In this lecture we will approach the study of language variation from the perspective of usage-based construction grammar. In the usage-based approach, grammar is a dynamic system of emergent categories and constructions that are in principle always changing under the continuous influence of domain-general cognitive processes. The dynamic view of grammar poses new challenges to grammatical theory and casts a fresh light on the study of language variation. The first part of the lecture provides an overview of recent developments in usage-based construction grammar (Diessel 2019). There is growing consensus among usage-based linguists that linguistic structure is best analyzed in terms of self-organizing networks. Combining evidence from linguistics with research in cognitive psychology, I propose specific network analyses for the following phenomena: argument structure, word classes, syntactic constituency, and grammatical paradigms. In the second part of the lecture, we will focus on a key concept of usage-based construction grammar, i.e. the notion of construction family. A construction family is an open-ended group, or network, of similar constructions that influence each other in language use and change. Examples of construction families include argument-structure constructions, questions, and subordinate clauses. Using data from a large typological database of subordinate clauses, I will illustrate how the notion of construction family can help to better understand cross-linguistic variation in the domain of adverbial subordination and relative clauses. Participants who would like to read up on usage-based construction grammar in advance might want to take a look at Diessel (2020).
References
Diessel, H. 2019. The Grammar Network. How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diessel, H. 2020. A dynamic network approach to the study of syntax. Frontiers in Psychology 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.604853
In this lecture we will first examine some basics of Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018) and multimodal interaction analysis (e.g., Streeck 2009, Mondada 2014, Goodwin 2017). We will then apply the principles of this theoretical approach to a case study investigating one type of clause-combining comparatively across languages.
In the case study, we will examine a multimodal, interactional linguistic analysis based on recordings of casual spoken interactions in several languages, focusing on complex clausal structures that have traditionally been regarded as pseudo-clefts (Maschler, Pekarek Doehler, Lindström, & Keevallik, forthc.; De Stefani, Lindström, & Maschler, in press). In line with existing research (Hopper 2001, Pekarek Doehler 2011, Maschler & Fishman 2020), we argue that, rather than constituting the first part of a bi-clausal structure, the A-parts pertain to a continuum of pseudo-cleft-like constructions, ranging from canonical A+B variants to free-standing A-parts. In the latter case, Part A is a projecting construction (Auer 2005): it occurs without any syntactic link to subsequent talk, serving to frame the following talk as an action/event/rephrasal or to display the speaker’s stance towards his/her upcoming talk. We show that this projecting construction has become grammatically and lexically sedimented for specific interactional purposes in a similar fashion across four languages from different (sub)families – Hebrew (Semitic), French (Romance), Swedish (Germanic), and Estonian (Finno-Ugric) – although ‘full’ grammaticization has been realized to differing extents. We further show that speakers’ co-occurring embodied conduct manifests some consistencies across the four languages as a function of the sequential contexts in which the construction appears. When Part A occurs at a major frame shift (Goffman 1981), it tends to be accompanied by a prominent shift in bodily-visual conduct.
Systematic analysis of such occurrences across the four languages sheds new light on cross-linguistic consistencies in the grammaticization of projecting constructions and on the interface of embodied conduct and emergent grammar (Hopper 1987).
References
Auer, P. 2005. Projection in interaction and projection in grammar. Text 25. 7-36.
Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. 2018. Interactional Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Stefani, E., Lindström, J., and Maschler, Y. (eds.). In press. Pseudo-Clefts from a Comparative Pragmatic Typological Perspective. Special issue of Lingua (6 articles).
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodwin, C. 2017. Co-Operative Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hopper, P. J. 1987. Emergent grammar. In J. Aske, N. Beery, L. Michaelis & H. Filip (eds.), Proceedings of the thirteenth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 139-157. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Hopper, P. J. 2001. Grammatical constructions and their discourse origins: Prototype or family resemblance? In M. Pütz, S. Neimeier & R. Dirven (eds.), Applied Cognitive Linguistics I: Theory and Language Acquisition, 109-129. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Maschler, Y. & Fishman, S. 2020. From multi-clausality to discourse markerhood: The Hebrew ma she- ‘what that’ construction in pseudo-cleft-like structures. Journal of Pragmatics 159. 73-97.
Maschler, Y., Pekarek Doehler, S., Lindström, J., and Keevallik, L. Forthc. A pragmatic typological study of Hebrew, French, Swedish, and Estonian pseudo-cleft-like constructions: The syntax-lexicon-prosody-body interface.
Mondada, L. 2014. The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 65. 137–156.
