The social embedding of a syntactic alternation: Variable particle placement in Ontario English

Abstract

The present work investigates the effects of social constraints on word order variation in particle placement in Ontario English, Canada. While previous research has documented numerous linguistic factors conditioning the choice of variant, social correlates have so far remained unexplored. To address this gap, we analyze 6,047 variable phrasal verbs from the vernacular speech of six communities in Ontario. These data were coded for length of the direct object, verb semantics, community, and the individual's education, gender, age, and occupation. Our analyses confirm previous findings that variation in particle placement is predominantly determined by direct object length. However, we also expose significant social and geographic factors, and importantly an effect of age, with younger speakers using the joined variant more than older speakers. Further analysis confirms that the latter effect is consistent across communities, indicating a change in progress, possibly due to ongoing grammaticalization of particles in the verb phrase.

Dialectal differences and linguistic divergence: A cross-linguistic survey of grammatical variation

“…For example, although English particle verb order is primarily driven by phonology, the centuries of separation between American and British Englishes have facilitated a divergence of frequencies. Both American and British Englishes are slowly increasing their frequency of VOP, to the detriment of VPO, but this change is slightly more advanced in Britain (Haddican et al 2020;Röthlisberger & Tagliamonte 2020). This is a kind of slow-moving, stochastic dialectal drift, which appears to be facilitated by reduced social contact, rather than being driven by group interaction and social signalling.…”

“…Basic constituent order (SOV, OVS etc) is variable in many languages, where it is generally influenced by information structure (Payne 1992). English particle placement (as in 16) is primarily influenced by the phonological weight of the object NP (Haddican et al 2020;Röthlisberger & Tagliamonte 2020). In Tagalog, variable ordering of nouns with adjective modifiers has been shown to be strongly influenced by phonotactics at word boundaries (Shih & Zuraw 2017).…”

Social role effects on English particle verb variation fail to replicate

“…Longer, prosodically “heavier” objects, which may also be more complex (see Wasow 1997, Wasow and Arnold 2011 for discussion of endweight), tend to occur at the ends of clauses. We operationalize object length as number of orthographic words (following Gries 2003, Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi 2018, see also Röthlisberger and Tagliamonte 2020), ranging from one to four.…”

“…Kroch and Small's findings have been influential. They continue to be cited in discussions of the role of prescriptive norms and standard language ideology in conditioning language variation (Romaine 1981, Irvine 1985, Guy and Bayley 1995, Johnstone and Bean 1997, Cameron 2000, Díaz-Peralta and Almeida 2000, Bresnan and Ford 2010, D'Arcy and Tagliamonte 2010, Adli 2013, Wiechmann and Lohmann 2013, Bouchard 2018, in literature reviews of the English verbparticle alternation (Gorlach 2004, Bleaman 2020, Haddican, Johnson, Wallenberg, et al 2020, Röthlisberger and Tagliamonte 2020, and in considerations of the question of whether syntactic variation more generally can be sensitive to social factors (Meyerhoff 2000, Röthlisberger andTagliamonte 2020). On this latter point, there is a large literature proposing or asserting that syntactic variation is unlikely to show social conditioning (see Levon and Buchstaller 2015 for a recent review); Kroch and Small's host/guest vs. caller difference is sometimes held up as a counterexample to this (Cheshire 1987, Meyerhoff 1997, Meyerhoff 2000, Röthlisberger and Tagliamonte 2020.…”

“…The lasting influence of their findings notwithstanding, Kroch and Small were careful to point out the need to replicate their study with more data and with multivariate analysis (1978: 51). There has been considerable recent large-scale corpus work on the particle verb alternation which has demonstrated that it has robust social correlates, including register, regional variety, speaker age, and social class (Gries 2003; Haddican and Johnson 2012; Röthlisberger and Tagliamonte 2020). Here, we ask: Can Kroch and Small's host/guest vs. caller difference be replicated on a larger data set using more modern statistical methods?…”