Morphosyntactic variation and syntactic constructions in Czech nominal declension: corpus frequency and native-speaker judgments

Abstract

Data from the Czech National Corpus and a large-scale survey of acceptability judgments are used to investigate the scope of morphosyntactic variation in two cases (genitive singular and locative singular) of a Czech declension pattern. The syntactic construction in which a form is found is shown to have a significant interaction with its frequency in the corpus and with its acceptability rating. We conclude that the pattern of acceptability preferences lends support to the entrenchment hypothesis and in general to emergentist approaches to language.Аннотация В настоящей статье рассматриваются отношения между данными из Национального Корпуса чешского языка и широким опросом оценки языковой приемлемости. Целью работы является рассмотрение масштабов морфосинтакси-ческой вариативности в двух чешских падежах (в родительном и локативном падежах единственного числа). Согласно результатам нашего анализа, синтаксическая конструкция, в которой имеется данная форма, состоит в тесном взаимодействии с ее частотностью в корпусе и с оценкой ее приемлемости. Таким образом, общая модель оценок приемлемости подтверждает гипотезу об «усилении» употребляемости более частых форм и в целом сходится с так называемыми «эмергентными» подходами к языку, т.е. с такими подходами, согласно которым созидание языковых структур происходит в ходе освоения языка.

Do Users’ Reading Skills and Difficulty Ratings for Texts Affect Choices and Evaluations?

“…A skewed ratio of forms (say, 99:1) is treated differently than a more balanced ratio of forms (say, 5:1 or 3:1), and this operates regardless of which specific variant is in question. These findings are entirely in line with our previous investigations (Bermel & Knittl 2012a, 2012b, Bermel, Knittl & Russell 2015, 2017.…”

“…In common with other Slavic languages, Czech is highly inflected, and thanks to a series of far-reaching phonological changes over the last millennium, the conditions for deploying its broad assortment of inflectional material are not always clear (see Bermel and Knittl 2012b: 9395) for a fuller discussion).4 Consequently, while we are able to describe clearly for some syntactic slots what exponent is used there, for others there is considerable variation. Exponents may be described using a list-type approach ("the following lexemes use exponent A; others use exponent B") or using a collection of rules of thumb ("borrowings, multisyllabic stems and labial consonant stems prefer exponent C; others prefer exponent D").…”

“…For a number of years now, we have been looking at places in the Czech conjugational and declensional systems where a syntactic 'slot' has multiple exponents whose usage is not clearly differentiated, a situation described variously as competition (Lečić 2015), variation (Bermel & Knittl 2012a, 2012b, Bermel, Knittl & Russell 2015a, 2017 or overabundance (Thornton 2012).3…”

The Role of Lexical Frequency in the Acceptability of Syntactic Variants: Evidence Fromthat‐Clauses in Polish

“…Sequences of linguistic units that are of high frequency or resemble sequences of high frequency will be judged more acceptable than those that are of low frequency or do not resemble frequently used structures” (Bybee & Eddington, : 349). A number of studies in both the generative and usage‐based traditions have, however, confirmed the existence of a grammaticality‐frequency discrepancy, if not a gap (Kempen & Harbusch, , ), for acceptability ratings: Corpus frequencies are poor predictors for off‐line acceptability ratings, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum, in morphology and syntax (Keller, ; Kempen & Harbusch, , ; Arppe & Järvikivi, ; Divjak, ; Bader & Häussler, ; Bermel & Knittl, ,b; but see the opposite tendency in the results of Lapata, McDonald, & Keller, , for adjective‐noun combinations). This has strengthened generativists in their belief that “simple frequency data” could and should be ignored in theoretical linguistic analyses.…”

Morphological variation and sensitivity to frequency of forms among native speakers of Czech

“…From previous research (Bermel & Knittl 2012a, 2012b we identified p r o p o r t i o n a l f r e q u e n c y -the percentage of time one variant occurs vis-à-vis other variants -as a type of frequency that has an effect on judgements. However, traditionally frequency is looked at in terms of absolute numbers (albeit often standardized to a corpus size of one million tokens, see e.g.…”