The author embraces Uniformitarianism to re-examine whether creoles and pidgins emerged in an exceptional way and why there are so few pidgins lexified by European languages in coastal Africa where the earliest trade contacts between European mercantile companies and Indigenous rulers took place. Equally significant is the fact that no historian of the trade mentions usage of a Portuguese pidgin-cum-broken language, though it appears that Portuguese functioned as the default lingua franca from the coast of West Africa to coastal East Asia. Note also that no English pidgin emerged in India, the territory from which the British East India Company spread its activities to Southeast and East Asia. There are more English pidgins than those based on other European languages; and most English pidgins are in the South Pacific. An extensive review of how the trade between Europeans and non-Europeans operated, through brokers-cum-interpreters, reveals that pidgins emerged like creoles by basilectalization away from the lexifier and not sooner than the early nineteenth century. Comparisons with the emergence of more specifically the Romance languages also suggests that the latter evolved similarly to creoles and pidgins, by gradual divergence away from the lexifier, under substrate influence.

The editors trace Uniformitarianism, aka the Uniformitarian Principle, to the nineteenth-century geologist Charles Lyell. Applying it critically to language evolution, they explain their interpretation of it as a two-way heuristic concept that uses information about language change in the distant past to shed light on recent changes and at the same time employs findings about recent language evolution, especially from an ecological perspective, to ask useful questions about earlier cases of language speciation. Assuming that the emergence of creoles and pidgins instantiates language speciation, they argue that the tables can be turned around how to use the ecological approach to show evolutionary similarities between the emergence of these new language varieties and that of their lexifiers. Evidence is adduced not only from the histories of the relevant language contacts but also from various restructuring processes observed in diverse domains of linguistics, such as the Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). The editors argue that the Uniformitarian approach disputes the interpretation of the home signs brought to the boarding school for the Deaf as pidgins. Specifically, the emergence of NSL illustrates the kinds of social dynamics under which communal languages (creoles and non-creoles alike) must have emerged in the history of mankind.

Focusing on the variation between modal auxiliaries indicating future time reference in recent spoken data, this study examines whether advanced EFL learners have adopted ongoing changes in core versus semi-modals, and whether the choice of the modal auxiliary is governed by similar structural variables as in native varieties, in this case, British and American English. We adopt a generalized linear mixed model tree analysis in two steps: (1) the alternation between will and be going to, with their different forms collapsed together, and (2) the alternations between be going to versus gonna, and will versus its contracted forms separately. Our results indicate that the English of foreign language learners is shaped by similar processes of change that influence native language varieties, but also that some learner groups are more similar to native speakers than others. Methodologically, the two-step approach ensures that subtle grammatical conditioning is not masked by uneven distribution of variants.

The Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) is a subset of sixty-four recorded interviews collected as part of the Linguistic Atlas Project from 1970 to 1983. Full transcriptions of all DASS interviews have been produced by the Atlas Project at the University of Georgia; however, these transcriptions have until now existed only as untagged text files, making them unsuitable for detailed corpus analysis. We discuss the process of preparing the DASS transcriptions to be uploaded to a Corpus Workbench (CWB) server, as well as a functionality test of the resulting corpus through analysis of the Southern American English feature reckon. Syntactic analysis indicates that reckon is more grammaticalized than the epistemic verbs think or believe in Southern American English, and sociolinguistic results show that the use of reckon is highly stratified by age, dropping off sharply among speakers born after 1917. Its use also decreases as socioeconomic class and education increase. These findings provide evidence of the growing stigmatization of reckon as a Southern lexeme over time, as well as its association with nonstandard speech. This chapter serves as an example of secondary data analysis of an existing dataset and demonstrates the utility of the DASS corpus for such research.

This chapter examines the implications of the Replication Crisis for corpus linguistics and humanities researchers working with language data. It highlights common issues and workflows in corpus linguistics that hinder reproducibility and offers guidance on improving data management, sharing practices and transparency of analyses. The discussion addresses several key issues prevalent in the field, including a lack of training on enhancing reproducibility, disorganized data management, analysis procedures that impede replication, and convoluted workflows compounded by limited resources. These challenges are particularly pronounced in qualitative and interpretive work, where specific attention is required, but also concern any type of data-intensive analysis. To address the issues, the chapter provides pointers to resources, practices, and tools that enhance data management and transparency of analyses in corpus linguistics, and it shows how these resources can be put into practice using the illustrative example of a study on adjective amplification in selected varieties of Asian Englishes. By adopting improved methods, researchers adhere to best practices and thereby enhance reproducibility, transparency, and the overall research quality in corpus linguistics.

