In corpora of written-edited-published British and American English covering the 1961-1992 period, AmE spearheads this change. We study 16,868 restrictive relative clauses with inanimate antecedents from Brown/LOB/Frown/F-LOB. Predictors include additional areas of variation regulated by prescriptivism. We show:(i) relativizer deletion follows different constraints than the selection of either that or which, (ii) this change is a case of institutionally backed colloquialization-cum-Americanization;

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The concept of speaky-spoky, a pejorative label for hypercorrect speech in Jamaica, has thus far been described in the context of shared speech community norms (Patrick 1999). In this article, I analyze a stretch of speaky-spoky discourse and its recontextualization. The theoretical perspectives from which the data are examined are that of the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) and of entextualization (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Silverstein & Urban 1996). The method of analysis draws on Goffman's writing on frames (1974) and production formats (1981). I argue that the ideological dimensions and interactional versatility of the speaky-spoky concept have thus far not received enough empirical attention. To address this gap, I propose to interpret speaky-spoky as a dynamic and relational ‘construct resource’ (Fabricius & Mortensen 2013) that speakers draw upon to highlight social meaning in interaction.