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Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated
notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the
intricacies of thinking about the complexity of languages and
language varieties (here: of English) in three major
contact-related fields of (and schools in) linguistics:
creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies (i.e. in the
realm of English linguistics, the "World Englishes" community), and
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: How can we adequately
assess linguistic complexity? Should we be interested in absolute
complexity or rather relative complexity? What is the extent to
which language contact and/or (adult) language learning might lead
to morphosyntactic simplification? The authors in this volume are
all leading linguists in different areas of specialization, and
they were asked to elaborate on those facets of linguistic
complexity which are most relevant in their area of specialization,
and/or which strike them as being most intriguing. The result is a
collection of papers that is unique in bringing together leading
representatives of three often disjunct fields of linguistic
scholarship in which linguistic complexity is seen as a dynamic and
inherently variable parameter.
Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use
morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before.
In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist
in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus
analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing
on regression analyses of a variety of functional,
discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external
factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation
between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive
and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival
complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a
number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and
geographical varieties of English. Providing a probabilistic
framework for examining the ways in which persistence - among
several other internal and external factors - influences speakers'
linguistic choices, the book departs from most writings in the
field in that it seeks to bridge several research traditions. While
it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with
internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in
English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by
psycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct a
comprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the
study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language
works. The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers
in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics,
psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.
Variation within the English language is a vast research area, of
which dialectology, the study of geographic variation, is a
significant part. This book explores grammatical differences
between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data
collected in over thirty counties. In doing so it presents a new
approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on
the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical
features to gauge regional differences. These features include, for
example, multiple negation (e.g. don't you make no damn mistake),
non-standard verbal-s (e.g. so I says, What have you to do?), or
non-standard weak past tense and past participle forms (e.g. they
knowed all about these things). Utilizing state-of-the-art
dialectometrical analysis and visualization techniques, the book is
original both in terms of its fundamental research question ('What
are the large-scale patterns of grammatical variability in British
English dialects?') and in terms of its methodology.
Variation studies is an increasingly popular area in linguistics,
becoming embedded in curriculum design, conferences, and research.
However, the field is at risk of fragmenting into different
research communities with different foci. This pioneering book
addresses this by establishing a canon of state-of-the-art
quantitative methods to analyze grammatical variation from a
comparative perspective. It explains how to use these methods to
investigate large datasets in a responsible fashion, providing a
blueprint for applying techniques from corpus linguistics,
variationist, and dialectometric traditions in novel ways. It
specifically explores the scope and limits of syntactic variability
in a global language such as English, and investigates three
grammatical alternations in nine varieties of English, exploring
what we can learn about the grammatical choices that people make
based on both observational and experimental data. Comprehensive
yet accessible, it will be of interest to academic researchers and
students of sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and World
Englishes.
Variation within the English language is a vast research area, of
which dialectology, the study of geographic variation, is a
significant part. This book explores grammatical differences
between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data
collected in over thirty counties. In doing so it presents a new
approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on
the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical
features to gauge regional differences. These features include, for
example, multiple negation (e.g. don't you make no damn mistake),
non-standard verbal-s (e.g. so I says, What have you to do?), or
non-standard weak past tense and past participle forms (e.g. they
knowed all about these things). Utilizing state-of-the-art
dialectometrical analysis and visualization techniques, the book is
original both in terms of its fundamental research question ('What
are the large-scale patterns of grammatical variability in British
English dialects?') and in terms of its methodology.
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