Bill Haddican

Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of 'be like'

This article examines change in social and linguistic effects on be like usage and acceptability. Results from two studies are presented. The first set of data comes from a trend study with samples of U.K. university undergraduates collected in 1996 and 2006. While the effect of subject person, morphological tense, and quote content is constant in the two samples, the effect of speaker sex decreases. The second study is a judgment experiment with 121 native speakers of U.S. English, examining acceptability of be like in environments biasing direct speech and reported thought readings. The analysis reveals no interaction between age and the reported thought/direct speech contrast, suggesting no support for change in this effect on be like acceptability in apparent time. The two studies therefore converge in suggesting no evidence of change in linguistic constraints on be like as it has diffused into U.K. and U.S. Englishes.

Dialect contact in a Southern Basque town

This article describes five dialect-based changes in progress in the Southern Basque town of Oiartzun. Based on data collected in sociolinguistic interviews with thirteen local Basque speakers, this article examines dialectal variation in elements chosen from different parts of the grammar: two lexical items, two morphosyntactic alternations on auxiliary verbs, and a phonological process, apheresis. In particular, several claims are made about dialect contact in Oiartzun. Strong apparent-time evidence exists that four out of five of these elements are undergoing change. Older speakers tend toward forms characteristic of dialects to the east of Oiartzun, whereas younger speakers prefer western forms. In each case, male speakers appear to be leading the process of change; men show significantly higher frequencies of incoming western forms than women. The data, however, provide little support for the hypothesis that the recently introduced Basque literary standard has influenced young peoples vernacular.

Changing Words and Sounds: The Roles of Different Cognitive Units in Sound Change

This study considers the role of different cognitive units in sound change: phonemes, contextual variants and words. We examine /u/-fronting and /j/-dropping in data from three generations of Derby English speakers. We analyze dynamic formant data and auditory judgments, using mixed effects regression methods, including generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). /u/-fronting is reaching its end-point, showing complex conditioning by context and a frequency effect that weakens over time. /j/-dropping is declining, with low-frequency words showing more innovative variants with /j/ than high-frequency words. The two processes interact: words with variable /j/-dropping (new) exhibit more fronting than words that never have /j/ (noodle) even when the /j/ is deleted. These results support models of change that rely on phonetically detailed representations for both word- and sound-level cognitive units.

Object symmetry effects in Germanic: evidence for the role of case

This paper focuses on passive symmetry effects in Germanic. We describe two large-sample judgment experiments with native speakers of Norwegian and Swedish, two partially symmetric passive languages. The results fail to support predictions of Anagnostopoulou’s (2003) seminal locality approach to passive symmetry in these languages. We propose that constraints on object ordering in these varieties are better modeled on a revised version of classic case-based theories. On this approach, patterns of object ordering are governed by variation in the way that case is assigned to objects. In addition, the Norwegian results suggest a shape conservation effect in object shift contexts not previously reported in the literature. Theme-recipient orders in Norwegian object shift contexts are available for just those speakers who also accept theme-recipient orders in active non-object shift contexts. This object ordering constraint applies in the same environment that another, much better described ordering constraint applies, namely Holmberg’s Generalization effects. We show that these results are explained by Fox and Pesetsky’s (2005) cyclic linearization algorithm together with the assumption that theme-recipient orders vP-internally reflect short theme-movement above the recipient.