The article reports on a study of the feminine gender in a Western dialect of Norway, using a production experiment eliciting the use of indefinite articles, possessives, adjectives, and the definite suffix. The participants (n=64) are of three age groups: children, adolescents, and adults. The results show that while the feminine gender is stable in the language of the adults, it is becoming vulnerable in the language of the children and adolescents. The main tendency is that feminine gender markers are being replaced with masculine markers. I argue that the innovations are interconnected and not random, and that numerous gender cues do not necessarily make the system more stable.

Assessing the pace of language change in historical settings can be impeded by a lack of contemporary documents. Loan word adaptation can provide an additional window on this problem. Given a series of formerly productive phonological processes and a well studied donor language, a search algorithm equipped with a simple phonotactic probability model can estimate how many loans entered before each phonological period ended. The population of loans during a period is a plausible proxy for the duration of the period, so periods with few loans could have been subject to rapid change. Our approach is illustrated with the Latin loans in Irish, shedding light on a period that pre-dates substantial written records. This period includes the development of rhythmic syncope in Irish, a process that has garnered interest due to its resistance to analysis in parallel but not serial models of phonology (McCarthy 2008, inter alia). Strikingly, our model finds that few loans entered during the rhythmic syncope phase of Irish, which is consistent with the process quickly becoming unproductive, as has been found for other languages (Bowers 2019, inter alia).

This paper responds to the target article by Law et al. (2025), who explore whether sign languages undergo regular phonological change similar to regular sound change observed in spoken languages. While they argue that iconicity and transmission patterns may inhibit such change, I propose that sign languages evolve systematically in a way that allows for regular change but in modality-specific ways that obscure it. Evidence of grammaticalization, lexicalization, and phonetic variation in sign languages indicates that both signed and spoken languages undergo the same processes, challenging the notion that regular change is absent. Additionally, I propose an approach that examines regular change through bundles of phonological features in signs that act as phonological environments shaping such change. Future research must integrate historical and online data, computer vision, and concerted studies to uncover whether regular phonological change is specific to modality or to language.

In this article, I focus on the intonation patterns of Turkish-German bilinguals to discuss intonation within the context of language contact and language variation. The intonational variance involves the realization of terminal rises as produced by second- and third-generation Turkish-German bilinguals living in Germany. These speakers produce two phonetically, phonologically, and pragmatically distinct rises, which differ from what is typically reported for German monolinguals. The primary phonetic differences between the two rises include the relative alignment and slope of the rise, with one rise aligning on the final syllable of the word regardless of the stress pattern and showing a significantly steeper slope than the other. Although the source of these two rises is likely the two languages used by the speakers, this is not a case of intonational code-switching. Rather, the two rises, along with other edge phenomena, form an intonational system in which the rises are in contrast with one another as well as with falls and level edge contours and as such play different pragmatic roles relative to one another.

I present evidence from Navajo and English that weaker, gradient versions of morpheme-internal phonotactic constraints, such as the ban on geminate consonants in English, hold even across prosodic word boundaries. I argue that these lexical biases are the result of a maximum entropy phonotactic learning algorithm that maximizes the probability of the learning data, but that also contains a smoothing term that penalizes complex grammars. When this learner attempts to construct a grammar in which some constraints are blind to morphological structure, it underpredicts the frequency of compounds that violate a morpheme-internal phonotactic. I further show how, over time, this learning bias could plausibly lead to the lexical biases seen in Navajo and English.

The status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated (Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Miller & Sag 1997, De Cat 2007b, and many others). Distributional properties of French subject clitics have led Kayne (1975), Rizzi (1986), and others to analyze them as argument-bearing elements occupying canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of the phonology. While this hypothesis enjoys a wide following, a growing body of evidence suggests that it fails to capture patterns of subject-clitic use in colloquial French dialects/registers (Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Zribi-Hertz 1994, Miller & Sag 1997). Using new evidence from prosodic and corpus analyses, speaker judgments, and crosslinguistic typology, this article argues that (i) European Colloquial French exhibits differences from Standard French that impact how subject clitics are best analyzed, and more specifically (ii) subject clitics in European Colloquial French are affixal agreement markers, not phonological clitic arguments.

What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic) and discourse-pragmatic changes. Our results provide a striking validation of the incrementation model, confirming its value as a key to understanding the evolution of linguistic systems. However, although our findings reveal the predicted peak in the apparent-time progress of a change and corroborate the female tendency to lead innovation, there is no absolute contrast between men and women with respect to incrementation. Instead, quantitative differences in the social embedding of linguistic change correlate with the rate of the change in the speech community.

Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous speech over an apparent-time span of 119 years.

Reasoning that forms salient enough to have attracted the attention of grammarians were likely widespread in the speech of the time, we demonstrate how these materials may be used to (i) infer the existence of prior variability, (ii) trace the evolution of normative dictates associated with the variants, and most revealing, (iii) discern hints of prior linguistic conditioning of variant selection. These are then operationalized as factors in a multivariate analysis and tested against the facts of usage.

The linguistic focus is on future temporal reference, a notoriously variable sector of the grammar in which competing exponents have persisted for centuries. Systematic comparison of grammatical treatments with actual speaker behavior shows virtually no correspondence between the motivations offered in the literature and those constraining actual variant choice. Prescriptive efforts to explain variability, by ascribing to each variant form a dedicated reading or context of use, have had no effect on speech, which is shown to be governed by a powerful set of tacit variable constraints. These in turn are unacknowledged by the grammatical tradition. The result is a great and growing disconnect between the variable rules governing speech and the normative dictates that underlie the notion of the standard. We explore the implications of these findings for the use of grammarians' observations as data for linguistic analysis.

In this paper, we advocate for the analysis of lexical variation being central to variationist sociolinguistics. We demonstrate that lexical variation is systematic and argue that this systematicity must be accounted for by a comprehensive variationist theory that explains the general causes and mechanisms of language variation and change. We present three empirical studies, which focus on lexical variation in Anglo-Cornish, British Sign Language, and online American English. These studies differ greatly in terms of their methods and results, but each reaffirms that lexis can be studied rigorously and informatively within the variationist paradigm, extending our understanding of language variation and change.