The study of short-"a" (e.g., the vowel in words such as "bat," "bad," "bang," "ban") in New York City English (NYCE) has a long history, and with many different descriptions of this complex system (e.g., Babbitt 1896; Trager 1930; Labov 1966/2006; Cohen 1970; Labov 2007). It is complex due to the…

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and social constraints on the occurrence of creaky voice quality (creak) in Beijing Mandarin (BM), as well as the effect of linguistic and prosodic context on creak's social meanings for Mandarin listeners. It is a two-phase study, composed of 1) a production study of the distribution of creak in the…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

This study focuses on the analysis of variation at the phonological level, specifically the variable realization of palatalization of dental stops before the high vowel /i/ and vowel nasalization in the speech of bilingual speakers of Uruguayan Portuguese (UP) in the city of Rivera, Uruguay. The data were collected in participant-observation and…

This study examines the acquisition of target-like patterns of variation by 22 American learners of French during study abroad (SA) in France and correlates such acquisition with the creation of dense, multiplex, exchange-based social networks (Milroy 1980) with native speakers (NSs) during the SA period. In this longitudinal study, naturalistic…

This dissertation establishes the utility and reliability of a statistical distance measure for syntactic dialectometry, expanding dialectometry's methods to include syntax as well as phonology and the lexicon. It establishes the measure's reliability by comparing its results to those of dialectology and phonological dialectometry on Swedish…

This dissertation investigates the media's portrayal of the linguistic situation of the predominantly Turkish migrant communities in Germany by analyzing data gathered from films, television clips, interviews, radio clips and the Internet, paying specific attention to the vowel systems of each speaker. I observe that the most salient aspect in…

Examining the linguistic repertoire of the Anglophone community living in Montreal, this article provides an analysis of the representations of the variety of French spoken by the first generation of young Anglophones who had experienced different types of contact with French. The relation between functional competence and usage of French is…

Describes the study of the use of /s/ vs. /h/ or O (in Spanish) in Valdivia, Chile, by speakers who differed in sex and age. No marked differences in relation to sex and age were found, indicating a relatively homogeneous community. (MLS)

A descriptive study to be undertaken on the effects of contact between English and Quebec French in the French-speaking community of Welland in Ontario is also presented as a study of the "Ontarianization" of Canadian French. The first chapter summarizes previous studies of Ontario French and poses some of the salient research questions…

Examined the pattern of deletion of final "/t/" and "/d/" in word final consonant clusters in 3- and 4-year-old children (n=16) and their degree of mastery of phonological and grammatical constraints. Results indicate that children as young as three had mastered the phonological constraints on (-t, d) deletion and that the…

A study compared language patterns in a group of 100 residents of Ottawa and 240 residents of Vancouver, categorized by sex, age (under or over 40), and socioeconomic status. The informants provided tape-recorded interviews of an hour or more in response to similarly-conducted questionnaires designed to elicit tokens for a large number of…

In the transmission of a language from one generation to another, the specific role of the family is not clear. There is evidence that in cities parents have less influence on a child's vernacular than playmates do; in rural areas, members of the nuclear family might be the major source of language change and stability, if the people with whom…

A china factory in Pennsylvania was the setting for a study of the characteristics of the factory, its workers, and the community. Specifically, the speech of 151 informants, representing 12 1/2% of the plant population, was analyzed for both careful and casual speech, in order to focus on lexical and grammatical forms which reflect regional and…

Thirty-five papers, all but one in French, presented at the conference on research in linguistics are presented here. Topics include: verb tenses in English; computerized text analysis program; study of specialized terminology; court translation in Canada; subject-verb agreement in English; bilingual editing; swearing with religious words;…