Free Variation in Grammar : Empirical and Theoretical Approaches.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kopf, Kristin.

Contributor:

Weber, Thilo.

Series:

Studies in Language Companion Series

Studies in Language Companion Series ; v.234

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and languages--Variation.

Language and languages.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Morphosyntax.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (360 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam/Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2023.

Summary:

"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.

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

3.2.2 Results

3.2.3 Discussion

3.3 Experiment 3

3.3.1 Method

3.3.2 Results

3.3.3 Discussion

4. General discussion

Chapter 3 Optionality in the syntax of Germanic traditional dialects

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

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

3.3 Comparison of the datasets

4. Genre and free variation

5. Conclusions

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

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

1.1 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

Abbreviations

Sources of data and examples

Chapter 7 Stability of inflectional variation

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

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

Appendix

Section 3 Free variation? Look harder!

Chapter 9 Syntactic priming and individual preferences

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

Chapter 10 Optionality, variation and categorial properties

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

Chapter 11 Variation of deontic constructions in spoken Catalan

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

Index.

Notes:

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This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

ISBN:

9789027249333

9027249334

OCLC:

1405190724