Molecular Metabolism

Proper names and titles in apposition can be joined with or without an accompanying definite article in any of the following arrangements: King Alfred, Alfred King, the King Alfred, and Alfred the King. Alfred King, which sounds unusual today, was the rule in the earliest period. King Alfred, the most favored by modern speakers, was virtually absent in Old English. The patterns with the definite article developed later and have been accepted to different degrees at different times. What must have been relevant to the choice among these patterns are meaning, emphasis, euphony, and rhythm, but their role cannot be established without native Old English informants. Anachronistic applications of modern linguistic intuition to old data must be avoided. However, if the data can be related linearly to the present-day usage with strong empirical backing, today’s intuition may be utilized for a more fine-grained analysis of the past data. In this article, such an attempt is shown to be effective in reconstructing the functions of different appositive patterns in the tradition of vernacular English historiography as represented by the Peterborough Chronicle.

In contrast to the common final rising pattern of Mainstream English yes/no questions, these questions may be produced with a final rising then falling intonation in parts of Central and Western Pennsylvania (PA). Researchers have suggested that this pattern is pragmatically conditioned, used either when a particular response is expected, or when the speaker wishes to communicate the answer is not-at-issue. While previous work on this regional final rise-fall pattern has been limited to observations of spontaneous speech, this paper presents the results of a pair of production and perception experiments aimed at obtaining a more detailed characterization of its acoustic correlates and testing hypotheses regarding its pragmatic conditioning. The results replicate and extend previous findings, illustrating highly variable fluctuations in fundamental frequency across yes/no question tokens that share a final rise-fall pattern, and a tendency toward using this pattern to imply that the speaker already has some idea of what the answer to the question will be. Comparison of the perceptions of speakers from Central PA with speakers from outside the Midland Dialect region suggests that pragmatic knowledge of this intonational variant may be region-specific. The results are discussed in the context of recent work in which intonation is shown to be a marker of social group or region, providing an example where regional intonational variation appears to be shaped at least in part by pragmatic meaning.

The merger of lot and thought, sometimes called the low-back merger, is a feature rapidly spreading across North America, even in locales historically resistant to the merger. New Orleans English has historically retained the lot/thought distinction due to raised thought, a feature more common to the mid-Atlantic region than the American South. In this study, we examine the relationship between lot and thought in a sample of fifty-seven speakers from the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette. We demonstrate that while some speakers in our sample retain phonemically distinct lot and thought, yet others demonstrate merged distributions of these low-back vowels. Using Euclidean distance measures, Bhattacharyya affinities, and modeling F1 and F2 values for lot and thought, we demonstrate a clear change in progress toward merger within New Orleans English, in apparent time. We observe two paths to merger in our dataset: women feature statistically significant lowering of thought over time in combination with lot backing, while for men the merger is mostly driven by lot backing. Progress toward the merger is most advanced in environments preceding /l/, with thought lower and fronter and lot backer preceding /l/. We note that this apparent-time evidence of progress toward a low-back merger places New Orleans English in the ranks of other Southern cities in the US demonstrating evidence of low-back merger, thereby neutralizing one of the key distinctions between New Orleans and surrounding dialects of English in the South.

In this paper, we investigate variable past marking in Australian Aboriginal English as spoken on Croker Island, Northern Territory. Employing data from twenty speakers and both mixed-effects regression and random forests, we show that despite a high degree of individual variability the occurrence or non-occurrence of a past-marked verb is subject to conditioning factors that are known from other varieties of English, most notably lexical and grammatical aspect and marker persistence. Moreover, the constraints governing the preverbal marker bin relate in systematic ways to those governing inflection. Our results suggest that the specifics of contact influence may be less relevant to explaining variable linguistic processes such as past marking than more general discourse-pragmatic and cognitive principles of language variation and change. This has implications for the debate about the uniqueness of creole languages, which have often been considered a language type like no other.

