Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English: A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis ... in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs)

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.

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.

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. Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use linguistic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in spoken discourse. The book explores the determinants of this persistence in corpus data of spoken English, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. In providing a variationist-probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which different internal and external factors influence speakers' linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works. Frontmatter Contents Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Previous research on persistence phenomena Chapter 3 Method and data Chapter 4 Persistence in comparison strategy choice Chapter 5 Persistence in genitive choice Chapter 6 Persistence in future marker choice Chapter 7 Persistence in particle placement Chapter 8 Persistence in complementation strategy choice Chapter 9 Discussion of findings Chapter 10 Conclusion Backmatter Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. This book explores the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors.