The be like quotative emerged rapidly around the English-speaking world and has quickly saturated the quotative systems of young speakers in multiple countries. We study be like (and its covariants) in two communities – Toronto, Canada, and York, United Kingdom – in apparent time and at two separate points in real time. We trace the apparent-time trajectory of be like and its covariants from inception to saturation. We take advantage of the prodigious size of our dataset to examine understudied aspects of the linguistic factors that condition quotative variation. Building on earlier suggestions (Cukor-Avila 2002; Durham et al.2012) that be like might show patterning over time consistent with the Constant Rate Effect (or CRE, Kroch 1989), we argue that the CRE does indeed apply to the rise of be like, but needs to be handled with care. Logistic modelling assumes that the top of the S-curve is located at 100 per cent of a given variable context. In the case of be like, the saturation point is nearer 75–85 per cent, with minor variants retaining small semantic footholds in the system. In conjunction with our analysis, we suggest how to adapt the predictions of the CRE to changes likely to lead to saturation but not categorical use.

A key component of Labov's (2001:411) socially motivated projection model of language change is the hypothesis that adolescents and preadolescents undergo a process of vernacular reorganization, which leads to a “seamless” progression of changes in progress. Between the ages of approximately five and 17, children and adolescents increase the “frequency, extent, scope, or specificity” of changes in progress along the community trajectory (Labov, 2007:346). Evidence of advancement via vernacular reorganization during this life stage has come from peaks in the apparent-time trajectory of a change around the age of 17 (e.g., Labov, 2001; Tagliamonte & D'Arcy, 2009). However, such peaks do not rule out the alternative explanations of retrograde change or age-grading. This paper presents both apparent time and real-time evidence for vernacular reorganization. We observe the arrowhead formation—a counterpart of the adolescent peak—for quotative be like in a trend study of adolescents and young adults in Toronto, Canada. Our results rule out the alternative explanations for previously observed adolescent peaks.

This paper examines the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of the fricative realization of /t/ in the dialect of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, in Nova Scotia, Canada. Two experiments were conducted to determine the similarities and differences betwee fricative /t/, or "slit-t", and other voiceless coronal sounds. Previous research on this sound in some communities has found it to be more similar to /s/ than /ʃ/, while in other communities it has been found to be more similar to /ʃ/ than /s/. The first experiment conducted was a qualitative analysis of static palatograms of one Cape Breton speaker's production of six different coronal sounds. Results from this experiment suggest "slit-t" to be articulatorily distinct from both /s/ and /ʃ/. The second experiment conducted was a statistical analysis of several acoustic measurements of six Cape Breton speakers' production of six different coronal sounds. Results from this experiment suggest "slit-t" is acousticcally distinct from both /s/ and /ʃ/, or rather on a cline between these two sounds.

The following paper explores the link between production difficulty and grammatical variability. Using a sub-sample of the Switchboard Corpus of American English (285 transcripts, 34 speakers), this paper shows that the presence of variable contexts does not positively correlate with two metrics of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). When 20 morphosyntactic variables are considered collectively (N= 6,268), there is no positive effect. In other words, variable contexts do not correlate with measurable production difficulties. These results challenge the view that grammatical variability is somehow sub-optimal for speakers, with additional burdensome cognitive planning.

This paper provides a unified phonologically motivated explanation for the movement of trap, dress, and kit following the low-back merger in North American English (i.e., the Canadian Shift, California Shift, Low Back Merger Shift, Third Shift, etc.). The explanation puts forth that the three-way merger of lot, palm, and thought results in the loss of the [+Front] feature specification for trap, opening the door for dispersion focalization to pull trap toward the low central region of the vowel space. Analogy then prompts all other [−Peripheral] vowels, including strut and foot, to centralize. Crucial to this explanation is that the low-back merger includes palm, not just lot and thought. Evidence for this requirement is presented in a phonetic analysis of older speakers from conservative Victoria, British Columbia. The explanation presented here reconciles an earlier proposal (Roeder & Gardner, 2013) with Fruehwald's (2017) observation that parallel movement requires a shared feature specification.