In this article, we draw on a socially stratified corpus of dialect data collected in northeast England to test recent proposals that grammaticalization processes are implicated in the synchronic variability of general extenders (GEs), i.e. phrase-or clausefinal constructions such as and that and or something. Combining theoretical insights from the framework of grammaticalization with the empirical methods of variationist sociolinguistics, we operationalize key diagnostics of grammaticalization (syntagmatic length, decategorialization, semantic-pragmatic change) as independent factor groups in the quantitative analysis of GE variability. While multivariate analyses reveal rapid changes in apparent time to the social conditioning of some GE variants in our data, they do not reveal any evidence of systematic changes in the linguistic conditioning of variants in apparent time that would confirm an interpretation of ongoing grammaticalization. These results lead us to question Cheshire's (2007) recent hypothesis that GEs are grammaticalizing in contemporary varieties of British English. They additionally raise caveats with regard to the assumption that the linguistic conditioning of GE variability in contemporary data sets is the product of change.

Discourse like is claimed to be rapidly spreading in urban centres throughout the English-speaking world (see Dailey-O'Cain 2000; Tagliamonte 2005; D'Arcy 2005; Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams 2005). Like is claimed to be particularly pervasive in the speech of adolescents (Andersen 2001). However, comparatively little is known about the distribution of discourse like in the speech of younger age groups. This paper reassesses the claims made by Miller and Weinert (1995), who suggest that discourse like is not acquired until relatively late, after the age of 10. Using a corpus based on the speech of a group of British preadolescents, I argue that not only are new uses of like encountered frequently in preadolescent speech, but that distributional differences between males and females, as well as between different age groups, point to significant aspects of the developmental acquisition of this discourse feature. Furthermore, using data from various languages, cross-linguistic parallels are highlighted between discourse markers that have a similar functional inventory to like in order to show that a number of languages have encoded comparable pragmatic functions using similar lexical sources.

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Most of the previous research on variation in tense-aspect morphology in narrative has focused on the discourse functions of the alternation between the simple past and the conversational historical present (CHP). However, it is not clear what discourse functions may be implicated in narrative by switches between the simple past and other tense-aspect categories and whether there are differences between contemporary vernacular varieties of English in this regard. This article addresses these issues by examining tense variation in the narrative complicating action clauses embedded in fifty-six narratives of personal experience recounted by a small group of preadolescents recorded in Greater London in the southeast of England. Using a variationist methodology incorporating distributional and multivariate analyses of tense variation in a circumscribed narrative subcomponent, the article examines switches between the simple past, the CHP, and the present perfect. Building on the foundational research conducted on the alternation between the simple past and the CHP in narrative, the results presented here suggest that alternations between the present perfect and other tense forms are motivated by structural and pragmatic considerations associated with the segmentation and evaluation of narrative episodes.

This small-scale study focuses on variation in the relative marker paradigm in the vernacular of a group of preadolescents recorded in the Greater London area. The distributional and multivariate analyses of variation in relative marker usage in restrictive relative clauses reveal that thewh-formswhoandwhatare well-established in the relative marker paradigm of the preadolescents.Whoandwhatare shown to be sensitive to the animacy of their antecedent heads:Whois strongly favoured by human antecedents, whereaswhatis preferred with non-human antecedents. The numerically dominant relativizerthatis shown to be strongly conditioned by the grammatical function of the relative marker as well as being favoured by indefinite and inanimate antecedent heads. The zero variant is similarly sensitive to syntactic function, and is preferentially selected in non-subject position. Furthermore, the selection of zero relatives is found to be highly constrained by clause length. Cross-variety comparison of the results with previous research on other English dialects suggests that not only are there nuanced differences in the choice of relative marker, but that there are possibly construction-specific differences constraining the choice of specific variants.