Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Case and agreement variation in contact

A multifactorial investigation of it-clefts across World Englishes

ORCID logo | Zhejiang University
ORCID logo | Zhejiang University

This study investigates the influence of language contact on morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes, specifically focusing on the joint variation of case and agreement in it-clefts with pronominal clefted constituents. Employing a multifactorial approach within the framework of probabilistic grammar, we examine the distribution of the four relevant it-cleft variants in the GloWbE corpus. We find that language contact, as a language-external factor, impacts the strengths and rankings of language-internal factors but not their directions. Additionally, we observe an intricate interplay between language contact and language-internal factors in shaping morphosyntactic patterns: low-contact varieties tend to display feature-based case and agreement with a high degree of variability, while high-contact varieties tend to exhibit position-based case and agreement with a low degree of variability. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the development of language diversity and structural simplification in World Englishes.

Keywords: agreement variation, case variation, it-clefts, language contact, probabilistic grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Contact-induced case and agreement variation
    • 2.1Morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes
    • 2.2Case and agreement variation in it-clefts
      • 2.2.1Case marking of pronominal clefted constituents
      • 2.2.2 Agreement variation in it-clefts
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Contact as a language-external factor
    • 3.2Language-internal factors of it-clefts
    • 3.3Statistics
  • 4.Case and agreement variation in it-clefts
    • 4.1Joint distribution of case and agreement variation in it-clefts
      • 4.1.1Variant distribution across pronominal clefted constituents
      • 4.1.2Variant distribution across contact levels
    • 4.2Case variation
    • 4.3Agreement variation
  • 5.Probabilistic grammar of it-clefts in contact
    • 5.1Probabilistic distribution and Type II variation
    • 5.2Probabilistic constraints
    • 5.3Syntactic configuration in contact
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
Published online: 25 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22119.zha
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