Animacy in early New Zealand english

The literature suggests that animacy effects in present-day spoken New Zealand English (NZE) differ from animacy effects in other varieties of English. We seek to determine if such differences have a history in earlier NZE writing or not. We revisit two grammatical phenomena — progressives and genitives — that are well known to be sensitive to animacy effects, and we study these phenomena in corpora sampling 19th- and early 20th-century written NZE; for reference purposes, we also study parallel samples of 19th- and early 20th-century British English and American English. We indeed find significant regional differences between early New Zealand writing and the other varieties in terms of the effect that animacy has on the frequency and probabilities of grammatical phenomena

Identity in the London Indian diaspora: towards the quantification of qualitative data

For second-generation members of a diaspora community, ethnic and cultural affiliation are less straightforward than for the first generation. We compare information on identity construction in London's Indian Diaspora with the participants’ linguistic integration into the host community. Our study is novel and exploratory in that it combines quantitative, variationist methodology with a qualitative approach. We employ two standard sociolinguistic instruments to model subjects’ ethnic identity: a questionnaire and sociolinguistic interviews with a focus on discursive identity construction. In a second step we investigate possible connections between morphosyntactic variation and ethnic identity in language use data from three different communicative contexts. The results show that, while interview data on ethnic identity are amenable to quantification, clear correlations between the resulting identity scores and vernacular morphosyntactic features are difficult to find. In particular, patterns of style-shifting between the different communicative contexts are not as expected

Relative complexity in scientific discourse

Variation and change in relativization strategies are well documented. Previous studies have looked at issues such as (a) relativizer choice with respect to the semantics of the antecedent and type of relative, (b) prescriptive traditions, (c) variation across text types and regional varieties, and (d) the role that relative clauses play in the organization of information within the noun phrase. In this article, our focus is on scientific writing in British and American English. The addition of American scientific texts to the ARCHER corpus gives us the opportunity to compare scientific discourse in the two national varieties of English over the whole Late Modern period. Furthermore, ARCHER has been parsed, and this kind of syntactic annotation facilitates the retrieval of information that was previously difficult to obtain. We take advantage of new data and annotation to investigate two largely unrelated topics: relativizer choice and textual organization within the NP. First, parsing facilitates easy retrieval of relative clauses which were previously difficult to retrieve from plain-text corpora by automatic means, namely that- and zero relatives. We study the diachronic change in relativizer choice in British and American scientific writing over the last three hundred years; we also test for the accuracy of the automatically retrieved data. In addition, we trace the development of the prescriptive aversion to which in restrictive relatives (largely peculiar to American English). Second, the parsed data allow us to investigate development in the structure of the NP in this genre, including not only phrasal but also clausal modification of the head noun. We examine the contribution of relative clauses to NP complexity, sentence length and structure. Structural changes within the NP, we argue, are related to the increased professionalization of the scientific publication proces

The be‐ versus get‐passive alternation in world Englishes

Multifactorial studies of the be:get‐passive alternation are still rare. On the basis of the International Corpus of English, this is the first investigation to use mixed modelling for the passive alternation in world Englishes. Overall, our findings reveal that regional differences are far less important than language‐internal constraints, with Inner and Outer Circle varieties largely sharing a core grammar. Additionally, while there is qualitative evidence confirming the interchangeability of the two passive allostructions, our generalised‐mixed model reveals that the choice is still heavily influenced by the different semantic origins of the variants, evident not only in the adversative semantics of theget‐passive but also in a tendency to prefer human/animate subjects. The strong prescriptive reaction to the progressive passive in the Late Modern period, however, has not resulted in a marked preference forgetoverbein progressives in our data

A sisterhood of constructions? A structural priming approach to modelling links in the network of Objoid Constructions

A central aim of Construction Grammar is to model links within the construct-i-con. This paper investigates three constructions that share one property: an atypical element in the object slot. The constructions are therefore not proto- typically transitive. Structural priming (implemented with an automatic maze variant of self-paced reading) is used to test hypotheses on the relation among the Reaction Objoid (She smiled her thanks), the Cognate Objoid (She smiled a sweet smile or He told a sly tale), and the Superlative Objoid (She smiled her sweetest) Con- struction, and between two variants of the latter (They worked (at) their hardest). Results support transitivity as gradient: intransitive COCs prime the ROC and the SOC, whereas COCs with transitives only prime the ROC. For variants of the SOC, we find evidence of asymmetric priming with the bare SOC priming the at-SOC. Within-construction priming effects in the SOC are of greater magnitude than those with the at-SOC and the latter are weaker than those of the COC and of a rather different nature than those from the ROC. This suggests that speakers, rather than creating a constructeme between the bare and the at-SOC, store distinct but closely related constructions on a cline of transitivity

