The register-specificity of probabilistic grammars in English and Dutch - Combining corpus analysis and experimentation

Register variation has enjoyed plenty of attention from a text-linguistic perspective and using the Multidimensional Approach (following Biber 1988). In variationist sociolinguistics, on the other hand, register has not often been examined in interaction with language-internal constraints in morphosyntactic variation research so that register's role in probabilistic, grammatical choice-making remains unclear. Sociolinguistic theory predicts that language-internal constraints are generally independent from stylistic factors (Labov 2010: 265), which are instead thought to be reflected by differences in variant frequencies (Guy 2005: 562; Rickford 2014: 601). Despite evidence that effects of language-internal factors vary substantially across mode of communication (Theijssen et al. 2013) and genre (Grafmiller 2014), systematic studies of register-specific choice-making processes are still lacking. Against this backdrop, this project examines register variation from a variationist perspective by means of three case studies of alternation phenomena in English and Dutch. (1) The dative alternation in English: If like someone gives you a DVD or a box set of something then it's like you've gotta watch it cos they've given it to you and they expect that you give it back having fully watched it (Spoken BNC2014, SNXG) (2) The dative alternation in Dutch: ey as[sic!] atari ons gene friet geeft dan geef ik ne friet aan sphieke [sic!] se Ey if Atari us no fries-SG gives then give I a fries-SG to Sophieke see 'Ey, if Atari doesn't give us fries, then I'll give fries to Sophieke, you know' (SoNaR, chats, WRUEA_UN_190) (3) The future marker alternation in English: In practice, however, experts think the most likely alien life forms we will come across are going to be some kind of alien microbes. (The Independent, 2018-07-02) The methodology combines variationist corpus studies with supplementary rating task experiments (cf. Bresnan 2007, Bresnan & Ford 2010), in which participants rate how natural a particular morphosyntactic variant sounds to them given the register context. Register is defined at the intersection of formality and mode (following Koch & Oesterreicher 2012), resulting in four broad register distinctions (informal conversations, parliamentary debates, blog entries/chats, and newspaper articles). The research questions are: (1) how does effect size and direction of language-internal constraints on variation vary across registers? (2) Are language users sensitive to probabilistic effects in different registers? (3) Do languages, such as English and Dutch, differ in terms of the importance of probabilistic register differences? Mixed effects regression analyses consistently detect interactions between register and internal constraints across all case studies, suggesting that probabilistic grammars are not stable across different situational contexts. What is more, participants' rating behaviour largely corresponds to the predictions of the corpus models, while the specific rating patterns differ across case studies as a function of experimental design. Taken together, these findings underpin the importance of methodological diversity in investigating grammatical variation and cognition (Klavan & Divjak 2016) and show that it is worthwhile to consider stylistic/register differences in probabilistic grammar. We must also re-think customary theorizing in variationist sociolinguistics according to which language-internal constraints are stable in the face of stylistic variation (but see Guy 2015). References: Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bresnan, Joan & Marilyn Ford. 2010. Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English. Language 86(1). 168-213. D'Arcy, Alexandra & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2015. Not always variable: Probing the vernacular grammar. Language Variation and Change 27(3). 255-285. Grafmiller, Jason. 2014. Variation in English genitives across modality and genres. English Language and Linguistics 18(3). 471-496. Guy, Gregory R. 2005. Letters to Language. Language 81(3). 561-563. Klavan, Jane & Dagmar Divjak. 2016. The cognitive plausibility of statistical classification models: Comparing textual and behavioral evidence. Folia Linguistica 50(2). 355-384. Labov, William. 2010. Principles of linguistic change, Vol. 3: Cognitive and cultural factors (Language in Society 39). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Rickford, John R. 2014. Situation: Stylistic Variation in Sociolinguistic Corpora and Theory. Language and Linguistics Compass 8(11). 590-603. Theijssen, Daphne, Louis ten Bosch, Lou Boves, Bert Cranen & Hans van Halteren. 2013. Choosing alternatives: Using Bayesian networks and memory-based learning to study the dative alternation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 9(2). 227-262.

Jaar van publicatie:2022

Toegankelijkheid:Open