in many philologies is today questioned in one philology, however. This paper assesses the pros and cons of the so-called “pluri-areal” perspective, which has in the past few years become prominent in German dialectology. Intended to replace the pluricentric model, “pluri-arealist” perspectives affect the modelling of German standard varieties in Austria and Switzerland, among others. Attempting to falsify claims on both sides, this paper argues from an English-German comparative perspective that the idiosyncratic treatment of national varieties in one context is a problem that threatens the unity of the field regarding how the standard is seen in relation to other varieties. It is shown that the base of the “pluri-areal” paradigm is an a-theoretical perspective of geographical variation that adheres implicitly to a One Standard German Axiom. This meta-theoretical paper suggests three principles to prevent such terminologically-fuelled confusion henceforth.

Negation with indefinite items in English can be expressed in three ways: any-negation (I didn’t have any money), no-negation (I had no money) and negative concord (I didn’t have no money). These variants have persisted over time, with some studies suggesting that the newest variant, any-negation, is increasing at the expense of no-negation (Tottie 1991a, 1991b). Others suggest that although this variable was undergoing change in earlier centuries, it is stable in Modern English (Wallage 2017). This article examines the current state of the variability in four communities within two distinctive English-speaking regions: Toronto and Belleville in Ontario, Canada, and Tyneside and York in Northern England. Our comparative quantitative analysis of speech corpora from these communities shows that the rates of no-negation vary between Northern England and Ontario, but the variation is largely stable and primarily conditioned by verb type in a robust effect that holds cross-dialectally: functional verbs retain no-negation, while lexical verbs favour any. The social embedding of the variability varies between the communities, but they share a common variable grammar.