De stap van micro- naar macroniveau met computersimulaties

peer reviewedOp microniveau bestaat taal uit een interactie tussen een spreker en hoorder, schrijver en lezer of gebaarder en kijker. In één zo’n interactie is echter zelden sprake van veel taalvariatie en nauwelijks van taalverandering – zulke macrotendensen worden pas duidelijk zichtbaar wanneer je honderden of zelfs miljoenen interacties bekijkt. Toch vloeien de tendensen die we op macroniveau zien, fundamenteel voort uit het gedrag van taalgebruikers in individuele interacties. De theoretische stap van microniveau naar macroniveau is echter niet zo eenvoudig, zeker niet als je ervan uitgaat, zoals in de taalgebruiksgebaseerde taalkunde, dat er een rechtstreekse terugkoppeling bestaat tussen het taalgebruik van een individu en diens cognitieve taalvermogen (Bybee 2010). Dat betekent immers elke vorige interactie een invloed heeft op een volgende interactie. Hier kunnen agent-gebaseerde simulaties ons helpen (Gilbert 2008; Steels 2011; Beuls and Steels 2013). Agent-gebaseerde simulaties zijn computerprogramma’s waarbij interacties tussen ‘agents’ worden gemodelleerd. Die agents nemen afwisselend de rol op van taalproducent en taalontvanger, gedragen zich volgens eenvoudige regels, en passen hun interne ‘taalsysteem’ aan aan het taalgebruik waarmee ze geconfronteerd worden. Door miljoenen interacties tussen zulke agents te laten plaatsvinden, kan onderzocht worden hoe macrotendensen in hun taalgebruik ontstaan. We bespreken drie voorbeelden van het gebruik van deze simulaties, waarbij zowel taalvariatie als taalverandering aan bod komen. Het eerste betreft lectale contaminatie (Pijpops 2022). Dit is een tendens waarbij een groep taalgebruikers meer geneigd is een morfosyntactische variant te gebruiken die typisch is aan een andere groep, bij woorden die vaker gebruikt worden door die andere groep. Zo blijkt bijvoorbeeld dat Nederlanders vaker de “Belgische” variant zonder s van de partitieve genitief gebruiken bij woorden die verhoudingsgewijs vaker voorkomen bij Belgen dan bij Nederlanders, zoals iets speciaal(s) in (1). (1) Dat is iets speciaal(s), presenteren. Sta je met een microfoon in een wei terwijl de cameraploeg tweehonderd meter verder staat. (Sonar-id: WR-P-P-H-0000119078.p.8.s.4; Oostdijk et al. 2013) Het tweede voorbeeld betreft de opkomst van de zwakke vervoeging van de verleden tijd in de Germaanse talen (bv. loop ~ loopte Pijpops, Beuls & Van de Velde 2015, De Smet 2021). Hierbij is de vraag hoe deze jongere variant erin geslaagd is dominant te worden, hoewel zijn concurrent, de oudere sterke vervoeging (bv. loop ~ liep) initieel dominant en nog duidelijk regelmatig was. Ten slotte is het derde voorbeeld een simulatie van de Britse en Amerikaanse invloed op het Indiase en Filipijnse Engels (Hundt 2013; ). Specifiek gaan we in op de variatie tussen transitieve en prepositionele argumentconstructies, zoals in (2)-(3) (Hundt 1998). (2) She protested (against) the inhumane demolition of squatters' homes in the city. (ICE-id: ICE-PHI, S2B-023) ‘Ze protesteerde tegen de wrede sloop van krakerswoningen in de stad.’ (3) Uh the charterers sought leave to appeal (against) that decision… (ICE-id: ICE-GB, S2A-065) ‘Euh, de scheepsbevrachters vroegen verlof om die beslissing te contesteren.

Non-sexist Language Policy and the Rise (and Fall?) of Combined Pronouns in British and American Written English

This paper focuses on the use of combined pronouns (s/he, his or her, him/her, etc.) as an example of late twentieth-century non-sexist language reform which had an overt democratizing aim. Within the scope of second-wave feminism, the use of combined pronouns increased the visibility of women in discourse by encouraging the use of feminine pronouns (she, her, hers) alongside masculine pronouns (he, him, his). Despite their promotion, however, the use of combined pronouns is relatively rare. This paper uses the LOB and Brown families of corpora to diachronically and synchronically study patterns in the use of combined pronouns in written American (AmE) and British English (BrE) from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The analysis not only determines what forms these patterns take, but questions whether combined pronouns are influenced by (a combination of) syntax and/or semantics, and questions whether combined pronouns are really democratic at all