Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt; Grafmiller, Jason; Bresnan, Joan; Rosenbach, Anette; Tagliamonte, Sali A.; Todd, Simon

doi:10.5334/gjgl.310

Cited by 51 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(56 reference statements)

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“…Later studies have confirmed these findings while adding further nuance. The semantics of the verb arguments also plays a role [12], and there is agreement that, on the whole, the dative alternation is subject to broadly similar constraints across different macro-varieties of English [2,[13][14][15][16][17].…”

Section: Verbsemtagmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite this activity, the dative alternation continues to draw theoretical and empirical attention in linguistics, with a number of relevant and underexplored questions remaining. These include questions of linguistic prototypicality [16], the role of probability in spoken grammar [17], and the role of individual-level sociolinguistic factors [2].…”

Section: Verbsemtagmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One notable exception is the dataset from [11], which was made available in an R package in 2008 [18] and re-used for didactic purposes in [19]. Another recent exception is [17].…”

Section: Verbsemtagmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Data from ‘The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary British Spoken Data’

Jenset

McGillivray

2019

Journal of Open Humanities Data

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Context This data was produced as part of the research for a publication on the English dative alternation for spoken data [2]. (2) Methods The EAS is composed of transcripts of spontaneous conversations, recorded in the period 2012-2014 and contains over 4 million tokens. The corpus also contains rich metadata about the speakers and the context of the conversation [1]. The EAS provides a rich opportunity for studying linguistic phenomena in a deeper sociolinguistic context. The dataset presented here deals with the so-called English dative alternation. To identify such constructions, we manually queried the EAS via the CQPweb interface, an online corpus query and analysis system [3]. The queries were carried out for six frequent verbs that occur with both dative alternation patterns [2]: give, lend, show, send, offer, and sell. Although these queries used the EAS, they can be reproduced in the full BNC2014 corpus via the metadata tag Sample release inclusion (available in CQPweb and the underlying XML). The queries produced six intermediate sets of results with concordance lines containing a limited surrounding context for each occurrence of the target verb in the corpus. These intermediate result sets were saved manually as separate spreadsheet files. The raw files were manually examined, and the rows that did not correspond to either of the constructions in i. or ii. were filtered out. Examples of omitted results are phrasal verbs like "give up" and idioms such as "give a shit". The remaining results were manually annotated for two syntactic patterns exemplified in i. and ii. Additionally, the syntactic head of the noun phrase arguments (e.g. "board" in the phrase "the board") were manually identified. The corpus markup does not include annotation for the relevant features we required. Experiments with automated syntactic annotation using tools trained on written English data did not yield good results, and for lack of appropriate training data a manual annotation process was followed. Moreover, we manually annotated the lemmas of recipients and themes with information about animacy. The resulting file is available as a supporting file alongside the dataset.

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Section: Verbsemtagmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Verbsemtagmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Data from ‘The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary British Spoken Data’

Jenset

McGillivray

2019

Journal of Open Humanities Data

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“…A growing body of literature has recently emerged from the incorporation of the principles of probabilistic grammar into the World Englishes paradigm with the aim of exploring and delimiting the extent to which the strength of probabilistic constraints fluctuates across varieties of English (e.g. Rosenbach 2002, 2003; Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi 2007; Bresnan & Hay 2008; Szmrecsanyi & Hinrichs 2008; Bresnan & Ford 2010; Bernaisch et al 2014; Szmrecsanyi et al 2016; Heller et al 2017; Röthlisberger et al 2017; Szmrecsanyi et al 2017; among others). Common to most of these studies is the observation that varieties share a fairly robust probabilistic grammar in that the constraints affecting a particular syntactic phenomenon are largely stable across varieties and fuel the same kind of syntactic choices.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probabilistic indigenization effects at the lexis–syntax interface

Tamaredo

Röthlisberger

Grafmiller

et al. 2019

English Language and Linguistics

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Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016) define probabilistic indigenization as the process whereby probabilistic constraints shape variation patterns in different ways, which eventually leads to more heterogeneity in the constraints governing syntactic variation across different varieties of English. The present study extends our knowledge of the heterogeneity of probabilistic grammars by sketching a corpus-based variationist method for calculating the similarity between varieties thereby drawing inspiration from the comparative sociolinguistics literature. Based on linguistic material from the International Corpus of English, we ascertain the degree of regional variability of five probabilistic constraints on the genitive, dative, particle placement and subject pronoun omission alternations across three varieties of English, namely British, Indian and Singapore English. Our results indicate that, of the four alternations under study, the genitive alternation is the most homogeneous one from a regional perspective, followed – in increasing order of heterogeneity – by subject pronoun omission, dative and particle placement alternations. On the basis of these findings, we evaluate claims in the literature according to which the extent of probabilistic indigenization is proportional to the lexical specificity of the syntactic phenomenon under study, a hypothesis that is borne out by our data.

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“…This approach allows one to see whether X 1 , X 2 , …, X n behave differently depending on L1 or VARIETY (see Gries and Deshors 2014: Section 3), which is often the main question of such studies (even if this is often not discussed using the above kind of statistical-interaction terminology). As mentioned above, such studies are becoming increasingly widespread; examples include but are not limited to Deshors (2014Deshors ( , 2018, Wulff et al (2014), , Szmrecsanyi et al (2017). In spite of the fact that these studies are a huge improvement over decades of monofactorial chisquared or loglikelihood ratio tests, depending on one's perspective, Gries and Deshors (2014) and Gries and Adelman (2014) developed an alternative approach that has a slightly different focus.…”

Section: General Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

There’s more to alternations than the main diagonal of a 2×2 confusion matrix: Improvements of MuPDAR and other classificatory alternation studies

et al. 2020

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Corpus-based studies of learner language and (especially) English varieties have become more quantitative in nature and increasingly use regression-based methods and classifiers such as classification trees, random forests, etc. One recent development more widely used is the MuPDAR (Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis using Regressions) approach of Gries and Deshors (2014) and Gries and Adelman (2014). This approach attempts to improve on traditional regression- or tree-based approaches by, firstly, training a model on the reference speakers (often native speakers (NS) in learner corpus studies or British English speakers in variety studies), then, secondly, using this model to predict what such a reference speaker would produce in the situation the target speaker is in (often non-native speakers (NNS) or indigenized-variety speakers). Crucially, the third step then consists of determining whether the target speakers made a canonical choice or not and explore that variability with a second regression model or classifier.Both regression-based modeling in general and MuPDAR in particular have led to many interesting results, but we want to propose two changes in perspective on the results they produce. First, we want to focus attention on the middle ground of the prediction space, i.e. the predictions of a regression/classifier that, essentially, are made non-confidently and translate into a statement such as ‘in this context, both/all alternants would be fine’. Second, we want to make a plug for a greater attention to misclassifications/-predictions and propose a method to identify those as well as discuss what we can learn from studying them. We exemplify our two suggestions based on a brief case study, namely the dative alternation in native and learner corpus data.

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Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English

Cited by 51 publications

References 38 publications

Data from ‘The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary British Spoken Data’

Data from ‘The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary British Spoken Data’

Probabilistic indigenization effects at the lexis–syntax interface

There’s more to alternations than the main diagonal of a 2×2 confusion matrix: Improvements of MuPDAR and other classificatory alternation studies

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