Analogical leveling in progress of a potential suffix in Tôkyô Japanese is analyzed within a quantitative paradigm. The phenomenon, whereby an innovative potential and a conservative potential alternate, is shown through a multivariate analysis to be controlled by five factors: sociological variable complex, length of the verb stem, conjugation pattern of the verb, the following inflectional form, and embeddedness of the clause containing the suffix. Most of the linguistic constraints are observed crosslinguistically in language change or variation, giving further credibility to the analysis. Although traditional frequency-based theory of analogical leveling would predict stem frequency to be a possible factor, I demonstrate that it is not in this case. As a principled explanation for this apparent lack of contribution from frequency, the Revised Frequency Hypothesis is proposed.

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On the Conservatism of Embedded Clausesl Kenjiro Matsuda Embedded clauses have been claimed to show syntactic conservatism against incoming linguistic change (GivOn 1979, Hock 1986, Matsuda 1993). While all of the cases show the conservative nature of dependent clauses whether it is a past change or a change in progress, it is not clear what causes such a tendency. Three possible explanations-syntactic (Emonds 1970, Ross 1973), speech stylistic, discourse-pragmatic (Givan 1979, Hooper and Thompson 1973), and processing-based (Townsend, Ottaviano and Bever 1979, Kluender and Kutas 1993)-are proposed and closely examined. It is then suggested that the most reasonable scenario is that the conservatism is caused by both discourse-pragmatic and processing-based factors.

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