This paper examines the status of the low back caught-cot merger in Upstate New York. Most of this region is subject to the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and therefore, according to Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), ostensibly “resists” the spread of this merger. It is found that the phonology of this region is indeed trending toward the merger in apparent time, in terms of both phonetic distance between the two phonemes and speakers' explicit judgments. It is argued that the fronting of the cot vowel in the NCS region is not sufficient to withstand the spread of the merger because fronting a low vowel is a “reversible” sound change (Labov, 2010). It is further argued that the expansion of a merger to new communities may take place indirectly, through launching a sound change in the direction of merger rather than causing merger to take place immediately in the new community.

Herold (1990) discusses three mechanisms by which phonemic merger can take place: expansion, approximation, and transfer. A fourth possibility Herold touches on but does not explore might be called phonological transfer: as in (lexical) transfer, words move abruptly from one phonemic class to another; but rather than one lexeme at a time being transferred, all words of a particular phonological class move simultaneously. This paper provides evidence that phonological transfer is playing a role in the movement toward merger of /o/ (as in lot) and /oh/ (as in thought) in Upstate New York. Words containing (olF)—i.e., historical /o/ followed by /l/ plus a labiovelar, as in golf and revolve—are produced with /oh/ rather than /o/ in 74 percent of tokens; this use of /oh/ is increasing in apparent time. Many speakers using /oh/ in (olF) words have an otherwise clear phonemic distinction between /o/ and /oh/; however, the geographic distribution of this phonological transfer is correlated with other indices of progress toward the low back merger. This indicates that phonological transfer can be regarded here as an early sign of merger in progress, and that a single merger can proceed by two mechanisms simultaneously (here, approximation and phonological transfer).

This paper reports a rapid and anonymous study of apparent‐time change in Toronto among the use of expressions such as you're welcome and no problem as responses to thanks, thank you, and thank you very much. We observe change in progress toward no problem and no worries at the expense of you're welcome. Meanwhile, a change in stylistic stratification is also taking place: for older speakers, no problem is a less formal response, suitable principally for responding to more perfunctory thanks, rather than more formal thank you; among younger speakers, no problem appears at equal rates in response to all levels of thanking expressions. This combination of changes may explain the intensity of the negative attention no problem attracts from prescriptivists and in popular media, in that older people perceive younger speakers as using what to them is an informal variant disproportionately frequently when a formal variant is called for.

This paper examines the dialectology of eastern New York State. Data are considered from twelve cities and villages bridging the gap between the Inland North dialect region (home to the Northern Cities Shift [NCS]) and the Western New England region. Communities are classified as belonging to the Inland North “core,” the Inland North “fringe,” or a non–Inland North region. The settlement history of these communities is used to explain the boundaries between the dialect regions; presence of the NCS is found to correlate well with heavy migration from southwestern New England early in a community's history. Looking in detail at the different distributions of the individual sound changes involved in the NCS across the dialect regions established in this paper makes it possible to posit a reconstructed early history for the NCS and make hypotheses about the phonological character of the different sound changes.

The conventional methodology of variationist linguistics foregrounds the variable as the object of study: each variant is situated in the envelope of variation against the other variants it competes with. This paper argues that it is necessary to look beyond the context of the alternations a variant participates in in order to get a full picture of the factors affecting variation. The multi-functional variant like is used as a case study to illustrate the value of a variant-centered analysis: the fact that several distinct variables are all simultaneously changing toward the variant like suggests that a variant can be targeted for change across multiple variables, parallelling Campbell-Kibler (2011)’s model of the variant as the carrier of sociolinguistic meaning. It is conjectured that the set of changes toward like can be explained as a top-down discursive change targeting like as an indicator of vague literality, a function it retains in multiple distinct variable contexts.