Individual differences and usage-based grammar

Abstract

Since usage-based theories such as cognitive grammar assume an intimate relationship between mental representations of grammar and the processing of instances of language (usage events), corpora have an important role in the development of grammatical analyses. One consequence of relying on corpus data is that individual differences in usage tend to be obscured. To overcome this problem and investigate individual differences in spoken usage, we examine a large corpus consisting of the spoken output of six White House press secretaries. The results provide strong evidence that within this one particular discourse context the patterns of speech of each individual are clearly recognisable. Furthermore, these idiolectal preferences are consistent and are maintained over a period of at least a year or two. In addition, we briefly explore some theoretical consequences and possible explanations for the disparity found between the speech of the individual and that of the discourse community.

Using word n-grams to identify authors and idiolects

“…Something that these authorship studies have in common is that the readers are not shown any of the specific word strings that were useful in the attributions. This contrasts with Coulthard (2004), Mollin (2009) and Barlow (2013) where the idiolectal nature of a precise set of collocations is tested. Also, there is often little or no explanation offered as to why word sequences were or were not useful in these studies.…”

“…Despite the methodological differences across these studies, Coulthard (2004) Mollin (2009) and Barlow (2013) all provide corpus-derived evidence that supports of the notion of idiolectal word strings. In an authorship context, however, where word strings have been used to attribute texts to their correct authors, they have returned mixed results.…”

“…absolutely central vs. fully central), and eliminating those which were over-represented in particular registers in the BNC (speech, newspaper style, parliamentary style), she finds 25 maximiser collocations that can be considered truly "typical" of Tony Blair, including entirely understand, absolutely committed and perfectly prepared. Barlow (2013) compares the use of two and three word strings in the speeches of six White…”

“…After presenting the differences in frequency with which the six speakers use the most common word bigrams in the corpus (e.g and the, the president, I think), Barlow (2013: 455) goes on to show how samples of 200,000 words from each of the press secretaries cluster together when bigrams are used as the basis for a correspondence analysis. This evidence, he argues, along with comparisons of trigram use (e.g.…”

“…Coniam 2004, Mollin 2009, Barlow 2013. These studies use smaller, specialised corpora to systematically examine idiolectal variation that is masked or buried in traditional largescale reference corpora.…”