Investigates the redundantly marked comparative "worser" in relation to its irregular, but etymologically justified, counterpart, "worse." Examines the diachronic development of the form as well as its distribution in the written language of the 16th and 17th centuries. (Author/VWL)

Discusses a corpus-based study that focuses on word epenthesis.Provides quantitative evidence that vowel epenthesis applies categorically in some environments and variably in others. Probabilistic analysis demonstrates that the variable pattern is constrained by a complex interplay of linguistic factors. Interprets such grammatical conditioning as…

Variation among tokens of enumeration in Montreal French are studied to explain how the constitutive processes interact in terms of Slobin's (1977) charges to language: be clear, processible in real time, quick and easy, and expressive. The contributions of six structural factors or processes to the fulfillment of these charges are examined.…

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)

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…

Analyzes two variants of subject doubling in Ontario French: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. It is proposed that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP (noun phrase), while lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant.(Author/JL)

Concerns the interrelation between the theoretical status and the social dimensions of syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch. Syntactic variation of Heerlen Dutch consists of a range of dative constructions that are unacceptable in standard Dutch. (Author/JL)

The quantitative methodology of GOLDVARB is used to examine the variable distribution of lexical noun phrases representing core arguments of the verb in a corpus of spoken French and Spanish. The distribution is shown to conform to a grammatically and pragmatically motivated pattern known as Preferred Argument Structure. (Contains 26 references.)…

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…

Evidence from a sample of informal written language (personal correspondence) shows that the most important constraints on pronoun usage in subject position are discourse-based. The quantitative analysis supports the hypothesis that pronoun usage is "functional" since semantically relevant information is preserved in surface structure.…

Using variationist methodology, this study analyzed natural speech data from 31 speakers of standard Canadian English and found an overwhelming preference for singular agreement in existentials. Contrary to predictions, this was not linked to a determiner-based structural distinction but rather to the form of the copula and the speaker's level of…

Social implications of phonological and morphological variation in Classical Latin is examined. Arguments for the social factor are instances of hypercorrection, private and domestic instances of certain datives and Augustus' use of rural "domos" for "domus." It is understood in terms of the model of urbanization. (35…

Compares models of Optimality Theory (OT) and Variable Rules (VR), arguing that VR is superior on theoretical and empirical grounds: constraint effects are stable, transparent, learnable. Moreover, VR's probabilistic treatment of constraint effects allows successful modeling of cases in which multiple violations of a single constraint lead to…

Guy's hypothesized linkage between empirical linguistics and formal linguistic theory is supported in a study of the English of 45 Chicanos from Los Angeles, which as a recently formed dialect provides an interesting test case. Age differences are found in the morphological classes associated with /-t,d/ deletion. (13 references) (Author/LB)

Offers an optimality theoretic account for the phonological process of across-word regressive assimilation (AWRA) in Picard, a Gallo-Romance dialect spoken in the Picardie region in Northern France and Southern Belgium. Focuses on the varieties spoken in the Vimeu region of France. Examines one particular topic in the analysis of AWRA: the…