The release and aspiration of word-final /t/ and /d/ are important sociolinguistic variables in American English because they have strong, contextually driven indexicality. Word-final /t d/ releases are usually coded impressionistically due to the absence of automated methods for identifying prepausal release bursts or aspiration. This paper introduces an automated method for identifying released tokens prepausally and for measuring phonetic properties of releases. We use the method to code prepausal /t d/ release versus non-release in a corpus of conversational English in Raleigh. We assess the data in relation to internal and social factors in order to validate the automated method, finding that the patterns in the automatically generated distributions match those in previous studies. We next show that among Raleigh White speakers but not Black speakers, /t d/ releases are becoming more frequent and stronger after obstruents across apparent time, a change that reflects Raleigh’s changing cultural landscape.

This cross-dialectal diachronic study focuses on actualization—the gradual mapping out of structural innovations across linguistic environments—and asks: to what extent can the route by which actualization unfolds be explained by appealing to common cognitive constraints, and to what extent are pathways of actualization shaped by community-specific patterns in language use? I analyze real-time syntactic change in Spanish oblique relative clauses (ORCs), which are undergoing an enhancive change towards increasing use of antecedent-agreeing definite articles (e.g., la casa en [la] que nací ‘the house in which I was born’). Over 8,000 occurrences of ORCs were compiled from three Latin American varieties. A Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows that various constraints representing the cognitive accessibility of the antecedent influence actualization similarly across varieties. The discussion addresses the cognitive realism of historical corpus data and formulates testable predictions that present profitable lines of inquiry in future cognitively oriented cross-dialectal diachronic research.

The present paper investigates a constructional alternation currently under development in Mozambican Portuguese, arising from the constructionalization of a new passive construction (Recipient passives) alongside its standard counterpart (Theme passives). We argue that beyond the influence of the Bantu substrate that led to the emergence of the innovative variant, variation is conceptually and pragmatically motivated and involves restructuring in accordance with the structural constraints of Portuguese. We show how the alternation proves sensitive to a set of linguistic factors, the most prominent of which are related to information structure and differences in perspectivization, or construal. By adopting a sociocognitive view of language and a network view of grammar, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of restructuration and indigenization processes taking place in postcolonial varieties of pluricentric languages in the sequence of their nativization.

This article is the first to quantify the interindividual effects of different major life events (MLEs) on retrospective perceptions of individual-level linguistic change across the adult lifespan. In this cross-sectional study, 701 German-speaking participants from Austria completed an online survey measuring the extent to which MLEs in the educational, occupational, and personal domain are associated with perceived changes in productive and affective-attitudinal aspects of the sociolinguistic repertoire. Bayesian modeling revealed that events such as beginning a tertiary degree, entry into the workforce, and retirement were perceived to impact participants’ varietal use. Overall, however, affective-attitudinal factors such as dialect identity appear to be more readily susceptible to perceived MLE-related change. These results help pave a new path for variationist agendas that approach lifespan linguistic change not as a result of chronological age, but rather as a phenomenon influenced by individual experiential factors complexly intertwined with the process of aging.

Recent research into vowel covariation has suggested that speakers can be identified as leaders or laggers in multiple ongoing sound changes. What remains unclear is how stable a speaker’s patterns of covariation are over time and whether these leaders and laggers of sound changes remain leaders and laggers over time. We employ corpus data from 51 New Zealand English (NZE) speakers who were recorded at two time-points (eight years apart) and explore covariation between 10 monophthongs using principal component analysis (PCA). The results indicate significant stability across the time-points in two unique vowel clusters, suggesting that speakers’ covariation position within their community remains stable over time. The overall covariation patterns also replicate patterns previously observed in a different corpus of NZE, indicating that patterns of vowel covariation observed with PCA can be stable and replicable across multiple corpora.