Free Variation in Grammar : : Empirical and Theoretical Approaches.

• Superior document: Studies in Language Companion Series ; v.234
• Author: Kopf, Kristin.
• TeilnehmendeR: Weber, Thilo.
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam/Philadelphia : : John Benjamins Publishing Company,, 2023.; ©2023.
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Language Companion Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (360 pages)

"Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable - or 'free' - grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Maya"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Free Variation in Grammar -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of contents -- Chapter 1 Free variation, unexplained variation? -- On the history of 'free variation' -- Free variation -- Investigating free variation -- This volume -- Identifying and measuring free variation -- Free variation and language change -- Free variation? Look harder! -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Section 1 Identifying and measuring free variation -- Chapter 2 How free is the position of German object pronouns? -- 1. Introduction -- 2. What governs the position of object pronouns? -- 3. Experiments 1-3 -- 3.1 Experiment 1 -- 3.1.1 Method -- Participants -- Materials -- Procedure -- Scoring -- 3.1.2 Results -- 3.1.3 Discussion -- 3.2 Experiment 2 -- 3.2.1 Method -- Participants -- Materials -- Procedure -- 3.2.2 Results -- 3.2.3 Discussion -- 3.3 Experiment 3 -- 3.3.1 Method -- Participants -- Materials -- Procedure -- 3.3.2 Results -- 3.3.3 Discussion -- 4. General discussion -- References -- Chapter 3 Optionality in the syntax of Germanic traditional dialects -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Non-true optionality (Level 2) -- 2.1 Apparent optionality -- 2.2 Evidence of apparent optionality -- 2.3 Interim summary -- 2.4 False optionality -- 2.5 Evidence of false optionality -- 2.6 Discussion and interim summary -- 3. True optionality -- 3.1 Evidence of true optionality -- 3.2 The simple negation/negative spread alternation from a diachronic perspective -- 4. Summary -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Chapter 4 Non-verbal plural number agreement. Between the distributive plural and singular -- 1. Introduction, structure and relevance of the chapter -- 1.1 Distributive plural in the literature -- 1.2 The distributive plural - the general norm and blocking factors -- 1.2.1 Avoidance of ambiguity -- 1.2.2 Fossilisation/the force of invariability.

1.2.3 Singularisation to achieve generalisation -- 1.2.4 Countability-related factor(s) -- 1.2.5 The wish to indicate joint possession -- 1.2.6 The wish to convey ideas of a figurative, abstract or universal kind -- 1.2.7 Do blocking factors always block? -- 1.2.8 Classification of blocking factors according to their strength -- 2. Free variation -- 3. The distributive plural and singular displayed by selected expressions in English corpora -- 3.1 Methodology -- 3.2 Results -- 3.2.1 Results -- 3.2.2 Results -- 3.3 Comparison of the datasets -- 4. Genre and free variation -- 5. Conclusions -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Language corpora &amp -- dictionaries -- Software -- Chapter 5 'Optional' direct objects: Free variation? -- 1. Human behaviour, flying saucers and the afterlife, or -- 2. Modelling variation -- 2.1 Rules for allophones in free and complementary distribution -- 2.2 Polysemy, polymorphy and partially equivalent distribution -- 3. Valency, constructions and optional complements -- 3.1 Verbs between polysemy and polymorphy -- 3.2 Optional direct objects -- 3.2.1 'Topic drop' -- 3.2.2 'Lexical ellipses' -- 3.2.3 'DNI' vs 'INI' -- 3.2.4 Non-lexical DNI -- 4. Empirical study -- 4.1 Methods -- 4.2 Do activity templates license valency reductions? -- 4.2.1 Setting -- 4.2.2 Results -- 5. Conclusion -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Appendix A. Cover sheet of questionnaire no. 35, incl. translations and comments -- Appendix B. Results -- Section 2 Free variation and language change -- Chapter 6 Variation and change in the Aanaar Saami conditional perfect -- 1. Introduction -- 1.1 The Saami conditional and its perfect -- 1.2 Data and methods of the present study -- 2. The Aanaar Saami conditional perfect and its variation across the data -- 3. Possible determinants of the variation -- 3.1 Person and number -- 3.2 Main verb.

3.3 Type of clause -- 3.4 Polarity -- 3.5 Dialect -- 3.6 Speaker generation -- 3.7 Significance and interplay of the variables -- 4. Discussion -- 5. Conclusion -- Abbreviations -- References -- Sources of data and examples -- Chapter 7 Stability of inflectional variation -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Varying forms -- 2.1 Morphological variation -- 2.2 Overabundance -- 2.3 Free morphological variation -- 2.4 Excursus - phonological variation -- 3. Phenomenon -- 3.1 The Swiss German indefinite article -- 3.2 dat.masc/neutr of the indefinite article in Zurich German -- 3.3 Zurich German -- 4. Corpus study -- 4.1 Data and data collection -- 4.2 Data analysis and results -- 4.2.1 Findings in the historical corpus -- 4.2.2 Findings in the modern corpus -- 4.2.3 Intrapersonal variation -- 5. Emergence of emene and of overabundance -- 6. Results -- 7. Summary -- Bibliography -- Chapter 8 Resemanticising 'free' variation -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Development of the V1 conditional in West Germanic -- 3. Methods -- 3.1 Coding and behaviour properties of conditional clauses -- 3.2 Corpus -- 3.3 Operationalisation -- 3.4 Model building -- 4. Results -- 4.1 Semantic and syntactic effects -- 4.2 Lexical effects -- 5. Discussion and conclusion -- Funding -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Appendix -- Section 3 Free variation? Look harder! -- Chapter 9 Syntactic priming and individual preferences -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Persistence and individual variation -- 3. The case study -- 3.1 Data -- 3.2 Persistence as a predictor of the variation between -ra and -se -- 3.3 Modelling the influence of individual preferences -- 3.4 Discussion of results -- 4. Conclusions -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Chapter 10 Optionality, variation and categorial properties -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Plural marking in Yucatec -- 3. Variation unexplained.

3.1 Morphosyntactic analysis of the Yucatec plural marker -- 3.2 Interpretation of the plural morpheme -- 3.2.1 Degree of animacy -- 3.2.2 Argument structure -- 3.2.3 Numerical quantification -- 3.3 Not a case of free variation -- 4. The condition of the variation -- 4.1 Individuation and (pseudo-)partitivity -- 4.2 Analysis -- 4.3 Compositionality -- 4.3.1 Pluralised nouns -- 4.3.2 Numeral-classifiers with bare nouns -- 4.3.3 Numeral classifiers with pluralised nouns -- 5. Further discussion -- 6. Conclusion -- Funding -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- References -- Chapter 11 Variation of deontic constructions in spoken Catalan -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Free variation in language -- 3. Deontic verbal constructions in Catalan -- 3.1 Catalan deontic constructions and linguistic factors -- 3.2 Sociolinguistic factors and variation in Catalan -- 4. Methodology -- 5. Results -- 6. Discussion of results and possible future lines of research -- 7. Can variationist linguistics prove the (non)existence of free variation? -- 8. Conclusion -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Index.