Return to the Obvious: The Ubiquity of Categorical Rules. The PowerPoint presentation of a talk given at the panel Panel on Usage-based and Rule-based approaches to phonological variation at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 17, Amsterdam, on March 4, 2008. Given some well documented cases of lexical diffusion and the effect of frequency on lenition procsses, the paper finds that these are not the major mechanisms in most of the sound changes now in progress. It begins with evidence from dialect geography which shows that the Great Vowel Shift was such a phoneetically defined regular sound change in England. A close examination of the fronting of /ow/ in the records of the Atlas of North American English (N=6736) finds a high degree of lexical regularity and no effect of word frequency. Some lexical items show slight fluctuations but no cases have been found of words not selected by the phonetically defined sound change.

Defining the Site of Linguistic Variation. The PowerPoint presentation of a talk given at the workshop on Locating Variabiliety: Formal Approaches at UMass Amherst on April 25, 2008. The central topic of this paper is the complementary relation between morphological and phonological variation, and its significance for the general architecture of language. In the examples presented, consistent phonological conditioning is accompanied by a single well established representation in the morhphological component, and cases of morhological variaion show no phonetic conditioning. This is not an obvious result, and the absence of counter examples implies a feed-forward, modular structure of morpholoical and phonological organization.

The Cognitive Capacities of the Sociolinguistic Monitor. The PowerPoint presentation of a plenary address given at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 17 in Amsterdam on March 5, 2008. The paper summarizes the findings of a number of experiments designed to determine listeners' sensitivity to freqiency, using the variables (ING) and (R) in three regions: Philadelphia, South Carolina and Boston/New Hampshire. Adult judges respond to a range of frequencies of a marked variant with a logarithmic function in which the impact of any given deviation from the norm is the proportional increase to the sum of deviations.. A surprising age effect appears, where all subjects over 23 show this function, but those younger are split into two different modal types: those who reproduce the function and those who do not..

The Life History of Language Change. The PowerPoint presentation of a plenary address given at the International Congress of Historical Linguistics at Montreal on August 6, 2007. The paper develops a general characterization of sequences of linguistic changes: triggering events, governing principles, forks in the road and driving forces. The major developments in the dialects of North America are linked in a single sequence, where diversity is the product of successions of bidirectional and unidirectional changes,.