Around the world in three alternations

Abstract

We sketch a project that marries probabilistic grammar research to scholarship on World Englishes, thus synthesizing two previously rather disjoint lines of research into one unifying project with a coherent focus. This synthesis is hoped to advance usage-based theoretical linguistics by adopting a large-scale comparative and sociolinguistically responsible perspective on grammatical variation. To highlight the descriptive and theoretical benefits of the approach, we present case studies of three syntactic alternations (the particle placement, genitive, and dative alternations) in four varieties of English (British, Canadian, Indian, and Singapore), as represented in the International Corpus of English. We report that the varieties studied share a core probabilistic grammar which is, however, subject to indigenization at various degrees of subtlety, depending on the abstractness of the syntactic patterns studied.

Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Toward a Computational Dialectology

“…Even though these international languages have global speech communities, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects, often within so-called inner-circle varieties (Kachru, 1982). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts (Goldhahn et al, 2012;Davies and Fuchs, 2015;Donoso and Sanchez, 2017) to represent national varieties (Szmrecsanyi et al, 2016;Calle-Martin and Romero-Barranco, 2017;Cook and Brinton, 2017;Rangel et al, 2017;Dunn, 2018aDunn, , 2019bTamaredo, 2018). The basic point is that in order to represent regional variation as a complete system, dialectometry must take a global perspective.…”

“…Most previous work relies on phonetic or phonological features (Kretzschmar, 1992(Kretzschmar, , 1996Heeringa, 2004;Labov et al, 2005;Nerbonne, 2006Nerbonne, , 2009Grieve et al, 2011Grieve et al, , 2013Nerbonne, 2011, 2015;Grieve, 2013;Nerbonne and Kretzschmar, 2013;Kretzschmar et al, 2014;Kruger and van Rooy, 2018) for the simple reason that phonetic representations are relatively straight-forward: a vowel is a vowel and the measurements are the same across varieties and languages. Previous work on syntactic variation has focused on either (i) an incomplete set of language-specific variants, ranging from only a few features to hundreds (Sanders, 2007(Sanders, , 2010Szmrecsanyi, 2009Szmrecsanyi, , 2013Szmrecsanyi, , 2014Grieve, 2011Grieve, , 2012Grieve, , 2016Collins, 2012;Schilk and Schaub, 2016;Szmrecsanyi et al, 2016;Calle-Martin and Romero-Barranco, 2017;Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi, 2018;Tamaredo, 2018) or (ii) language-independent representations such as function words (Argamon and Koppel, 2013) or sequences of part-of-speech labels (Hirst and Feiguina, 2007;Kroon et al, 2018). This forces a choice between either an ad hoc and incomplete syntactic representation or a reproducible but indirect syntactic representation.…”

“…While useful for visualizations, these models are difficult to evaluate against ground-truths. Another strand of work models the importance of predictor variables on the use of a particular variant, with geographic region as one possible predictor (Szmrecsanyi et al, 2016). These models are based on multivariate work in sociolinguistics that attempts to find which linguistic, social, or geographic features are most predictive of a particular variant.…”

General introduction: A comparative perspective on probabilistic variation in grammar

“…As to grammar specifically, we know that intra-systemic grammatical variation -that is, variation within and across varieties of the same language -is highly systematic, and that the determinants of this variation are numerous, multifactorial, and probabilistically conditioned (e.g. Gries 2003;Bresnan & Hay 2008;Tagliamonte, Durham & Smith 2014;Szmrecsanyi et al 2016). Results of such studies are generally taken to be evidence for a model of grammar that is quantitative and probabilistic.…”

“…But it is only in recent years that the predictions outlined in the previous paragraph have begun to be explored more systematically. We take the liberty to illustrate this trend by sketching a research project (2013-2021) based at the KU Leuven and entitled "Exploring probabilistic grammar(s) in varieties of English around the world", which investigates three syntactic alternations (see (1)-(3)) in some nine international varieties of English: British English, Canadian English, Irish English, New Zealand English, Hong Kong English, Indian English, Jamaican English, Philippine English, and Singapore English (Szmrecsanyi et al 2016).…”