Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty

Gardner, Matt Hunt; Uffing, Eva; Vaeck, Nicholas Van; Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0252602

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…If the variants exhibit a length asymmetry, the longer variant is more likely to be preferred in formal communication and careful speech, whereas the shorter one will be more appropriate in informal communication and casual speech (e.g., Labov, 1966). Generally speaking, contracted forms are considered more appropriate in informal language, while full forms are regarded as typical of formal texts (Finegan & Biber, 2001), so contractions like I'll, aren't or 1 Gardner et al (2021) argue against production difficulties in the presence of different morphosyntactic variants. However, they do not control for the equal probability of the variants in specific contexts, where the Principle of No Synonymy operates.…”

Section: Aims Of This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicative efficiency and the Principle of No Synonymy: predictability effects and the variation ofwant toandwanna

Levshina

Lorenz

2022

Lang. cogn.

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There is ample psycholinguistic evidence that speakers behave efficiently, using shorter and less effortful constructions when the meaning is more predictable, and longer and more effortful ones when it is less predictable. However, the Principle of No Synonymy requires that all formally distinct variants should also be functionally different. The question is how much two related constructions should overlap semantically and pragmatically in order to be used for the purposes of efficient communication. The case study focuses on want to + Infinitive and its reduced variant with wanna, which have different stylistic and sociolinguistic connotations. Bayesian mixed-effects regression modelling based on the spoken part of the British National Corpus reveals a very limited effect of efficiency: predictability increases the chances of the reduced variant only in fast speech. We conclude that efficient use of more and less effortful variants is restricted when two variants are associated with different registers or styles. This paper also pursues a methodological goal regarding missing values in speech corpora. We impute missing data based on the existing values. A comparison of regression models with and without imputed values reveals similar tendencies. This means that imputation is useful for dealing with missing values in corpora.

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Section: Aims Of This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicative efficiency and the Principle of No Synonymy: predictability effects and the variation ofwant toandwanna

Levshina

Lorenz

2022

Lang. cogn.

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Case and agreement variation in contact

Zhang,

Yue

2024

IJCL

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This study investigates the influence of language contact on morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes, specifically focusing on the joint variation of case and agreement in it-clefts with pronominal clefted constituents. Employing a multifactorial approach within the framework of probabilistic grammar, we examine the distribution of the four relevant it-cleft variants in the GloWbE corpus. We find that language contact, as a language-external factor, impacts the strengths and rankings of language-internal factors but not their directions. Additionally, we observe an intricate interplay between language contact and language-internal factors in shaping morphosyntactic patterns: low-contact varieties tend to display feature-based case and agreement with a high degree of variability, while high-contact varieties tend to exhibit position-based case and agreement with a low degree of variability. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the development of language diversity and structural simplification in World Englishes.

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Parameterization of manipulative media discourse: possibilities and problems of automatic diagnosis

Shakenova,

Tashimkhanova,

Shaikova

et al. 2024

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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The issue of quantitative measurement and automatic processing is a significant problem in determining the markers of the manipulative potential of media texts, since linguistic indicators are the basis of machine parameterization. The purpose of the research is to analyse the possibilities of the main language parameters of the manipulativeness of media discourse, which can be identified using machine learning. To achieve the research goals, the following methods were used: system, content analysis, computer modelling, and comparative. The results of the article determined that such language indicators as use of the subjunctive mood of verbs, capital letters, high frequency of use of the ‘not’ particle, punctuation marks, questions, or exclamations of a rhetorical nature, use of quotation marks for the purpose of irony, double negative sentences, use of the word ‘no’, and verbal structures calling to action act as computer classification parameters. In order to cover the above purpose, PYTHON software was implemented that allowed texts to be analysed and visualized in algorithmic and lexical-vocabulary ways. In addition, it was determined that by integrating the PYTHON tool, it became possible to use language transformation markers that formed linguistic patterns in the analysed text. The list of parameters for diagnosing manipulative texts is non-exhaustive, which emphasizes the possibility of machine measurement of the manipulative component of mass media discourse.

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Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty

Cited by 5 publications

References 150 publications

Communicative efficiency and the Principle of No Synonymy: predictability effects and the variation ofwant toandwanna

Communicative efficiency and the Principle of No Synonymy: predictability effects and the variation ofwant toandwanna

Case and agreement variation in contact

Parameterization of manipulative media discourse: possibilities and problems of automatic diagnosis

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