Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation

What explains variation in human language? How are linguistic and social factors related? How do we examine possible semantic differences between variants? These questions and many more are explored in this volume, which examines syntactic variables in a range of languages. It brings together a team of internationally acclaimed authors to provide perspectives on how and why syntax varies between and within speakers, focusing on explaining theoretical backgrounds and methods. The analyses presented are based on a range of languages, making it possible to address the questions from a cross-linguistic perspective. All chapters demonstrate rigorous quantitative analyses, which expose the conditioning factors in language change as well as offering important insights into community and individual grammars. It is essential reading for researchers and students with an interest in language variation and change, and the theoretical framework and methods applied in the study of how and why syntax varies.

Third Factors in Language Variation and Change

In this pioneering study, a world-renowned generative syntactician explores the impact of phenomena known as 'third factors' on syntactic change. Generative syntax has in recent times incorporated third factors – factors not specific to the language faculty – into its framework, including minimal search, labelling, determinacy and economy. Van Gelderen's study applies these principles to language change, arguing that change is a cyclical process, and that third factor principles must combine with linguistic information to fully account for the cyclical development of 'optimal' language structures. Third Factor Principles also account for language variation around that-trace phenomena, CP-deletion, and the presence of expletives and Verb-second. By linking insights from recent theoretical advances in generative syntax to phenomena from language variation and change, this book provides a unique perspective, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students in syntactic theory and historical linguistics.

Heritage Tagalog Phonology and a Variationist Framework of Language Contact

Heritage language variation and change provides an opportunity to examine the interplay of contact-induced and language-internal effects while extending the variationist framework beyond monolingual speakers and majority languages. Using data from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project, we illustrate this with a case study of Tagalog (r), which varies between tap, trill, and approximant variants. Nearly 3000 tokens of (r)-containing words were extracted from a corpus of spontaneous speech of 23 heritage speakers in Toronto and 9 homeland speakers in Manila. Intergenerational and intergroup analyses were conducted using mixed-effects modeling. Results showed greater use of the approximant among second-generation (GEN2) heritage speakers and those that self-report using English more. In addition, the distributional patterns remain robust and the approximant appears in more contexts. We argue that these patterns reflect an interplay between internal and external processes of change. We situate these findings within a framework for distinguishing sources of variation in heritage languages: internal change, identity marking and transfer from the dominant language.

Heritage Language Variation and Change – How Complex Is It?

We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach that examines variable aspects of language (that is, different ways of saying the same thing). Arguably, variable elements are harder to acquire than categorical ones, as a Variability Matrix must be acquired along with every element. This matrix contains probabilistic information about when each form is (more) appropriate, according to an array of factors. These include inter-speaker (social) and intra-speaker (linguistic context) predictors. We ask how the Variability Matrix for predictors of a variable compares between heritage speakers (people living in a context where their language is a minority language) and homeland speakers (people living in a context where their language is a majority language), and how these can fairly be compared. In the variationist approach, multivariate regression analyses reveal the predictors (and levels within each predictor) of a response or dependent variable and their corresponding Variability Matrices. However, the variationist field lacks an established comparative methodology to determine how/if varieties differ. One shortcoming is that different-sized samples are often compared, implicating different levels of statistical significance even when the populations’ patterns are identical. Comparison of variable patterns in Heritage and Homeland Cantonese illustrates one solution. We revise analyses conducted previously of two morphosyntactic variables: prodrop and classifiers (Nagy, 2015; Nagy & Lo, 2019) in Cantonese, applying a bootstrap procedure to mitigate issues associated with unequal-sized datasets frequent in studies of minority and endangered varieties. From these analyses, we learn that heritage and homeland grammars’ degrees of complexity are similar: the matrices of (significant) frequencies are the same size. This approach allows us to consider not just which surface forms constitute the heritage vs. homeland varieties, but also the complexity of the decision-making process the speakers apply in selecting among the forms. As one might expect, heritage and homeland speakers are capable of equally complex processes.

