<OT> New Posting: ROA-875

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ROA 875-1006

Typology in Variation: A Probabilistic Approach to 'be' and 'n't' in the Survey of English Dialects

Joan Bresnan <bresnan at stanford.edu>
Ashwini Deo <ashwini.deo at yale.edu>
Devyani Sharma <devyani.sharma at kcl.ac.uk>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=875


Abstract:
Subject agreement and synthetic negation for the verb ‘be’
show extraordinary local variation in the Survey of English
Dialects (SED, Orton et al. 1962-71). Extracting partial
grammars of individuals, we confirm leveling patterns across
person, number, and negation (Ihalainen 1991; Cheshire,
Edwards, and Whittle 1993; Cheshire 1996).  We find that
individual alternations of forms bear striking structural
resemblances to invariant dialect paradigms, and also reflect
typologically observed markedness properties (Aissen 1999).
In the framework of stochastic Optimality Theory (Boersma
and Hayes 2001), variable outputs of individual speakers
are expected to be constrained by the same kinds of typological
and markedness generalizations that are found cross-linguisticall
y. The stochastic evaluation of candidate outputs in individual
grammars reranks constraints by perturbing their ranking
values, often matching the individual grammar to variable
frequencies encountered in the linguistic environment. 
As a result, individual variation samples the typological
space of possible grammars and reflects features of categorical
grammars it comes into contact with.  In addition to relating
individual and group dialectal variation to typological
variation (Kortmann 1999; Anderwald 2003), the findings
suggest that an individual grammar is sensitively tuned
to frequencies in the linguistic environment, leading to
isolated loci of variability in the grammar rather than
complete alternations of forms as in a competing grammars model.

Comments: To appear in English Language and Linguistics
Keywords: Stochastic Optimality Theory, English dialects, subject-verb agreement, negation, typology
Areas: Syntax, Typology, Sociolinguistics
Type: Journal Article

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=875