Sali A. Tagliamonte

According to recent research, the get -passive, e.g. get arrested , rather than the be -passive, was arrested , has been increasing in frequency since 1850 (Hundt 2001). While some researchers argue that the two variants remain differentiated by semantic nuances like adversativity and agent animacy (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985: 167–71), others assume they are interchangeable and vary according to social factors (Weiner & Labov 1983). Recent corpus-based studies (Allen 2022; Fehringer 2022) tested linguistic and social factors, finding that both play a role. In this article, we aim to contribute new insights by analyzing get vs be in a large corpus of vernacular English from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada. Using a combination of mixed-effects logistic regression and decision tree analysis, we find significant effects of animacy, explicit agent, adversativity, speaker gender, level of education and year of birth. The results show that the get -passive is increasing in apparent time. Moreover, we discover a prevailing effect of animacy that reveals the nature of the reorganization taking place in the system across the twentieth century. We conclude that get emerged as a change from below but is gradually losing its stigma and continues to advance into the grammar of English.

This study explores how two English grammatical systems with alternative grammatical options expose typological tendencies. A study of negation, no vs. negative quantifiers (nothing) vs. negative polarity items (any/anybody) reveals that the syntactic patterning of English indefinites and negative objects lines up with the hard syntax of the same expressions in closely related languages. A study of variable possession (the vs. my/our) reveals that while much of the system is stable, but nuances of contrast between UK and Canadian patterns expose differences in conceptions of the personal domain that relate to the cultures in which the varieties are spoken. Taken together these results make several important contributions: 1) the value of natural speech data in providing insights into linguistic and sociolinguistic typology operating in tandem; 2) the importance of statistical tools to uncover relevant patterns and contrasts in variable data. The findings affirm that patterns in single variety, when viewed across communities, dialects and languages reveal that linguistic systems are a continuum of interlocking structural and tractile contrasts in the broader context of human language.

This study tracks the use of familiarizer vocatives across the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada from a corpus comprising 11 million words of conversational interviews from individuals in eighteen communities, born between the 1880s and the 2000s. Vocatives are a richly variable grammatical category which are strongly tied to their sociolinguistic context. We focus here on the sub-category of familiarizers for birth years 1950-2004, which in these materials are almost entirely dominated by man , buddy , and dude . We extracted and coded several thousand vocative tokens, yielding 467 familiarizers. Random Forest modeling shows significant effects of birth year, gender, and community; but not education nor occupation. The dominant familiarizer man declines with the rise of buddy (outside Toronto) and dude (especially inside Toronto). Women use these incoming forms more than men do, perhaps as alternatives to the masculine-associated form man . The results show rapid change for familiarizers in patterns which parallel longstanding sociolinguistic principles.

Several of the world’s languages exhibit double determination structures, including English dialects which have a construction with a demonstrative determiner and a locative adverb (e.g. this here book ). Doubling in demonstratives has commonly been explained as a language’s response to a loss of deixis, leading to a linguistic cycle . However, this explanation cannot be sustained for English because demonstratives are fully functioning grammatical deictics (e.g. this book ). In this article, we probe the role of doubling in the history and grammatical development of English double demonstratives with evidence from rural UK dialects. Using quantitative methods and the principle of accountability we calculate proportion of forms and patterning in simple and double demonstratives, enabling us to demonstrate that the doubled form has particular discourse-pragmatic functions, most notably, to flag topics in discourse. Our findings lead us to make two theoretical proposals. First, double demonstratives in English are used for discourse-pragmatic purposes; and second, doubling led to a new, complex determiner suitable to take over discourse-pragmatic functions from simple determiners ( complexification of the determiner paradigm ). Finally, we suggest that obsolescing features like the English double demonstrative offer key insights for understanding the development of linguistic systems.

This paper examines ongoing lexical variability among words that describe areas with trees, such as woods, bush and forest, among others. The historical perspective shows ongoing semantic evolution of these terms, from wood(s) (c.825) to the emergence of bush in the late 16th century or early 17th century. We assess regional, social and linguistic patterns of variation in 1849 tokens, from individuals born in the late 1800s to early 200s across 21 communities in Ontario, Canada. The most common word is bush; use of woods is moderate while forest is rare. Ancestry and migration play key roles in their distribution, demonstrating that ancestral roots, migration and language contact play into the selection of a word. We argue that lexical variation, when analysed in a comparative sociolinguistic perspective in the context of social typology, history and geographic location, offers important insights into language use and human behaviour.

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Subject dislocation (SD) is common across languages. In French, it is a vernacular norm. In English, it is comparatively rare. This article examines English SD in a unique contrastive situation in Ontario, Canada: two communities where SD is a community norm, one where individuals speak both English and French (Kapuskasing), and the other where the population speaks English only (Parry Sound). Dislocated subjects are produced by the same underlying linguistic mechanisms in both places, with parallel constraints by type of subject and intervening material, suggesting a typological universal. However, SD is age-graded in Kapuskasing, regardless of heritage language. In Parry Sound, it is obsolescent, in steady decline over the twentieth century. We conclude that while typological trends are underlain by universal cognitive processes, locally embedded sociocultural influences are the source of differentiation.

English tense/aspect-marking is an area where variation abounds and where many theories have been formulated. Diachronic studies of the preterit/present perfect alternation indicate that the present perfect (e.g.I have eaten already) has been losing ground to the preterit (e.g.I ate already) (e.g. Elsness 1997, but see Hundt & Smith 2009, Werner 2014). However, few studies have examined this alternation in vernacular speech. This article fills this lacuna by analyzing spoken data from Ontario, Canada, from an apparent-time perspective. Using a large archive of multiple communities and people of different generations, we focus on linguistic contexts known to be variable, viz. with adverbs of indefinite time. Results indicate that, in contrast with previous studies, the alternation is mostly stable. We find evidence of change only with the adverbever. Where there is evidence of change, this change is different from the predictions in the literature, with the preterit increasing in frequency. We suggest that a minor constructionalization process operates in tandem with ongoing specialization of the preterit/present perfect contrast. Taken together, these results provide another example of the importance of including speech in research on language variation and change and of the unique contribution certain constructions make to more general systems of grammar.

In this study, we examine variation in English strong verb preterite/participle morphology in four frequent verbs: came/come, saw/seen, gave/give and did/done, using data from more than a dozen Ontario communities, socially stratified by age, sex, occupation and education, representing a continuum of urban/rural locations and spanning more than 100 years in apparent-time. Comparative sociolinguistic methods and statistical modelling permit testing of social, geographic and linguistic factors on the variation. Despite strong social constraints, linguistic constraints are also significant. We argue that standardization and increasing literacy have nearly eradicated the vernacular preterite forms, but they are not moribund yet. Moreover, at least one form is stable, preterite seen. The non-standard variants endure as sociolinguistic markers, perhaps due to locally situated prestige, particularly in non-urban communities.