Variation and change in idiolects: Tracing a lexical substitution inside a psychiatric hospital around 1900

This paper presents a case study on the lexical substitution of Wärter (‘guard’) by Pfleger (‘nurse’) in records from a southern German psychiatric hospital around 1900. Its goal is to shed light on language variation and change from the perspective of idiolects. Therefore, I analyse how this change, implemented by official documents in 1876, spreads ‘from above’ into the written language of 108 patients and 10 family members. The results show a quick implementation of the new variant, comprising its semantic generalization and the near-complete replacement of the older variant. This process can sometimes be observed in individual lifespan changes, while other writers continue using Wärter in idiosyncratic ways. Finally, a comparison with two more general corpora (DWDS and Google Books) shows that this lexical change appears delayed and less consistent outside the hospital context.

Language variation and change in the formation of Greek superlative constructions

This paper addresses variation and change in the realization of superlative constructions in the light of the evidence provided by Modern Greek dialectal variation as a window into the study of the organization of grammar. Dialectal data show that analyticity prevails in the realization of relative comparative constructions, while absolute ones seem to resist more persistently due to their high relevance with another morphological category, evaluative intensification. Our findings argue in favour of the strong interplay among all three processes, viewed as realizations of the conceptual category of gradation, accounted for in terms of a continuum. The proposed organization captures the strong interplay between intensification and absolute superlatives on the one hand, while relative and absolute superlative formations on the other. On a theoretical level, this account could contribute further to important issues such as the controversial status of comparison and evaluation in grammar, which may differ cross-linguistically, suggesting that a combined account of the three processes might prove more adequate.

Embedding in Shawi narrations: A quantitative analysis of embedding in a post-colonial Amazonian indigenous society

In this article, we provide the first quantitative account of the frequent use of embedding in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian Northwestern Amazonia. We collected a corpus of ninety-two Frog Stories (Mayer 1969) from three different field sites in 2015 and 2016. Using the glossed corpus as our data, we conducted a generalised mixed model analysis, where we predicted the use of embedding with several macrosocial variables, such as gender, age, and education level. We show that bilingualism (Amazonian Spanish-Shawi) and education, mostly restricted by complex gender differences in Shawi communities, play a significant role in the establishment of linguistic preferences in narration. Moreover, we argue that the use of embedding reflects the impact of the mestizo1 society from the nineteenth century until today in Santa Maria de Cahuapanas, reshaping not only Shawi demographics but also linguistic practices. (Post-colonial societies, Amazonian linguistics, Kawapanan, Shawi, embedding, language variation and change, contact linguistics)*

First-Person Plural Subject Pronoun Expression in Mexican Spanish Spoken in Georgia

Variationist research on subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish typically incorporates all grammatical persons/numbers into the same analysis, with important exceptions such as studies focusing exclusively on first-person singular (e.g., Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess & Edward J Rubin (eds.), Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), 329–349. Amsterdam, Salt Lake City: Benjamins 2004; Travis, Catherine E. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19. 101–135; Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 711–748), third-person singular (Shin, Naomi Lapidus. 2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change 26. 303–330), and third-person plural subjects (Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005. Overt nonspecific ellos in Spanish in New York. Spanish in Context 2(2). 157–174). The current study is the first variationist analysis (to the best of my knowledge) to focus solely on first-person plural SPE. It is well-established that nosotros/nosotras exhibits one of the lowest rates of SPE relative to the other persons/numbers; however, factors conditioning its variation are less understood. Conversational corpus data from Mexican Spanish are employed to examine tokens of first-person plural SPE (n=660) in terms of frequency and constraints, incorporating factors such as TMA, switch reference, and verb class in logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that nosotros, like other subjects, is strongly impacted by switch reference and tense-mood-aspect (TMA). However, the TMA effect is unique in that preterit aspect is shown to favor overt nosotros relative to other TMAs, diverging from previous studies. Furthermore, verb class — a factor found to be repeatedly significant in the literature — is inoperative for nosotros. These results suggest that nosotros does not respond to the same factors as other persons/numbers. Additionally, the findings lend support to researchers regarding the importance of studying individual persons/numbers in subject variation research.