Variation, change and constructions in English

Hoffmann, Thomas; Trousdale, Graeme

doi:10.1515/cogl.2011.001

Cited by 76 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…As pointed out by Geeraerts (2006: 30), doing corpus research implies coming to terms with variation in the data, as bringing in real language data automatically brings in sociolinguistic variation. In addition to the above-mentioned studies, we can also refer to Hoffmann and Trousdale (2010), Fried (2013), Östman and Trousdale (2013) and Hollmann (2013) for further discussion of the ways in which and reasons why construction grammar is particularly suited to deal with the inherent variability of language.…”

Section: Constructions In Variation and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

1. Constructions all the way everywhere: Four new directions in constructionist research

Boogaart¹,

Colleman²,

Rutten³

2014

Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar

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Section: Constructions In Variation and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

1. Constructions all the way everywhere: Four new directions in constructionist research

Boogaart¹,

Colleman²,

Rutten³

2014

Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar

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“…In so doing, we link up with recent developments in cognitive linguistics, where a "social turn" has been argued for (Croft 2000(Croft , 2009 Kristiansen and Dirven 2008; Geeraerts, Kristiansen, and Peirsman 2010;Harder 2010;Hoffmann and Trousdale 2011). In so doing, we link up with recent developments in cognitive linguistics, where a "social turn" has been argued for (Croft 2000(Croft , 2009 Kristiansen and Dirven 2008; Geeraerts, Kristiansen, and Peirsman 2010;Harder 2010;Hoffmann and Trousdale 2011).…”

mentioning

confidence: 86%

7. Social and constructional diffusion: Relative clauses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

Rutten¹,

Wal²

2014

Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar

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In this paper, we discuss a significant change in the morphosyntax of Dutch, arguing that bringing together evidence from (historical) sociolinguistic and constructional analyses advances our understanding of language variation and change. In so doing, we link up with recent developments in cognitive linguistics, where a "social turn" has been argued for (Croft 2000(Croft , 2009 Kristiansen and Dirven 2008; Geeraerts, Kristiansen, and Peirsman 2010;Harder 2010;Hoffmann and Trousdale 2011). The change under discussion concerns the rise of w-relativizers such as waar 'where' at the expense of d-relativizers such as daar 'lit. there, where'. The change will be introduced in more detail in section 2. In section 3, we discuss previous research, and formulate two hypotheses following suggestions in the literature. First, we hypothesize that the change is a so-called change from above in the social sense, that is a change that spreads from the upper ranks of society to the lower ranks. Second, we hypothesize that the change spreads from construction to construction. We assume, therefore, that the change exhibits diffusion in at least two ways: social and constructional. We will use a socially stratified corpus of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century private letters to investigate this. The corpus will be introduced in section 4. In sections 5 and 6, we argue that both social and constructional diffusion can indeed be found in the change from dto w-relativization. Section 5 shows that w-relativizers are more in use in letters from the upper ranks of society than in letters from the lower ranks. The private letters in our corpora are characterized by a great number of epistolary formulae. In section 6, we will argue that these formulae can be considered as constructions in the sense of construction grammar, after which we will show that w-relativizers appear to spread from formula to formula, that is from construction to construction. In section 7, we discuss the results, and moreover argue that a constructional approach may gain from sociolinguistic analyses.Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 7/28/15 5:12 AM 1 http://www.datingwebsites.nl/reviews/second-love/ 2 http://forums.marokko.nl/archive/index.php/t-1459274%2520%253C/t-1703877-p-3.html 182 Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke van der Wal Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 7/28/15 5:12 AM 6 http://www.dutchdivas.net/sopranen/raymonde_serverius.html 7 http://www.allaboutworldview.org/dutch/bestaat-de-hel.htm 8 A recent syntactic atlas of Dutch dialects shows that the locative relative in De bank waar ze op zaten was pas geverfd 'The bench that they were sitting on had just been painted' is mostly realized as a w-form (267 locations), d-forms (33 locations) being largely restricted to the Dutch provinces of North Brabant and Friesland (SAND 2005, map 88b). As noted in the commentary to the maps (p. 77), it is striking that there are hardly any dialects with solely d-forms. In other words, in dialects wh...

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“…CxG views language as a set of symbolic form-meaning mappings (Goldberg 2006;Langacker 2008). There is a large body of research using CxG to represent linguistic structure (e.g., Kay and Fillmore 1999) and studying variation and change using CxG representations (e.g., Claes 2014;Gisborne 2011;Goldberg 2011;Hoffmann and Trousdale 2011;Hollmann and Siewierska 2011;Uiboaed et al 2013). The advantage of CxG from the perspective of dialectometry is that, while constructions do contain relations between their internal slots, they remain countable entities as a whole.…”

Section: Construction Grammar Induction To Discover Potential Variantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding variants for construction-based dialectometry: A corpus-based approach to regional CxGs

Dunn

2018

Cognitive Linguistics

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This paper develops a construction-based dialectometry capable of identifying previously unknown constructions and measuring the degree to which a given construction is subject to regional variation. The central idea is to learn a grammar of constructions (a CxG) using construction grammar induction and then to use these constructions as features for dialectometry. This offers a method for measuring the aggregate similarity between regional CxGs without limiting in advance the set of constructions subject to variation. The learned CxG is evaluated on how well it describes held-out test corpora while dialectometry is evaluated on how well it can model regional varieties of English. The method is tested using two distinct datasets: First, the International Corpus of English representing eight outer circle varieties; Second, a web-crawled corpus representing five inner circle varieties. Results show that the method (1) produces a grammar with stable quality across sub-sets of a single corpus that is (2) capable of distinguishing between regional varieties of English with a high degree of accuracy, thus (3) supporting dialectometric methods for measuring the similarity between varieties of English and (4) measuring the degree to which each construction is subject to regional variation. This is important for cognitive sociolinguistics because it operationalizes the idea that competition between constructions is organized at the functional level so that dialectometry needs to represent as much of the available functional space as possible.

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Variation, change and constructions in English

Cited by 76 publications

References 49 publications

1. Constructions all the way everywhere: Four new directions in constructionist research

1. Constructions all the way everywhere: Four new directions in constructionist research

7. Social and constructional diffusion: Relative clauses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

Finding variants for construction-based dialectometry: A corpus-based approach to regional CxGs

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