We attempt to further our understanding of the beginnings of language change by analyzing a semantic innovation in Multicultural London English: the use of still as a discourse-pragmatic item in utterance-final position. We show that the change follows well-attested processes of semantic change, so it could have occurred at any time and amongst any group of speakers. Its emergence now, amongst young men in inner city London, can be explained by considering not only well-known external factors such as population change but also by analyzing the interactional contexts in which the new meaning emerges and by relating this to the local peer group culture. In this way we gain insights into how speakers can be motivated to use a form with a new meaning during interactional moves that are especially important for them in their everyday lives.

Many scholars consider clause-final adverbs (CFAs) like already, also, and only to be a prominent feature of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), but little is known about their use in present-day CSE. Using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), we investigate patterns of variation involving CFAs and examine whether they are sensitive to factors such as speaker age and gender. We find that clause-final already and only has increased over time, while clause-final also has remained stable. Overall, the results suggest that CFAs are a stable feature of CSE. Variation in the use of CFAs is conditioned by semantic function, age, and gender. Specifically, clause-final already is associated with the inceptive function. Clause-final already and also are more likely to be used by younger speakers, while clause-final also and only are more likely to be used by males and in all-male conversational settings respectively. We suggest that these patterns are due to present-day English-Mandarin bilingualism, increasingly positive attitudes toward CSE, and National Service for males.

This article reviews the status of the trap-bath split in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England. The East Midlands forms a linguistic transition zone between northern English varieties which lack (part of) the trap-bath split, and southern English varieties which have this split. We examine the acoustic properties of trap and bath in the region to determine whether this pattern is stable over time or diffusing. Reading-passage data, stratified by age group, sex, and location are used to provide an apparent time and multilocal view on the distribution of the two vowel categories. Results suggest there is no complete overlap between these vowel sets in the region, although it varies across the East Midlands. Furthermore, we find the East Midlands apparently occupies a stable middle ground between northern and south-eastern varieties.

Descriptions of ethnolects in the U.S. have frequently focused on canonical, well-described features of these varieties, but less work has focused on how such features may overlap and spread into other ethnolects and local varieties in contact. Outside the U.S., the concept of the multiethnolect has been used to describe such situations of dialect contact, but little work has been done to document highly multiethnic dialect contact situations in the U.S. This study is among the first to provide a sociophonetic description of the distribution of features linked to different ethnolects, and to describe a situation of sustained U.S. contact dialect among youth from different racialized groups. Analysis of the speech of a group of Black and Latinx adolescents in Southern California reveals that these teens use a variety of sociophonetic features that have been previously linked to Chicano English (ChE) and African American English (AAE), as well as California Anglo English (CAE). I examine eight phonological variables previously described in these other varieties and reveal a complex sociolinguistic situation in which teens of both ethnicities appear to employ repertoires that draw on features of ChE, AAE, and CAE. I argue that the patterns of use I observe in this data provide evidence of a unique type of dialect contact situation that reflects ongoing trends in urban centers across the U.S.

The origins of the variable - s-marking patterns of present-tense verbs in earlier African American English (AAE) have been widely argued, with one of the most common arguments stating that the pattern is indicative of the Northern Subjects Rule (NSR), a variable - s-marking rule common in the northern British Isles. I explored verbal - s in the Federal Writer’s Project ex-slave narratives to understand what patterns of - s-marking existed in earlier AAE and how these patterns differed across regions. Statistical analysis suggested no NSR influence in AAE as a whole or within any of the regions, but - s-marking still significantly differed between and within regions. I discuss other possible causes of this variation, including influence from other concord patterns, aspectual marking, and phonotactics, but highlight the difficulty of proposing concrete hypotheses due to change over time and a dearth of data.

Against the backdrop of the fading Southern Vowel Shift, this paper explores the degree to which different young adults maintain or forego the SVS as a function of demographic traits and self-reported political ideology. Using data from 126 White young adults who grew up in Georgia and were recorded as university students, we find that the more canonically “Southern” pronunciations of the vowels in FACE, DRESS, TRAP, and PRIZE are positively correlated with a continuous measurement of political conservatism, even controlling for gender and hometown. These findings are consistent with speakers’ qualitative impression that the SVS is indexically linked to the conservative political beliefs attributed to a stereotyped White Southerner, constituting one factor that may motivate young adults in this changing landscape to maintain or forego the SVS.