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Recent research on frequency effects in phonology suggest that word frequency is often a significant motivating factor in the spread of sound change through the lexicon. However, there is conflicting evidence regarding the exact nature of the relationship between phonological change and word frequency. This article investigates the role of lexical frequency in the spread of the well-known sound change TH-Fronting in an under-researched dialect area in east-central Scotland.Using data from a corpus of conversations compiled over a two year period by the first author, we explore how the process of TH-Fronting is complicated in this community by the existence of certain local variants which are lexically restricted, and we question to what extent the frequency patterns that are apparent in these data are consistent with generalisations made in the wider literature on the relationship between lexical frequency and phonological change.

The history of English exhibits numerous instances of changes that proceed along crosslinguistically recurrent pathways, notably the life cycle of phonological processes and grammaticalization clines. These pathways of change bear striking resemblances to each other: both are predominantly unidirectional, and both produce ‘layering’ effects in which old and new patterns come to coexist in the synchronic grammar. We provide English examples of key stages in the life cycle of phonological processes, including the rise of new gradient processes of phonetic implementation, their stabilization as categorical phonological rules, and the narrowing of their morphosyntactic domains. Understanding this life cycle enables us to rethink classic problems, such as the history of word-final prevocalic consonants. We also examine the grammaticalization cycles in the development of grammatical words, clitics and affixes in English, and the micro-steps involved in the creation of new grammatical constructions. As with the discussion of phonological change, we explore continua (within and between morphosyntactic categories), and directionality, and show how such rethinking is relevant for our understanding of classic problems in the history of English morphosyntax, such as the development of markers of negation, and the s-genitive. The parallels between phonological and morphosyntactic change which we address suggest new ways of thinking about the nature of grammatical change.