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 vowel in just indicate that it does not pattern with other content or grammatical words belonging to its canonical vowel class and has instead moved towards a closer and fronter realization. Finally, we show that this phonetic change is led by variants of just which occur in newer (more recent) collocational contexts. Together these findings provide an example of word-specific change and evidence that a word’s phonetic realization depends in part on its grammatical status, and that phonetic change over time can be linked with shifts in collocational patterns and pragmatic function.
Grama et al. (Thu,) studied this question.