We extracted around two million vowel tokens from a sample of sixty-four speakers (b. 1886–1965; 35M/29F; 16 African Americans/48 non-African Americans) across eight states in the American South in an NSF-funded project. We have validated automatic measurements with manual inspection of alignment samples and find that 87 percent of alignments are successful and another 6 percent are partially successful. This large body of tokens (big data) complements existing sociophonetic research by providing a more thorough, detailed picture of the phonetics of American English. We find that (1) there is a much wider range of realization for vowels than is typically represented, and (2) there is no central tendency for any vowel. Using spatial methods drawn from technical geography, we find that all distributions of tokens in vowel space are nonlinear. This suggests that traditional reliance on finding average acoustic properties of a vowel may be unrepresentative of what most speakers actually do. (3) Distributional patterns for vowels are fractal. When we break up the overall dataset into subgroups (e.g., male/female), the same nonlinear distributional pattern appears but with varying locations of highest density of tokens. These findings complement existing sociophonetic research and demonstrate methods by which variation can both be represented and analyzed.

This paper investigates the expressive function of two types of binary English blends composed of personal names: determinative blends such as Messidona, where the referent of the whole blend is the same as the referent of one of the names (Messi), and coordinative blends like Clintasha (Clint + Natasha), referring to (real or imagined) couples in a romantic relationship. We present the results of two complementary studies exploring quantitative methods for studying the functions of blending. Specifically, we use sentiment analysis to test the hypothesis commonly advocated in the literature that blends are expressive word-formation devices. The first study compares the contexts of name-based determinative blends and non-blends to investigate to what extent name blending as a word-formation pattern carries expressive meaning. The second study explores the relation between the expressive nature of coordinative blends and different registers and communicative constellations. On a theoretical level, the paper corroborates earlier research on the expressive nature of blends but also challenges previous claims about the irregular nature of blending by showing that expressiveness is a systematic property of the word-formation process. On a methodological level, we show how recent data analytic tools can be used to address theoretical linguistic questions in morpho-pragmatics.

This chapter explores the Spanish Creole Debate (Granda 1968; Schwegler 1999; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2021) through Afro-Veracruz Spanish (AVS), a vernacular spoken in rural Veracruz, Mexico. Findings align with studies on other Afro-Hispanic dialects (Díaz-Campos & Clements 2008; Sessarego 2013a, 2014, 2015, 2019), showing that colonial Veracruz lacked the conditions for creole formation, challenging earlier claims (McWhorter 2000: 11). By integrating sociohistorical and linguistic perspectives, it adds a valuable piece to the Spanish Creole Debate.

This computational modelling work investigates whether different rhetorical sections as subgenres of postgraduate English academic texts can be characterised by distinct types and amounts of syntactic structures. A corpus of dissertations written by students with different English language backgrounds and academic contexts was subjected to various Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. Using a novel analytical method on linguistic data, this study identifies strong syntactic predictors of genres with the robust statistical modelling of ensemble learning. This method consists of four machine learning predictive classifiers of Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors, deep learning artificial neural network, and Gradient Boosting as the stacked layer and the Naive Bayes method as the meat-learner. The discussion of findings examines the extent of variability among the rhetorical sections of MA dissertations regarding the type and distribution of coordination, subordination, phrasal complexity, as well as the length of syntactic structures.

This chapter offers a close analysis of the Uniformitarian Principle and its use as a conceptual tool for understanding and narrating language contact and language change, paying special attention to the social life of Anguillian, the English-lexifier Creole language of Anguilla, the most northerly of the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands. The language and aspects of the situation of contact that led to its emergence are described from a novel uniformitarian perspective that integrates insights from general linguistics, Communication Accommodation Theory, and the analysis of early colonial-era archives.

What psycholinguistic mechanisms shape the emergence of Creole languages, and are these processes unique or universal across human language evolution? In this exploration, determiner-noun fusion (DNF) in Haitian Creole takes center stage, challenging assumptions about the sole role of substrate influence. By analyzing DNF patterns in Haitian Creole and comparing them to those in Mauritian Creole, the chapter reveals how statistical learning – hallmarks of word segmentation – plays a pivotal role. These findings align Creole emergence with broader linguistic processes, refuting claims of a “break in transmission.” This chapter bridges Creole linguistics and psycholinguistics, providing support for the Uniformitarian Principle and reshaping the debate on Creole emergence.