Chapter 9
Processing and prescriptivism as constraints on language variation and change
Relative clauses in British and Australian English parliamentary
debates
We investigate the choice between the relative markers
which and that in 8,283 restrictive
relative clauses on subject position, with inanimate antecedents, in a
written corpus consisting of British and Australian Hansard materials over
five sampling years (1901, 1935, 1965, 1995, 2015). Our aim is to determine
how processing-related factors and prescriptivism-related factors influence
processes of language variation and change across two varieties of English.
We analyse how the language-external variables of period and variety
(British, Australian) interact with two groups of language-internal
variables, namely predictors related to language processing and linguistic
predictors associated with prescriptivism. The analysis shows that the
relativiser that has been on the rise over the past
century. The increase is particularly pronounced in the British Hansard, as
which was comparatively frequent in early
twentieth-century British material. As to the relative importance of
predictors, we find that language-external predictors are the most important
in conditioning the variation in relative markers, followed by
processing-related constraints. Prescriptivism-related variables tend to
generally be less important in this type of variation.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1The relative marker alternation
- 2.2Australian English
- 2.3Prescriptivism, varieties of English and language change
- 3.Methods and data
- 3.1The Hansard: A hybrid spoken-written register
- 3.2The variable context and corpus retrieval
- 3.3Predicting relativiser choice
- 3.3.1Language-external predictors
- 3.3.2Prescriptivism-related predictors
- 3.3.3Predictors related to language processing
- 3.4Analysis
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Distributional analysis of the relative markers
which and that
- 4.2Probing the importance of constraints on relativiser choice
- 5.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
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Cited by (1)
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2024.
Getting a handle on a Hansard with Python and NLTK, or how to tame the linguistic picture of British politics with NLP.
Linguistics & Polyglot Studies 10:2
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