National variation in the use of er “there”. Regional and diachronic constraints on cognitive explanations

Register in variationist linguistics

“…- Heylen (2005) investigates constituent order variation in varieties of German and finds that the difference between the spoken and written medium has a significant impact on variant choice; - Grondelaers, Speelman, and Geeraerts (2008) model the Dutch postverbal er ('there') retention versus omission alternation and show that register (UseNet discourse versus popular newspapers versus quality newspapers) is a significant factor in Belgian Dutch; -Levshina (2011: Chapter 6), in her study of the Dutch doen versus laten alternation, reports some significant register effects, with doen being particularly unlikely to be used in conversations and disfavored in web-based Dutch (Usenet discourse) in comparison to Dutch from newspapers; -Lohmann (2011) analyzes the help versus help to alternation in English and finds that including genre distinctions significantly improves model accuracy; -Wolk, Bresnan, Rosenbach, and Szmrecsanyi (2013) study the historical development of, among other things, the English dative alternation in A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER) and report that factoring in register differences improves model accuracy; -Pijpops and Van De Velde (2014) find significant register effects (chat versus email versus quality newspaper versus tabloid) in some of their models of the Dutch partitive genitive alternation; -Gries (2015) investigates the English particle placement alternation and finds that what he calls "sub-registers" (110) (e.g. private versus public dialogue, scripted versus unscripted monologue, and so on) matter for predicting particle placement choices; -Rosemeyer and Enrique-Arias (2016) model the conditioning of variation in the expression of possession in Old Spanish and report that in their Bible corpus, register variation (lyrical, narrative) has a significant effect on variant choices; -Szmrecsanyi et al 2016investigate ternary genitive variation in the late Modern English period and find that including register information (news versus science versus letters) as a random effect improves model accuracy; -Heller (2017) is concerned with the genitive alternation across a range of postcolonial varieties of English and reports that the distinction between written and spoken registers has a significant effect on variant choice; -Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi (in press) study the particle placement alternation across varieties of English and report that according to conditional random forest analysis, register variation (written formal versus written informal versus spoken formal versus spoken informal) often has a substantial impact on variant choices.…”

Corpus-driven Cognitive Semantics. Introduction to the field

“…Moreover, this is particularly false when corpus techniques are applied to semantic research. Indeed, the usage-feature or behavioural profile approach, one of the principal trends in corpus-driven lexical semantic research (Gries 2006a;Divjak 2006;Glynn 2009;Janda & Solovyev 2009; and grammatical semantic research (Heylen 2005;Wulff et al 2007;Grondelaers et al 2008;Szmrecsanyi 2010) involves the detailed and extremely laborious task of analysing a wide range of formal, semantic, and sociolinguistic features of thousands of natural language examples. Given this kind of research, arguing that corpus linguists are just interested in numbers is risible.…”

Schaalvergroting in het syntactische alternantieonderzoek

“…Eerder onderzoek heeft immers aangetoond dat pragmatische predictoren minstens even belangrijk zijn voor het modelleren van deze er-alternantie. Op basis van eerder corpuslinguïstisch onderzoek met manueel gecodeerde datasets (Grondelaers, Speelman & Geeraerts 2002, 2008, maar ook op basis van experimenteel psycholinguïstisch onderzoek (Grondelaers et al , 2009, weten we dat met name de voorspelbaarheid van het onderwerp de belangrijkste predictor is voor de aan-of afwezigheid van er. Daarom zullen we in de huidige studie ook werken met automatisch gegenereerde corpusgebaseerde maten voor deze voorspelbaarheid (zie ook Jaeger 2005; Levy en Jaeger 2007).…”

“…Omdat de er-alternantie reeds uitvoerig werd bestudeerd in eerdere studies (Grondelaers et al , 2009Grondelaers, Speelman & Geeraerts 2002, 2008Grondelaers & Speelman 2007) die als belangrijkste aandrijvers manueel gecodeerde semantisch/pragmatische categorieën identificeerden, kunnen we die oudere studies als negenproef gebruiken voor de validiteit van de automatische methode. Daarbij stellen we ons enerzijds de vraag of de nieuwe methode überhaupt in staat is om een kwaliteitsvol model van de er-variatie te bouwen.…”