Pekarek Doehler, S. 2011. Clause-combining and the sequencing of actions: Projector constructions in French talk-in-interaction. In R. Laury & R. Suzuki (eds.), Subordination in Conversation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, 103-148. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Streeck, J. 2009. Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
The lecture focuses on the fundamental concepts of Variationist Sociolinguistics. Its approach rests on the observation that speakers engage in choices to express a given referential meaning or grammatical function in discourse and recognizes variability as an inherent property of speech. The key theoretical construct, the linguistic variable (Labov 1972), involves two or more alternating variants. This variable behaviour is not random but rather structured and governed by multiple linguistic and social factors. We will examine how the underlying structure of variability is discerned from examination of variants distribution and their variable conditioning.
The case study involves the emergence and the structure of the quotative être comme (‘be like’) in Canadian French, more specifically the variety spoken in Ottawa-Gatineau, the national capital region of Canada. The quotative system is often considered as the locus of rampant variability and innovation. We will situate the candidate for change (être comme) within the wider variable system in which it is emerging and we will adduce any real- and apparent-time evidence to demonstrate what has changed. Our focus is on vernacular speech, widely regarded as providing the most systematic data for linguistic analysis. Two corpora were examined: a sample of 23 speakers collected in 2014 and a sample of 15 speakers collected in 2019, which yield a total of 1,405 tokens. These corpora were stratified by age and sex and offered an important window on the social embedding of variation and change. These datasets, each containing an apparent-time component, were used to: (i) identify patterns of quotative variation; (ii) probe evidence of linguistic change; and (iii) trace the trajectory of change by operationalizing measures of advanced grammaticalization (e.g., using grammatical person, content of the quote, etc.).
We demonstrate and discuss (i) how each speaker alternates amongst two or more variants, but will manifest an overall pattern consistent with that of the speech community; (ii) how this conditioning can be used as a benchmark for comparison, be it diachronic, cross-linguistic, cross-variety, etc.; and (iii) how the conditioning can elucidate a wide variety of linguistic issues (e.g., the acquisition of linguistic competence in L2; grammaticalization; the trajectory of a linguistic change; etc.).
References
Digesto, S. (2021) Lexicalization and Social Meaning of the Italian Subjunctive. Cadernos de Linguística, v. 2, n. 3, p. e609.
Levey, S., Kastronic, L., Digesto, S., & Chiasson, M. (2022). Quotative Variation and Change in French with Additional Insights from Brazilian Portuguese and Italian. In E. Peterson, T. Hiltunen, & J. Kern (Eds.), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change: Theory, Innovations, Contact (pp. 61-82). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poplack, S. (2012). Grammaticalization and linguistic variation. In B. Heine & H. Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (pp. 209-224). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tagliamonte, S. (2006). Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In this lecture, I demonstrate how to study emerging changes in language. The data come from an archive of socially stratified vernacular speech from people born 1870’s to 2001’s. Because the archive also comprises varying social characteristics and different types of communities, the analyst is able to study emerging language changes from different perspectives. Comparative sociolinguistics (Tagliamonte, 2002) and variationist analysis (Tagliamonte, 2006; 2013) provide the theoretical approach and methodological toolkit, offering a practical means to understand linguistic patterns.
The case study is a 20th century development, discourse-pragmatic wait, (1), with origins in adverbial collocations such as wait a minute, (2) and other variants, hold on, (3).
(1) Wait, are Craig and I invited to dinner? (F, 24)
(2) Ah not thirty-thousand wait a minute it wasn’t that much. (M, 72)
(3) Now hold on a second here, I treated your family good. (M, 44)
Following a step by step process that builds from diverse lines of evidence: historical sources, regional diffusion and social categories I demonstrate the development of discourse pragmatic wait. Older people use more of the fully specified variants, wait a minute/wait a second and hold on is a low frequency, stable alternative that is favoured among men. Cross-community patterns show retention of the adverbial collocations in small, rural places and an increase of the variants with wait alone in large towns and urban centres, particularly among speakers born after 1973, and women lead its advance. These social trends are consistent with well-known principles of linguistic change (Labov 2001) converging with historical trends and regional diffusion. Taken together, the evidence points to an interpretation of ongoing grammatical change: wait is developing from a verb with temporal specification to a full-fledged discourse-pragmatic marker on the left periphery (Tagliamonte, 2021) and continues to advance in contemporary usage and social media.
