This article examines the ways in which explanation has been achieved in scientific work on language change over the last two hundred years. Explanations have come in many forms and at many levels and are greatly influenced by what are taken as the leading questions, which themselves have varied significantly since the early nineteenth century.

How may the structure of a new linguistic community shape language emergence and change? The 1817 founding of the US's first enduring school for the deaf, the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, heralded profound changes in the lives of deaf North Americans. We report the demographics of the early signing community at ASD through quantitative analyses of the 1,700 students who attended the school during its first fifty years. The majority were adolescents, with adults also well represented. Prior to 1845, children under age eight were absent. We consider two groups of students who may have made important linguistic contributions to this early signing community: students with deaf relatives and students from Martha's Vineyard. We conclude that adolescents played a crucial role in forming the New England signing community. Young children may have pushed the emergence of ASL, but likely did so at home in deaf families, not at ASD.

This study describes a change in which relative clause extraposition is in the process of being lost in English, Icelandic, French, and Portuguese. This current change in progress has never been observed before, probably because it is so slow that it is undetectable without the aid of multiple diachronic parsed corpora (treebanks) with time depths of over 500 years each. Building on insights from Kiparsky (1995), the study shows that the change may date as far back as the innovation of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance relative clauses, as these varieties differentiated from Proto-Indo-European. It also shows that the unusually slow speed of the change is due to partial specialization of the construction along the dimension of prosodic weight, following the argument made at greater length in Fruehwald & Wallenberg 2016. Finally, the change is shown to have important consequences for the syntax of extraposition, supporting the adjunction analysis of Culi- cover and Rochemont (1990). The article also discusses the implications of Sauerland's (2003) analysis of English relative clauses, and while modern English data supports his analysis, the diachronic extraposition data is not yet fine-grained enough to bear on the ‘raising’ analysis of relatives in general. This is identified as an important question for further research on this change.

How flexible is an individual's accent during adulthood, and how does this flexibility relate to longer-term change? Previous work has found that accents are remarkably flexible in conversational interaction, but predominantly stable over years, leading to very different views of the role of individuals in community-level sound change. This article examines MEDIUM-TERM accent dynamics (days to months) by taking advantage of a ‘natural experiment’: a reality television show where contestants live in an isolated house for three months and are constantly recorded, forming a closed system where it is possible to both determine the dynamics of contestants’ speech from day to day and reason about the sources of any observed changes. We build statistical models to examine time dependence in five phonetic variables within individuals, in 14.5 hours of spontaneous speech from twelve English-speaking contestants. We find that time dependence in pronunciation is ubiquitous over the medium term: large daily fluctuations in pronunciation are the norm, while longer-term change over weeks to months occurs in a minority of cases. These patterns mirror the conflicting findings of previous work and suggest a possible bridge between the two. We argue that time dependence in phonetic variables is influenced by contrast between sounds, as well as systematic differences between speakers in how malleable their accents are over time; however, we find only limited evidence for convergence in individuals’ accents. Our results have implications for theories of the role of individuals in sound change, and suggest that medium-term pronunciation dynamics are a fruitful direction for future work.

This article argues that language play is intimately related to linguistic variation and change. Using two corpora of online present-day English, we investigate playful conversion of adjectives into abstract nouns (e.g. made of awesome∅), uncovering consistent rule-governed patterning in the grammatical constraints in spite of this option stemming from deliberate subversion of standard overt suffixation. Building on Haspelmath's (1999) notion of ‘extravagance’ as one of the keys to language change, we account for the systematic patterning of deliberate linguistic subversion by appealing to tension between the need to stand out and the need to remain intelligible. While we do not claim that language play is the only cause of linguistic change, our findings position language play as a constant source of new linguistic variants in very large numbers, a small proportion of which endure as changes. Our conclusion is that language play goes a long way toward accounting for linguistic innovations—with respect to where they come from and why languages change at all.

This article considers two instances of rapidly accelerating linguistic change in Glaswegian vernacular, th-fronting and l-vocalization, both typically associated with the Cockney dialect of London. Both changes have been underway for some time, but took off during the 1990s. In this article we consider a range of factors that are contributing to the rapid proliferation of these forms in the speech of inner-city Glaswegian adolescents. Our multivariate analysis shows very strong effects for linguistic factors, as well as strong positive correlations with social practices relating to local Glaswegian street style, some links with dialect contact with friends and family living in England, and—perhaps surprisingly—also positive correlations with strong psychological engagement with the London-based TV soap drama EastEnders. Our results suggest that the changes are being propelled by several processes: ongoing transmission and at the same time continuing diffusion through dialect contact; the local social meanings carried by these variants for these speakers; and strong engagement with a favorite TV drama. For this community at least, engaging with a favorite TV drama is an additional accelerating factor in rapid linguistic diffusion.

Grammaticalization research has led to important insights into the driving processes of innovation and propagation. Yet what has generally been lacking is a principled way of analyzing their interaction. Research into innovation focuses on the role of individual language users and tends to take a more qualitative approach, while propagation is typically studied in terms of the community grammar and tends to be more statistically driven. We propose an approach that bridges the two. Drawing on a much larger historical data set than is commonly done, our study shows how a highresolution analysis of semantic and morphosyntactic behavior can be married to statistics, resulting in a method that measures the degree of grammaticalization at the level of single attestations. We apply this method to the early grammaticalization of be going to INF, showing how a communal increase breaks down into different rates of change in the run-up to, the middle of, and right after conventionalization. Additionally, we trace lifespan change of individual authors longitudinally. While not robustly in evidence, there are hints of postadolescence reanalysis in the run-up generation, and of increased realization of innovative features in the middle generation.

