Despite the assumption in early studies that children are monostylistic until sometime around adolescence, a number of studies since then have demonstrated that adult-like patterns of variation may be acquired much earlier. How much earlier, however, is still subject to some debate. In this paper we contribute to this research through an analysis of a number of lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic variables across 29 caregiver/child pairs aged 2;10 to 4;2 in interaction with their primary caregivers. We first establish the patterns of use -both linguistic and social -in caregiver speech and then investigate whether these patterns of use are evident in the child speech. Our findings show that the acquisition of variation is highly variable dependent: some show age differentiation, others do not; some show acquisition of style shifting, others do not; some show correlations between caregiver input and child output, others do not. We interpret these findings in the light of community norms, social recognition and sociolinguistic value in the acquisition of variation at these early stages.1 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council for award no RES-000-22-0447 and the British Academy for award no. SG/45936. This research was also supported in part by the program Apprentissages, connaissances et société funded by the ANR (French national agency for research). We thank Paul Foulkes, Jean-Pierre Chevrot, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Moira Smith, our invaluable on-site fieldworker, and the caregivers and children of Buckie who so warmly welcomed us into their hooses.Brought to you by | Purdue University Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/15 11:59 PM 286 J. Smith et al.

This paper focuses on the way that local social indexicality interacts with principles of vowel change. A combination of real and apparent time data from the northern English dialect of York indicate fronting of tense back vowels in the goat and goose lexical sets, and diphthongization of traditionally monophthongal mid-vowels in the face and goat lexical sets. The latter process of change, a northward diffusion of more prestigious southern forms, has been noted for some other northern English dialects, but has not been described acoustically in published work. We show that these two vowel changes have different social meanings in the community. As is the case in previous studies, goat and goose fronting is not strongly associated with different speaker groups in the community. Monophthongal realizations of face and goat, on the other hand, are strongly associated with the speech of the local community, especially working-class speech. The results align with predictions of Labov's (1994) principle III of vowel change in that they show that goose fronting precedes goat fronting. However, we argue that a full understanding of the trajectories of change requires attention to social indexical properties of these variants as well. In particular, the scarcity of fronted variants of monophthongal goat is explained as a consequence of local indexing of such forms.

The set of English [+human] pronominal quantifiers has been variable for at least 500 years, with the compound forms –body and –one competing since Middle and Early Modern English. This change has still to run its course (cf. Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003:78). Using corpora of historical texts, we track the development of these variants alongside the demise of the earlier variant –man. Then, drawing on contemporary and regionally diverse corpora, we trace the continued development of –body/–one variation through the 20th century. The trajectories reveal paradigmatic leveling in the late 19th century and the rise of –one as the dominant form. However, grammatical, social, and lexical developments continue. Most striking is that after an initial phase of historical leveling, the different lexical quantifiers—any, every, some, no—go their own ways in the collection of varieties examined here, demonstrating that the mechanisms shaping evolutionary pathways across the globe are not only systemic, but also retain local alternations.

In this paper I analyse variation in the use of past tense be in data from Morley, a suburb of Leeds, in the North of England, using both real-time and apparenttime data. Rather than concentrating on the traditional aspects of this variable, namely alternation between was and were, I identify four phonetic variants of the past tense be system. I propose that the community under consideration are adopting intermediate variants that, both in terms of perception and production, lie between the standard (British) realisations of was [wɒz] and were [wɜː]. A reallocation process has occurred between these two intermediate forms, along the lines of polarity. The inclusion of the intermediate forms of past tense be enables us to perceive previously unobserved patterns of variation with regard to this variable.