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Part of
Corpus-based Approaches to Register Variation
Edited by Elena Seoane and Douglas Biber
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 103] 2021
► pp. 111–142

Chapter 5
Between context and community

Regional variation in register effects in the English dative alternation

| University of Zurich

This paper investigates the relationship between the stylistic context of utterance production and the language user’s regional background as influencing factors in one syntactic alternation, i.e., variation between the double object and the prepositional dative construction. To that end, this chapter zooms in on (1) the competition between stylistic context and regional community regarding dative choice, (2) cross-regional inter-register variation, and (3) register-specific coherence (aka intra-register variation). Comparing data from nine varieties of English using corpora that presumably share the same structure (and registers) reveals that community is more important than context, that the effect of register is regionally variable and that registers are largely but not fully coherent. These findings do not only stress the variable nature of probabilistic grammars but also point to the importance of regional effects when studying register variation (all scripts at https://​osf​.io​/3djkr/).

Keywords: inter-register variation, intra-register variation, dative alternation, World Englishes, probabilistic grammar, regional variation, stylistic context, probabilistic indigenization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Combining the variationist perspective with register studies
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1The data
    • 3.2Coding of variables: Language-internal and -external constraints
    • 3.3Statistical measures
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall distribution by register and variety
    • 4.2The importance of context vs community
    • 4.3Cross-regional variation in register effects
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.103.05rot
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