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The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to identify instances of a certain linguistic feature - say, the zero copula construction - in a corpus, and analyze the feature’s distribution across speakers, topics, and other variables, to either gain a qualitative understanding of the feature’s function or systematically measure variation. In this paper, we explore the challenging task of automatic morphosyntactic feature detection in low-resource English varieties. We present a human-in-the-loop approach to generate and filter effective contrast sets via corpus-guided edits. We show that our approach improves feature detection for both Indian English and African American English, demonstrate how it can assist linguistic research, and release our fine-tuned models for use by other researchers. 

This paper jointly considers syntactic, semantic, and phonological/phonetic factors in approaching an understanding of BIN, a remote past marker in African American English that has been described as “stressed.” It brings together data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) and a production study in a small African American English-speaking community in southwest Louisiana to investigate the use and phonetic realization of BIN constructions. Only 20 instances of BIN constructions were found in CORAAL. This sparsity was not simply due to a dearth of semantic contexts for BIN in the interviews, since 122 instances of semantically equivalent been + temporal adverbial variants were also found. These results raise questions about the extent to which BIN constructions and been + temporal adverbial variants are used in different pragmatic and discourse contexts as well as in different speech styles. The production study elicited BIN and past participle been constructions in controlled syntactic and semantic environments. The phonetic realization of BIN was found to be distributed over the entire utterance rather than localized to BIN. BIN utterances were distinguished from past participle been utterances by having higher ratios of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration in BIN/ been relative to preceding and following material in the utterance. In both studies, BIN utterances were generally realized with a high F0 peak on BIN and a reduced F0 range in the post- BIN region, with variability in the presence and kinds of F0 movements utterance-initially and utterance-finally, as well as in F0 downtrends in the post- BIN region.