Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation

Cacoullos, Rena Torres; Travis, Catherine E.

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2013.08.003

Cited by 22 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Scherre and Naro (1991) extended this finding to agreement marking or nonmarking across differ ent phrases within the same clause in Brasilian Portuguese. See also Cameron and FloresFerrán (2004), Scherre (2001), Travis (2007), Torres Cacoullos and Travis (2013). Based on this work, we investigated the possibility of contraction priming contraction by coding whether or not there is a preceding BE in the ten words preceding the target, by either the speaker or another participant in the dialogue, and if so whether that instance of BE was contracted ('s, 're, 'm), full (is, are, am), or ineligible for contraction (be, been, being, was, were) 10 .…”

Section: Predictorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is

Barth¹,

Kapatsinski

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is Abstract: The present paper presents a multimodel inference approach to lin guistic variation, expanding on prior work by Kuperman and Bresnan (2012). We argue that corpus data often present the analyst with high model selection uncer tainty. This uncertainty is inevitable given that language is highly redundant: ev ery feature is predictable from multiple other features. However, uncertainty in volved in model selection is ignored by the standard method of selecting the single best model and inferring the effects of the predictors under the assumption that the best model is true. Multimodel inference avoids committing to a single model. Rather, we make predictions based on the entire set of plausible models, with contributions of models weighted by the models' predictive value. We argue that multimodel inference is superior to model selection for both the ILanguage goal of inferring the mental grammars that generated the corpus, and the ELanguage goal of predicting characteristics of future speech samples from the community represented by the corpus. Applying multimodel inference to the classic problem of English auxiliary contraction, we show that the choice between multimodel inference and model selection matters in practice: the best model may contain predictors that are not significant when the full set of plau sible models is considered, and may omit predictors that are significant consid ering the full set of models. We also contribute to the study of English auxiliary contraction. We document the effects of priming, contextual predictability, and specific syntactic constructions and provide evidence against effects of phono logical context.

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Section: Predictorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is

Barth¹,

Kapatsinski

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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“… on Mandarin Chinese). This empirical research shows that languages classified as null subject languages vary widely in their rate of zero subjects, from 72 per cent zero in Italian, 53 per cent in Cantonese, 47 per cent in Mandarin, down to 11 per cent in Finnish (Torres Cacoullos & Travis : 22). A systematic study of the frequency and distribution of null subjects in Singaporean and Hong Kong English is lacking so far.…”

Section: Null Subjects In Singaporean and Hong Kong Englishmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Following the extensive study of pro‐drop in inflectional ‘canonical NSL’, there is an increasing number of corpus‐based studies on null subjects in non‐inflectional languages investigating the structural conditions of subject expression (Englebretson & Helasuvo on crosslinguistic phenomena; Wagner and Torres Cacoullos & Travis on US English; Meyerhoff on Bislama; Jia & Bayley and Li et al. on Mandarin Chinese).…”

Section: Null Subjects In Singaporean and Hong Kong Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This excludes sentence fragments as well as all cases of auxiliary drop, a frequent phenomenon especially in Singaporean English (line 337). Also excluded from the analysis are the three following contexts: imperatives as canonical contexts for null subjects in English, formulaic expressions like discourse markers and tag questions (Torres Cacoullos & Travis : 22–23). Repetitions of overt subject pronouns are only counted once.…”

Section: Null Subjects In Singaporean and Hong Kong Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Null subjects in English are described as a root phenomenon, that is, restricted to declarative main clauses (Torres Cacoullos & Travis : 22). In Chinese, there is no such restriction (Huang : 533).…”

Section: Null Subjects In Singaporean and Hong Kong Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pronoun deletion in Hong Kong English and Colloquial Singaporean English

Schröter

Kortmann

2016

World Englishes

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The question how substrate features and extralinguistic conditions interact in shaping contact varieties is an ongoing debate in the study of world Englishes. The present study tries to describe substrate influence by identifying an areally marked morphosyntactic feature, subject pronoun deletion, and comparing its occurrence and structural conditioning in two closely related varieties of English in Southeast Asia. Our results show that even in the typologically similar linguistic habitats of Hong Kong and Singapore, the different degrees of nativisation are reflected in the frequency and distribution of null subjects in the two relevant local varieties.

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The Future of Usage‐Based Approaches

Rivas¹

2023

The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics

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Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation

Cited by 22 publications

References 19 publications

A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is

A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is

Pronoun deletion in Hong Kong English and Colloquial Singaporean English

The Future of Usage‐Based Approaches

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