Stability and Fluidity in Syntactic Variation World-Wide

Abstract

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

“…the animacy-related AmE/NZE contrast reported in Bresnan & Hay 2008). At the same time, we mentioned how recent follow-up research (Heller et al 2017;Röthlisberger et al To appear) fails to replicate contrasts that we have uncovered in this study. These replication failures are potentially troubling -it seems that comparative variation analysis of the type we have performed here is more sensitive to the particulars of the data source and coding decisions and to the design of the analysis than one would suspect or hope.…”

“…Recent work has found sizeable differences in genitive usage across spoken and written modes and registers, even within the same variety (Grafmiller 2014), thus the results presented here should be interpreted within the larger context of what we know about genitive variation across different modes, registers and communities. 7 Finally, we note that none of the probabilistic contrasts that our analysis unearths emerge as significant in Heller et al (2017), a recent study on probabilistic genitive variation that covers the same varieties that are represented in Table 4, albeit using different multivariate designs and on the basis of different, more acrolectal and less vernacular data sources (the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English). 7 As an aside, we note that in the BrE data a good number of interviewees are fishermen, who talk a lot about their fishing boats.…”

“…Hundt and Szmrecsanyi (2012) find that possessor animacy is overall a more important predictor in (earlier, written) NZE than in (earlier, written) BrE; Jankowski and Tagliamonte (2014) report that in vernacular CanE, the s-genitive is near-categorically used with animate possessors, while inanimate possessors exhibit more variation and apparent-time change. Heller et al (2017) establish that the top constraints fueling probabilistic differences across a set of nine international varieties of English include possessor animacy, constituent length, and final sibilancy.…”

“…Glossa general linguistics a journal of Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, et al 2017. Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective:…”

Constraints in contact: Animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective

“…Grafmiller 2014) and across varieties of English (e.g. Hundt & Szmrecsanyi 2012;Szmrecsanyi et al 2014;Heller et al 2017;Szmrecsanyi et al To appear). In the meantime, the originally typologically inspired research has been somewhat neglected in recent work (for a notable exception see however O'Connor et al 2013).…”