Natural human languages often contain variation (sociolinguistic or Labovian variation) that is passed from one generation of speakers to the next, but studies of acquisition have largely ignored this, instead focusing on aspects of language that are more deterministic. Theories of acquisition, however, must be able to account for both. This article examines variation from the perspective of the statistical learning framework and explores features of variation that contribute to learnability. In particular, it explores whether conditioning variables (i.e. where the pattern of variation is slightly different in different contexts) lead to better learning of variation as compared to when there are no conditioning variables, despite the former being conceptually more difficult. Data from two experiments show that adult learners are fairly good at learning patterns of both conditioned and unconditioned variation, the latter result replicating earlier studies. Five-to-seven-year-old children, in contrast, had different learning outcomes for conditioned versus unconditioned variation, with fewer children regularizing or imposing deterministic patterns on the conditioned variation. However, the children who did not impose deterministic patterns did not necessarily acquire the variation patterns the adults did.

This article studies the relationship between prosody and desemanticization in grammaticalization processes by means of a well-described phenomenon, the grammaticalization of ‘type’ nouns (type, kind, sort) in present-day English. To this end, 1,155 tokens of the three nouns, retrieved from the ICE-GB corpus, were semantically classified and prosodically analyzed. Our main result is that different synchronically coexisting prosodic patterns correspond to different degrees of grammaticalization. This result provides evidence that desemanticization and erosion proceed hand in hand. Their parallel development is attributed to the demands of iconicity rather than to frequency effects.

In grammaticalization studies, reanalysis is understood as the assignment of new meaning to formally unchanged elements, supported by bridging contexts compatible with the old and the reanalyzed meaning. The source determination hypothesis (SDH) predicts that parallel grammaticalization trajectories occur crosslinguistically, as similar source meanings give rise to similar inferences. One such pattern is the development of recent past markers from FINISH constructions. While grammaticalization pathways are well-documented crosslinguistically, the SDH has never been tested experimentally. In this study, we examine whether modern English speakers are sensitive to inferences arising from a bridging context identified as relevant to the grammaticalization of Old Spanish FINISH into a recent past marker. In a temporal distance judgment task, we examined whether the bridging context identified for Old Spanish facilitates an inference of temporal immediacy in contemporary English, where the construction has not been grammaticalized. In line with the SDH, the bridging context enhanced an inference of immediacy in contemporary English (Exp. 1), with specific grammatical features of the source determining its strength (Exp. 2). These results not only demonstrate the viability of testing hypotheses about language change using experimental pragmatics but also call for empirically refining the concept of source determination.

Cette étude porte sur le changement linguistique en lien avec la référence temporelle au futur en français québécois du 21e siècle dans les données du Corpus de français parlé au Québec (CFPQ), qui couvrent la période 2006–2019. Trois variantes sont analysées: le présent du futur (PDF), le futur fléchi (FF) et le futur périphrastique (FP). Bien que plusieurs contraintes identifiées précédemment jouent un rôle semblable dans la variation (p. ex. la polarité, la présence de locutions adverbiales temporelles), la présente étude montre les taux les plus élevés de PDF en français québécois parmi les études antérieures consultées. Selon une interprétation en temps apparent, il y a une augmentation du PDF en contexte affirmatif et négatif qui n’est pas attribuable à un effet lexical. Ce résultat suggère que le PDF jouerait un rôle important dans le changement en cours par rapport à la référence temporelle au futur en français québécois.

This is an extended review of Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) that addresses several important issues in the methodology of historical Arabic linguistics.

In this article, we aim to reconcile the interrelated role of social and spatial influences on colloquial German by conducting an apparent-time analysis of 15 lexical, morphological, and phonetic variables from the Atlas of Colloquial German (AdA). Specifically, we introduce a “change in variation intensity” (CVI) measure meant to gauge the degree of change in colloquial speech between younger and older cohorts. Using this measure, we investigate (a) whether the CVI within and across variables is prone to spatial patterns and (b) the extent to which the CVI differs systematically between variable types. Results from visual–spatial analyses indicate clear spatial patterns, though the geographical distributions are largely item-specific, and a linear mixed-effects model revealed no effect of variable type. More broadly, the CVI measure represents an important advancement in how we address language variation and change from a methodological-statistical perspective, specifically when dealing with heterogeneous, crowdsourced data.

This paper explores the complementation of the verb prevent in contemporary English. While the verb is typically followed by from -ing, British English also exhibits a variant without from (e.g. They must carry out a forensic examination of these failings to prevent them happening again [The Daily Mail, 22 December 2020]). In British English, this construction has in fact been reported to be on the increase in recent years. Since previous studies on this topic have tended to rely on a limited number of examples, the present research investigates a larger dataset drawn from the 2010 issues of The Daily Mail (British) and USA Today (American). This study also examines the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus as a supplementary resource. The BAWE corpus is a collection of academic assignments and provides insight into unedited uses of the verb prevent. The findings are as follows: the use of from-less -ing is indeed expanding in contemporary British English; the rate of this expansion differs between newspaper texts and unedited academic writing; and the complementation patterns of prevent are more varied in contemporary English than previously assumed. The discussion concludes by situating these present-day uses within the historical development of this verb.