Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous…

The behavior of verbal "-s" is examined in two data sets on early Black English as represented by: (1) tape-recorded interviews with native English-speaking residents of a region of the Dominican Republic; and (2) the ex-slave recordings housed in the Library of Congress. Each verbal construction with the potential for variable…

This study examines quantitatively the systems of tense, mood, and aspect in Puerto Rican Spanish spoken in the United States. In the community under investigation, code-switching is an integral part of the communicative repertoire; also, the codes tend to be switched at points around which the surface structures of Spanish and English map onto…

An analysis of the linguistic and social contexts of the occurrence of verbal "-s" marking in early Black English, within a historical and comparative perspective, shows that both third person singular and nonconcord "-s" are subject to regular, parallel environmental conditioning. (68 references) (Author/CB)