This study examines the lexical and grammatical diffusion of TH-fronting amongst adolescents in London, where TH-fronting is well established, and Edinburgh, where it is a relatively new phenomenon. Our results reveal that the application of TH-fronting is constrained in Edinburgh in ways that are not relevant for London, and vice versa. Specifically, whereas TH-fronting is sensitive to phonotactic context and prosodic position in Edinburgh, we observe no such effects amongst the London speakers. Morphological complexity, on the other hand, is a significant predictor of TH-fronting in both regions; however, we also find evidence of significant gender differences in the use of fronting in London that do not emerge in our Edinburgh data. We argue that these results attest to the more established nature of TH-fronting in London as compared to Edinburgh. We also address the question of how speech perception influences the emergence and spread of innovative neutralisation phenomena like TH-fronting. The results of this study further highlight the usefulness of a comparative variationist approach to understanding patterns of dialectal variation and change.

This article reviews and exemplifies the theory of the life cycle of phonological processes and illustrates how diachronic phonological changes can be accounted for in a stratal/cyclic model of phonology. The life cycle captures the fact that sound change operates in orderly stages and that phonological processes become increasing integrated with morphosyntactic structure as they age. Phonological rules also often display different rates of application across a given dialect continuum. Thus, the developmental phases that a phonological innovation goes through in its life cycle define a template of language change; and these stages of change reflect synchronic patterns of microtypological variation.

In velarising dialects of Spanish, nasal place contrasts neutralise to [n] word-finally. However, whereas velarisation applies transparently in word-final prepausal environments, place neutralisation ' overapplies' to stem-final presuffixal nasals and to word-final nasals which resyllabify into onset position across word boundaries. Yet since previous analyses of Velarising Spanish have been based exclusively on theory-led interpretations of impressionistic data, doubts exist as to whether wordfinal nasals in velarising dialects are consistently realised as [n] (Baković 2000). The first goal of this paper therefore is to submit the claims put forward in these analyses to empirical testing. Experiments using electropalatography confirm that speakers of Velarising Spanish produce robustly dorso-velar nasals in word-final environments ; this result refutes the claim that word-final nasals are placeless in velarising varieties. Secondly, because opaque instances of nasal place neutralisation pose challenges for Optimality Theory (OT), I compare two approaches to modelling the nasal alternations in Velarising Spanish, namely Output-Output correspondence in classic OT and a cyclic analysis in Stratal OT. This comparison reveals that classic OT cannot account for the opaque patterns without stipulating fixed OO-constraint rankings. By contrast, the stratal model straightforwardly predicts the occurrence of both opacity effects on the basis of general architectural principles.

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