Applying insights from variationist linguistics to historical change
mechanisms that have affected the consonantal system of English, Daniel
Schreier reports findings from a historical corpus-based study on the
reduction of particular consonant clusters and compares them with
similar processes in synchronic varieties, thus defining consonantal
change as a phenomenon involving psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics,
phonological theory and contact linguistics. Moreover, he weighs the
impact of external and internal effects on causation, examining data
from a total of 15 varieties with different time depths and social
histories.