302 Lynn Clark and Graeme Trousdale
Many of the social and linguistic factor groups were included to test pervi-
ous findings from the research literature on th-fronting in Britain (e.g.
speaker age, speaker sex, phonological context of variation). These factor
groups are therefore typical of the type often found in sociophonetics and
require no further comment here. There were, however, two main differ-
ences between our approach and most other mainstream analyses of phono-
logical variation and change; these were (a) the methods used in order to
reach the social factors presented within the factor group ‘friendship
group/community of practice membership’ and (b) the inclusion of lexical
frequency as a ‘cognitive factor group’ in the analysis of variation.
The friendship groups presented in Table 2 are based on a combination
of observations made during the 2-year period of ethnographic fieldwork
and a sorting task that the members of WFHPB were asked to carry out.
This was modeled on a sorting task developed by Mathews (2005) in her
research on the category labels that were given to adolescent girls in an
American high school. Each informant was presented with a group of
cards; each card contained the name and/or nickname of every other mem-
ber of WFHPB. The informants were then asked to group the cards together
into friendship groups, place these groups of cards inside an envelope and
label the envelope with something that they felt characterized the behavior
of the group. The results of each separate sorting task can also be collated
into an aggregate matrix. It is then possible to find sub-groups (or cliques)
within this aggregate matrix by employing the clique analysis built into
social network software packages such as UCI NET (Borgatti, Everett and
Freeman 2002). The results of the clique analysis suggest that the groups
presented as friends and/or communities of practice in Table 2 are the most
salient or most clearly identifiable social groups in WFHPB^8.
In order to discover whether there is a significant correlation between
lexical frequency and th-fronting in WFHPB, it is first necessary to consid-
er how best to measure lexical frequency in these data. This is problematic
because, as Bybee explains, “there is no one method for doing frequency
research” (Bybee 2007: 16). Often researchers interested in frequency ef-
fects take the frequency value of a particular lexical item from a list of fre-
quency counts such as that provided by Baayen, Piepenbrock, and Gulikers
(1995) in the form of the CELEX lexical database (employed by Hay
2001). However, the highly vernacular nature of the WFHPB data meant
that a number of potential th-fronting sites occurred in local placenames,
nicknames and other non-standard lexical items, all of which appear much
more frequently in the WFHPB corpus than in any corpus of British Eng-