It’s not just a sound change: linking phonetic and pragmatic change in the word just

Abstract

The collocational patterns of a word and its phonetic properties are often considered independent of each other. This corpus-based study tracks change in the word just over real and apparent time in New Zealand and Australian English and shows that these two phenomena take place in tandem. Four major changes are reported. First, the frequency of just has increased in both varieties, mirroring reports in Canadian and UK varieties of English. Second, the collocations of just demonstrate that it has undergone pragmatic change, evidenced by, for example, its increased co-occurrence with sort of, like, and an existential subject (it’s just…). Third, acoustic phonetic analyses of changes in the vo..