Gender separation and the speech community: Rhoticity in early 20th century Southland New Zealand English

The existence of a shared constraint hierarchy is one of the criteria that defines and delimits speech communities. In particular, women and men are thought to differ only in their rates of variable usage, not in the constraints governing their variation; that is, women and men are typically considered to belong to the same speech community. We find that in early twentieth century Southland, New Zealand, women and men had different constraint hierarchies for rhoticity, with a community grammar of rhoticity only developing later. These results may be a product of a particular set of sociohistorical facts thatare not peculiar to Southland. We suggest that further research in other geographical locations may indeed reveal that men and women have different constraint hierarchies for other variables. Speech communities may thus be delimited along social lines in ways that have not been previously considered.

World Englishes and Phonological Theory

The relationship between phonological theory and World Englishes is generally characterized by a mutual lack of interest. This chapter argues for a greater engagement of both fields with each other, looking at constraint-based theories of phonology, especially Optimality Theory (OT), as a case in point. Contact varieties of English provide strong evidence for synchronically active constraints, as it is substrate or L1 constraints that are regularly transferred to the contact variety, not rules. Additionally, contact varieties that have properties that are in some way ‘in between’ the substrate and superstrate systems provide evidence for constraint hierarchies or implicational relationships between constraints, illustrated here primarily with examples from syllable structure. Conversely, for a scholar working on the description of World Englishes, OT can offer an explanation of where the patterns found in a contact variety come from, namely from the transfer of substrate constraint rankings (and subsequent gradual constraint demotion).

The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German

Several western Swiss German dialects roughly grouped around the nation's capital Bern show /l/ > [u] vocalization in various contexts. The spatial boundaries of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German are suspected to have been expanding since being described in theLinguistic Atlas of German-Speaking Switzerlandin the middle of the 20th century. The present study assesses the overall expansion of /l/-vocalization by means of a rapid anonymous survey in 20 urban regional centers situated just beyond the traditional boundaries of /l/-vocalization highlighted by theAtlas. Results show that the expansion of /l/-vocalization mainly progresses in southeasterly, southerly, and westerly directions, but with much less success to the north and northwest, where the equally influential dialectal areas of Basel and Zürich seem to exert opposing influences. Further analysis of the data indicates that somewhat differing constraint hierarchies are at work in the different places to which vocalization has diffused.

Evidence for Morphoprosodic Alignment in Reduplication

Morphoprosodic Alignment (MPA) is a nontemplatic model of reduplication designed to account for languages with multiple reduplicative subpatterns. The premise of MPA is that reduplicative morphemes can be stem-internal or stem-external and that this distinction is visible to the phonological component through general constraints on the association of stem-internal and stem-external morphemes to prosodic categories. I illustrate the model with Moronene, Klamath, and Gooniyandi, each of which has several reduplicative morphemes. MPA meets the challenge for an optimality-theoretic model to account for such systems without resorting to morpheme-specific indexed constraints or cophonological constraint hierarchies.