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Glottalization and glottal replacement (particularly of /t/ in British English) have traditionally been assumed to be variants characteristic of male, lower-class speakers. Both phenomena have been heavily stigmatized, but are spreading rapidly. Recent studies in various parts of the British Isles (including Tyneside) have suggested that glottal replacement of /t/ is led by middle-class and/or female speakers. A fuller understanding of the nature of this linguistic change depends on treating glottalization of /p, t, k/ (a more localized Tyneside feature) and glottal replacement as independent phenomena, rather than as points on a lenition scale corresponding to a social continuum (e.g., casual to careful style). The studies of Tyneside glottalization reported here show that, while females lead in the use of glottal replacement, males prefer glottalization. This pattern is interpreted in terms of a preference of males for localized variants, whereas females lead in adopting supra-local norms.

This paper offers a variationist critique of aspects of phonological theory and method, focusing on advances in descriptive methods and highlighting the problems that need to be addressed in explaining phonological variation. On the one hand, socially situated language samples which have been systematically collected and analysed constitute a legitimate -indeed often vital -source of evidence to be utilised by linguists for assessing and refining theoretical models. On the other hand, variationists cannot operate in isolation from theoretical concerns, and can benefit from an evaluation of the competing theoretical frameworks available to them.The paper begins with a brief review of the philosophical foundations underlying the tension between ' external ' and ' internal ' methodology. We then focus on a particular phonological example -glottalisation in English. We demonstrate that phonological models of this can be complemented by systematic and accountable data collection and analysis of the kind associated with sociolinguistics. It is suggested that the patterns of variation produced by speakers are significantly more complex than has been indicated in the phonological literature. Consequently, these approaches can be usefully expanded and extended as theoretical models. We discuss some desiderata for extending the range of phonological models, focusing chiefly on the need to account for variability and change in language.

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SUMMARY Extreme value models play an important role in assessing the risk to buildings caused by high wind speeds. However, standard procedures take no account of the directional behaviour of the wind. In this paper the extremal properties of the wind process are modelled as a function of direction. This requires the adaptation of techniques which have recently been developed for the study of spatial extremes. In particular, fitting techniques are required which account for dependence across directions, and, for joint probability statements, a model for the dependence itself is required.

SUMMARYIn this paper, we investigate the effects of declustering applied to sequences of extreme observations. Through a simulation study, we demonstrate that the common practice of analysing peaks over thresholds (POT) is liable to incur serious bias in the estimation of parameters, as well as the return levels used as design specifications when building to withstand extremes of wind or rain, or river or sea level. We demonstrate that a much simpler approach, the direct analysis of all exceedances of a high threshold, can reduce this bias to negligible levels. This approach has, until now, been unpopular, because the data being analysed are not independent. The effect of this is to cause the standard errors associated with parameter estimates to underestimate the uncertainty attached to these estimates. We employ existing but little-used methodology to inflate these standard errors, and we demonstrate that the adjusted values are very good representations of the true uncertainty associated with maximum likelihood estimates. The overall approach has thus achieved the effect of eliminating the bias in estimation, while accounting for any undesirable effects caused by dependent data.We apply our approach to a sequence of sea-surge data from southwest England, and illustrate the discrepancies between this and a POT approach, which are consistent with the POT approach underestimating long-period return levels. We also pay considerable attention to checking the robustness of our results, demonstrating that the problems of bias caused by the POT approach apply systematically over all of the declustering schemes we consider, as well as over the entire range of tail behaviours. When the primary interest is in return-level estimation, we recommend that our procedure will generally prove to be much more effective and reliable than the POT approach. Should there be a deeper interest in the serial dependence itself, then we recommend that this dependence is explicitly modelled, and we refer the reader to an earlier paper by the authors, published in this journal.