Free Variation in Grammar : : Empirical and Theoretical Approaches.

"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-...

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Bibliographic Details
Superior document:Studies in Language Companion Series ; v.234
:
TeilnehmendeR:
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)
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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.