In producing linguistic variation, language users display a tendency to reuse the same variant. This paper compares the empirical properties of different types of repetitiveness in a single case study: locative variation in Chengdu Mandarin. Using conversational data from sociolinguistic interviews, we ask whether within-speaker repetitiveness (persistence) and cross-speaker repetitiveness (convergence) behave similarly with respect to (1) their sensitivity to the linguistic similarity of the prime and target, and (2) their tendency to decline with greater temporal distance between the prime and target. Our results suggest that intraspeaker persistence and interspeaker convergence behave similarly in both respects. We therefore propose that repetitiveness has a common underlying mechanism within and across speakers and encourage future work aimed at testing this hypothesis across other variables and varieties.

This paper presents the results of a survey of phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic variation in British English, based on over 14,000 responses. We map twelve variables using geospatial “hotspot” analysis. One of our aims is to document the patterning of under- and unstudied variables. A second aim is to track changes in real time, which we do by comparing our findings to those of the 1950s-era Survey of English Dialects (SED; Orton, 1962). We improve upon previous dialectological work by paying careful attention to the phonemic status of mergers and splits: In our contemporary data, we do this by asking subjects if they have a phonemic contrast; in the SED data, we do this by superimposing the isoglosses for individual phones. We find evidence for both stability and change; we document previously unverified patterns. Perhaps most importantly, we identify a number of directions for future research.

The current study investigates Spanish children's variation between the standard and non-standard forms for second person singular preterit –s (caiste ~ caístes). All second person singular preterit forms were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 78 children in Spain and analyzed for the effects of age, language contact setting, and lexical frequency. Results show that children in contact with Galician and Catalan produce more non-standard than children in non-contact areas like Madrid. Meanwhile, low-frequency verbs (e.g., pillaste) are more likely to occur with the non-standard –s than high-frequency verbs (e.g., fuiste). However, age is not a significant predictor of children's 2sg preterit production. These preliminary findings demonstrate that Spanish children do have the non-standard -s in their speech, and that their 2sg preterit forms are significantly conditioned by language contact and lexical frequency.

The current study investigates cross-linguistic influence of second language (L2) learning on native language (L1) processing of morphosyntactic variation in proficient L2 learners immersed in their L1. Despite Spanish pre- and postverbal clitic pronoun positions being grammatical in complex verb phrases, preferences of use have been well attested in naturalistic language production. To examine whether those preferences obtain for comprehension in monolinguals, as well as how those preferences might be modulated by learning an L2 with fixed pronoun positions, we administered a self-paced reading experiment to 20 Spanish monolinguals as well as 22 proficient learners English (L1 Spanish). The results of a Bayesian mixed effects regression analysis suggest that preferences in production are echoed in comprehension—but only for the monolingual group. We find support for facilitation in the bilingual group precisely where both languages overlap, as well as evidence that bilinguals may not use clitic position as a reliable cue at all. We interpret the results as evidence that learning an L2 that lacks variation for a particular feature may lead to reduced sensitivity to that feature as a cue in an analogous L1 structure. We situate these results in an experience-based, shared-syntax account of language processing.

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.

This paper analyzes the ergative-antipassive alternation in Inuktitut using a variationist sociolinguistic approach. This alternation is not a typical linguistic variable, as these constructions are traditionally believed to have different syntactic functions. However, the nature of those functions remains controversial (e.g., Bittner 1987, Manga 1996), and they are undergoing changes in some dialects (e.g., Johns 2001, Carrier 2012), with the antipassive being increasingly used in place of the ergative. Thus, a variationist sociolinguistic approach is employed here to identify the significant functions of these constructions, and to find the specific context where they overlap and the language change is taking place. The study examines data collected in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, which presents a case of new-dialect formation due to the High Arctic relocation. The analysis reveals the functions of these constructions, describes the source of fading ergativity for the dialects considered in this study, and supports Trudgill's (2004) theory on new-dialect formation.

Recent proposals hold that the cognitive systems underlying language production exhibit computational properties that facilitate communicative efficiency, i.e., an efficient trade-off between production ease and robust information transmission. We contribute to the cross-linguistic evaluation of the communicative efficiency hypothesis by investigating speakers’ preferences in the production of a typologically rare head-marking alternation that occurs in relative clause constructions in Yucatec Maya. In a sentence recall study, we find that speakers of Yucatec Maya prefer to use reduced forms of relative clause verbs when the relative clause is more contextually expected. This result is consistent with communicative efficiency and thus supports its typological generalizability. We compare two types of cue to the presence of a relative clause, pragmatic cues previously investigated in other languages and a highly predictive morphosyntactic cue specific to Yucatec. We find that Yucatec speakers’ preferences for a reduced verb form are primarily conditioned on the more informative cue. This demonstrates the role of both general principles of language production and their language-specific realizations.