References
Tagliamonte, S. A. 2002. Comparative sociolinguistics. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill & N. Schilling-Estes (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change, 729-763. Malden / Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Tagliamonte, S. A. 2006. Analysing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tagliamonte, S. A. 2013. Analysing and interpreting variation in the sociolinguistic tradition. In M. Krug & J. Schlüter (eds.), Research Methods in Language Variation and Change, 382-401. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tagliamonte, S. A. 2021. Wait, it’s a new English discourse marker. American Speech 96(3). 424-449.
Theories and approach
The lecture distills key findings and methodological innovations from a research project entitled “Exploring probabilistic grammar(s) in varieties of English around the world” based at the KU Leuven (see Szmrecsanyi et al. 2016 for a programmatic sketch). The lecture adopts the variationist methodology and takes a particular interest in how people choose between different ways of saying the same thing. But in so doing, the lecture breaks new ground by marrying the spirit of probabilistic grammar research (which posits that grammatical knowledge is experience-based and partially probabilistic) to research along the lines of the English world-wide paradigm (which is concerned with the dialectology and sociolinguistics of post-colonial English-speaking communities around the world). The big objective is to understand the plasticity of probabilistic knowledge of English grammar, on the part of language users with diverse regional and cultural backgrounds: how different are the ways a speaker of, say, British English chooses between different ways of saying the same thing (e.g. look up the word versus look the word up) from how a speaker of, say, Canadian English chooses?
Case study
As a case study, we will investigate the probabilistic conditioning of the genitive alternation in nine varieties of English, based on the dataset originally analyzed in Heller et al. (2017). Dataset & R code will be made available prior to the lecture.
References
Heller, B., Szmrecsanyi, B. & Grafmiller, J. 2017. Stability and Fluidity in Syntactic Variation World-Wide: The Genitive Alternation Across Varieties of English. Journal of English Linguistics 45(1). 3-27. https://doi.org/10/gf7nv8
Szmrecsanyi, B., Grafmiller, J., Heller, B. & Röthlisberger, M. 2016. Around the world in three alternations: Modeling syntactic variation in varieties of English. English World-Wide 37(2). 109-137. https://doi.org/10/gf7ntq
The inherent variability of language has been long acknowledged and described in sociolinguistics and usage-based linguistics (see the other lectures in this spring school). Yet, in some domains, such as typology, the predominant type of data remains qualitative (categorical), which not only leads to lower precision, but also restricts the linguistic phenomena that can be investigated (Wälchli 2009). Despite many practical challenges, I will argue for a gradient approach in typology (Levshina, Namboodiripad et al., In press), which can capture language variation. More specifically, I will discuss token-based typology, which involves corpora. This approach gives us an opportunity to capture new and fine-tune old cross-linguistic generalizations, and to understand better the cognitive and communicative motivations behind them (Levshina 2022).
In my lecture I will first provide a brief overview of available corpora that can be used for token-based typology. Next, I will show how to model linguistic variability with the help of diverse statistical, probability-theoretic and information-theoretic measures, such as conditional probabilities, Shannon’s entropy, Kullback-Leibler divergence and mutual information (Levshina 2019; Levshina and Hawkins 2022). Finally, I will demonstrate how to use these variables in order to test typological universals and formulate new causal hypotheses in a form of causal graphs. These methods will be illustrated by a case study of the relationships between word order variation, case marking and semantic tightness in diverse languages.
References for preparatory reading
Main:
Levshina, N. 2019. Token-based typology and word order entropy: A study based on universal dependencies. Linguistic Typology 23(3). 533-572. doi:10.1515/lingty-2019-0025.
Additional:
Levshina, N. 2022. Corpus-based typology: Applications, challenges and some solutions. Linguistic Typology 26(1). 129-160. doi:10.1515/lingty-2020-0118.
Levshina, N., & Hawkins, J. A. 2022. Verb-argument lability and its correlations with other typological parameters. A quantitative corpus-based study. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2(1). 94-120. doi:10.6092/issn.2785-0943/13861.
Levshina, N., Namboodiripad, S., Allassonnière-Tang, M., Kramer, M., Talamo, L., Verkerk, A., Wilmoth, S., Garrido Rodriguez, G., Gupton, T.M., Kidd, E., Liu, Z., Naccarato, C., Nordlinger, R., Panova, A., Stoynova, N. In press. Why we need a gradient approach to word order. To appear in Linguistics.
Wälchli, B. 2009. Data Reduction Typology and the Bimodal Distribution Bias. Linguistic Typology 13(1). 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1515/LITY.2009.004.