The historical relation between Hiberno-English and New World Black English is a fruitful research site for exploring the interplay of internal and external factors in linguistic diffusion. A recent hypothesis that NWBE habitual be derives from HE is first assessed through attention to the history of Irish/African contact in colonial America and the Caribbean, and then critically evaluated against six alternatives. On the basis of internal and external considerations, a hypothesis which involves decreolization from creole does (be), but incorporates possible influences from Hibernian and British varieties of English, is regarded as the single most viable hypothesis. Directions for further research on this issue are indicated, and relevance to larger theoretical concerns is identified.

Do languages die gradually or abruptly? Spontaneous speech samples were elicited from 40 speakers of Trinidad Bhojpuri in rural Caroni, Trinidad, ranging in age from 95 to 26. The oldest 28 subjects were representative of their age group; the youngest 10 were distinctly unrepresentative. Data corpora were pro-rated to equal length, and the errors and test features in each corpus were counted to distinguish statistically between native and non-native competence. Speakers formed two internally age-independent competence clusters—with the 10 youngest speakers and one older speaker a group apart, signaling a discontinuity between native and post-native competence.

Geminate consonants and long vowels frequently resist the application of rules that would a-priori be expected to apply to them; i.e., they are frequently ‘inalterable’. This article argues that, by invoking the theory of CV Phonology, it is often possible to predict which phonological rules are unable to affect long segments. The prediction follows from rather minimal assumptions about how rules apply to forms.

In autosegmental phonology, a sequence of adjacent identical tones can be represented (a) as a single tone mapped onto multiple vowels, (b) as a one-to-one mapping between multiple tones and vowels, or (c) as a combination of these extremes. The Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) has been proposed as a constraint which restricts tonal representations to a one-to-many mapping between tones and vowels. It is argued here that the strongest form of the OCP is falsified by a number of languages which distinguish single vs. multiple tones associated with a sequence of vowels. The language-particular violations of the OCP constitute a strong argument for the full power of autosegmental phonology.

Although similarities and differences between speech and writing have often been studied, contradictory claims concerning the linguistic relationship between the two modes are still common. These contradictions can arise from basing global conclusions on restricted methodologies—such as assigning undue weight to individual linguistic features, or to choice of particular text samples and text types. The present study uses a ‘multi-feature/multi-dimension’ approach, which includes a broad range of linguistic features and text types in a single quantitative analysis, to provide a global description of similarities and differences among spoken/written text types in English. The distribution of 41 linguistic features in 545 text samples of approximately 2000 words each is subjected to factor analysis (a multivariate statistical technique). Three underlying textual dimensions are identified: Interactive vs. Edited Text, Abstract vs. Situated Content, and Reported vs. Immediate Style. To demonstrate the value of the multi-feature/multi-dimension approach, the specific findings of earlier studies are reconciled within the model proposed here.