Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2017

Bybee et al. (1994) claimed that grammatical-types like past and future have similar paths of development cross-linguistically. Following another line of research, Poplack (2011) , Poplack and Tagliamonte (2000) and Walker et al. (2004) explored the grammaticalization of periphrastic ‘go-future’ in English, French, and Spanish from a variationist perspective and have come to the same conclusion. In this study we explore whether a new Persian future marker, MI_KHA: ‘want/will/going to’, which is gaining ground in this language, can be an instance of the grammatical-types mentioned above, and follows the same path of variation and change as that of English and French. Eight-hundred and one future-referring utterances were collected from natural conversations among Persian native speakers and subjected to variable rule analysis to discover the factors conditioning their use and variation. The findings suggest that the Persian MI_KHA: is not only conditioned by linguistic factors, it also most likely follows a path of development similar to English and French.

Syllable contraction has been observed in many modern Chinese varieties, including Mandarin. Public opinion of syllable contraction, especially some stereotyped contracted words, tends to associate it with a southern (especially Taiwanese) accent. Gendered social meanings are often attached to it as well. This paper investigates Mandarin syllable contraction using Prestonian perceptual mapping techniques, graphical aggregation, and quantitative comparisons. The results of the mapping tasks suggest that participants’ beliefs about the location and gender of contraction users are generally in line with the public opinions observed in qualitative analyses of media discourses. However, an analysis of map responses in terms of respondents’ region of origin and gender uncovers nuanced contrasts along gendered and regional lines. Northern respondents (judges) had a negative attitude toward southern contraction but a positive opinion toward northern contraction, while southern judges viewed syllable contraction positively regardless of region. Female judges viewed female contraction users positively and male users negatively, but male judges had a strongly negative opinion of only the male users. Region and gender intertwine with each other and constitute the sociolinguistic meanings of Chinese syllable contraction that involve both the user and perceiver. In this way, the study uncovers new perceptual perspectives on the sociolinguistic meaning of a less commonly studied variable in a less commonly studied language.

The sociolinguistic enterprise has demonstrated that speakers manipulate linguistic variants as they construct their speech style. Contrary to this expectation, this study introduces specific cases in which stylistic variation is highly constrained. We examine the verbal negative suffix in Kansai vernacular Japanese. We first demonstrate that this variable indexes speech style. We then show that in a few specific contexts, such as following the verb stem shir- ‘know’, speakers overwhelmingly use a single variant, in this case, shira-n ‘not know’. We point out that the unusual forms such as shira-n all have a high relative frequency compared to the other forms in their paradigms. Complex forms such as the English word insane, which occur more frequently than their parts (in+sane), are difficult to decompose. We claim that this phenomenon also impedes stylistic variation as forms such as shira-n are not readily decomposed into verb stem + negative suffix.

This paper explores the correlation between speakers’ social attitudes and their linguistic production in a contact-induced dialect mixture in Hohhot, a Chinese immigrant city. In Hohhot, the contact between the community speaking the local Jìn dialect and migrants from all parts of the country has led to the formation of a new vernacular. Thirty-five speakers across three generations from the migrant community were recorded, and their social attitudes in different dimensions were measured through questionnaires. A significant correlation between the speakers’ attitudinal scores and their adoption of a local Jìn feature was found by mixed-effects modelling, and the effects of attitude remained even when speakers’ social contact with Jìn speakers was considered. The findings demonstrate the role of attitudes in contact-induced linguistic change and suggest that speakers’ overt attitudes recorded in questionnaires are also likely to predict their linguistic production.