Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

Lauren Fonteyn, Andrea Nini

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which there is individuality in how structural variation is conditioned over time. Earlier research already classified the diachronically unstable gerund variation as involving a high fraction of mixed-usage speakers throughout the change, whereby the proportion of the conservative variant versus the progressive variant as observable in the linguistic output of individual language users superficially resembles the mean proportion as observable at the population level. However, this study sets out to show that there can still be heterogeneity within such a centralized population in terms of how each individual conditions the observed variation. A random forest and conditional inference tree analysis of over 14,000 gerunds uttered by nineteen seventeenth-century authors is presented to show that, while the most important language-internal factors conditioning the gerund variation are adopted by (and shared between) all authors, we can still attest inter-individual variation (i) at lower levels of variable importance, and (ii) in the breadth of the range of contexts individual authors employ to condition the attested variation.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)279-308
Number of pages30
JournalCognitive Linguistics
Volume31
Issue number2
Early online date11 Mar 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25 Jun 2020

Keywords

  • conditional inference tree
  • gerund
  • idiolect
  • random forest
  • usage-based

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this