Focuses on gender-related variation in the ellipsis of the nominative particle "ga" and the topic market "wa" in Japanese. (Author/VWL)

Argues that statistical analysis of the potential distinctiveness of near-merged contrastive pairs must simultaneously take into account several acoustical dimensions. Discriminant analysis of the speech of five Utah speakers distinguished near-merged contrasts but not homophones, suggesting that discriminant analysis is useful in assessing…

Examines the loss of palatalization assimilation in modern Russian within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). Shows that this theory offers new explanations for the role of markedness and naturalness in the mechanism of a sound change and argues that OT provides new possibilities for relating quantitative patterns to the principles of…

Describes a new research project on York English, a variety in northeast England. Conducted a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature that recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide--"was/were" variation in the past tense paradigm. (Author/ER)

Conducts quantitative analysis of negative concord in Buckie, a relic dialect from the northeast of Scotland, and compares findings with varieties of English in North America. Results show Buckie has high rates of use of negative concord, as do all the dialects included in the study. Negative concord in other environments is found in certain…

Investigates the contraction of negatives in a corpus of discourse and writing in order to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Argues that pragmatic and morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished…

Examined a nonstandard pattern of agreement found in certain varieties of Atlantic Canada Acadian French. Quantitative analysis of subject-verb agreement patterns in Newfoundland French revealed consistent invariant behavior in this dialect, or, where there is variation, variation constrained according to specific linguistically based factors. (19…

Investigates Japanese as it is spoken in Tokyo within the variationist framework, focusing on the variable (ng). Quantitative analysis was made of the data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews. Findings confirm the existence of inherent variation and orderly heterogeneity. (17 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

Provides evidence from a small northern U.S. city for Canadian raising, a Canadian phenomenon that heightens the onset of diphthongs in /ai/ and /au/ relative to the low central onset in neighboring dialects. Findings suggest that the Canadian diphthong varieties may not be conforming to the U.S. norm, but instead that the two varieties are…

Examines a pattern of end-of-word deletion in Faetar, a Francoprovencal dialect spoken in southern Italy, and considers synchronic variants. The article uses the word "deletion" as a synchronic description of the fact that speakers do not always phonetically produce everything in the input form. Optimality Theory accounts for such…

Examines the rate of phrase structure change in Yiddish, using quantitative methods to estimate the rate of change of structurally ambiguous verb clauses. Four subcases of phrase structure change are distinguished, three of which provide strong evidence for the Constant Rate Hypothesis of linguistic change. (MDM)