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Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and geographical varieties of English. Providing a probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which persistence - among several other internal and external factors - influences speakers' linguistic choices, the book departs from most writings in the field in that it seeks to bridge several research traditions. While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by psycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct a comprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works. The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

English language --- Morphology. --- Syntax. --- Discourse analysis. --- Grammar. --- Variation. --- Pragmatics --- Grammar --- Dialectology --- 802.0-55 --- 802.0-56 --- 802.0-56 Engels: syntaxis; semantiek --- Engels: syntaxis; semantiek --- 802.0-55 Engels: morfologie --- Engels: morfologie --- Anglais (Langue) --- Morphologie --- Syntaxe --- Analyse du discours --- Grammaire --- Variation --- Analysis and parsing --- Diagraming --- Discourse analysis --- Morphology --- Syntax --- Dialects --- Composition and exercises --- Germanic languages --- Corpora. --- English/language. --- sociolinguistics.

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Linguistics

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Variation studies is an increasingly popular area in linguistics, becoming embedded in curriculum design, conferences, and research. However, the field is at risk of fragmenting into different research communities with different foci. This pioneering book addresses this by establishing a canon of state-of-the-art quantitative methods to analyze grammatical variation from a comparative perspective. It explains how to use these methods to investigate large datasets in a responsible fashion, providing a blueprint for applying techniques from corpus linguistics, variationist, and dialectometric traditions in novel ways. It specifically explores the scope and limits of syntactic variability in a global language such as English, and investigates three grammatical alternations in nine varieties of English, exploring what we can learn about the grammatical choices that people make based on both observational and experimental data. Comprehensive yet accessible, it will be of interest to academic researchers and students of sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and World Englishes.

English language --- Variation. --- Syntax. --- Data processing. --- Germanic languages --- Variation --- Syntax --- Data processing

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English language

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The central topic in this Master thesis is grammatical variation. Many linguists have argued that, for a speaker, having different options to express the same thing, so-called grammatical variation, complicates speech production. Nevertheless, some research, such as conducted by Gardner et al. (2021) and by Uffing (2020), has demonstrated quite the opposite. Therefore, this thesis will replicate these previous studies but based on a different dataset to verify the potential difficulty of grammatical variation for speakers. This thesis will also study disfluencies, namely filled pauses such as “um, uh and unhunh” and unfilled pauses, marking a silent pause of more than 130ms in the speech stream. These pauses are significant because they function as a manner to measure the complexity of an utterance. When a speech consists of many pauses, filled or unfilled, it is considered harder to produce because it indicates the speaker thinks hard about what he or she wants to say.This paper uses a database of 4 transcribed conversations from the Santa Barbara corpus (Du Bois et al., n.d.). In these conversations, each instance of grammatical variation that occurs and the pauses are counted. These will be brought into relation with each other to be able to test the assumption of speech difficulty. The selected grammatical variables are the same 20 types of grammatical alternations as selected by Gardner et al. (2021). The first step in the analysis is to test, for each of the four conversations, the correlation between variable contexts and the filled pauses and unfilled pauses utilizing the Pearson correlation method. These two correlations can then show the specific effect direction of the variables. This thesis also conducts a random forest analysis. This second analysis demonstrates the relative importance of all the 20 grammatical variables. There are two analyses for each of the four conversations, one regarding the relative importance of the alternations in relation to the unfilled pauses and one regarding the relative importance of the same variables in relation to the filled pauses. The analysis results demonstrate the variables that have a value importance higher than 0. Then, a correlation is tested between each variable that appeared to be important and the (un)filled pauses in order to be able to trace the effect direction; in other words, how do they interact with each other. The results show that all correlations between these variable contexts and (un)filled pauses showed negative correlations, except one, which means that when grammatical variation increases pauses will decrease (cf. negative correlation). Hence, this thesis challenges the previous claim that grammatical variation is associated with production difficulty. This result has been explained by the argument that variation does not make speech harder but even facilitates it (e.g. Ferreira, Christenfeld). Another explanation could be as argued by G.Scontras et al. (2015: 571), that “Language producers may be avoiding constructions that are more costly to produce, opting for syntactically simpler constructions when possible”. In other words, if language users have more grammatical options to choose from, they can use the simplest construction. However, if the language user has only a few options, he or she has no other choice than to use a more complex one which could make speech more difficult.