Ahead-of-Publication / Just-Accepted

Hewramî (ISO 639-3) is an Iranic language featuring tense-sensitive alignment, characterised in terms of indexing by employing two sets of bound person markers for expressing direct objects. In TAM categories based on past stem verbs, the direct object is expressed by suffixal person/number morphology. However, the index may be absent under certain conditions. This article explores object indexing in Hewramî, considering its token frequency in discourse and factors conditioning differential object indexing (DOI). The data come from two spoken corpora of over 35,000 words from the Tekht variety of Hewramî. The corpus data were annotated for factors such as animacy, identifiability, person of the referent and textual givenness. The data provide some support for the complementarity hypothesis, meaning that agreement markers slightly favour zero object arguments. The most decisive factor triggering the lack of indexing with overt Os is the co-optation of the agreement slot by a higher-ranked argument. But when taking semantic-referential features into account, the person of the object referent strongly predicts differential object indexing. With the direct object being 3 pl and the NP modified, animacy predicts DOI.

This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized dependency (sub)trees and extract them from spoken and written Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks in two syntactically distinct languages, English and Slovenian. For each corpus, we analyze the size, diversity, and distribution of syntactic inventories, their overlap across modalities, and the structures most characteristic of speech. Results show that, across both languages, spoken corpora contain fewer and less diverse syntactic structures than their written counterparts, with consistent cross-linguistic preferences for certain structural types across modalities. Strikingly, the overlap between spoken and written syntactic inventories is very limited: most structures attested in speech do not occur in writing, pointing to modality-specific preferences in syntactic organization that reflect the distinct demands of real-time interaction and elaborated writing. This contrast is further supported by a keyness analysis of the most frequent speech-specific structures, which highlights patterns associated with interactivity, context-grounding, and economy of expression. We argue that this scalable, language-independent framework offers a useful general method for systematically studying syntactic variation across corpora, laying the groundwork for more comprehensive data-driven theories of grammar in use.

This study investigates the quantitative properties of Mandarin measure words using corpus data and word embeddings to address three research questions: (1) how does constructional productivity relate to construction frequency and construction frequency distributions; (2) how semantically cohesive are different measure words; and (3) do classifiers and massifiers differ systematically in productivity and semantic cohesion. We estimated the productivity of measure word constructions with the Good–Turing estimate of unseen types and observed that productivity decreases linearly with the number of types, consistent with previously reported results for Mandarin compounds, and indicating that individual measure word constructions are sampled from the same population of measure word constructions (a measure word schema). The rank–frequency distributions of measure words have power-law like distributions, most of which are best characterized with breakpoint linear regression models. These yield quantitative measures that are predictive for construction productivity. Construction productivity also covaried with semantic measures gauging the semantic cohesion measure word constructions, such that semantically more cohesive measure words were associated with lower Good–Turing estimates of unseen types. Furthermore, massifiers were observed to be more productive and more semantically cohesive than classifiers. Our study demonstrates that the quantitative measures that have proved useful for gauging the productivity of derivation and compounding (morphological constructions) also provide insight into the productivity of measure words (syntactic constructions).

Understanding how different dimensions of syntactic complexity interact with processing demands is fundamental to language acquisition, pedagogy, and assessment. While structural measures like Clausal Density (CD) and Embedding Depth (ED) have been examined separately, their relationship with processing load, as proxied by Mean Dependency Distance (MDD), remains underexplored. This study investigates this interplay in 42,654 complex sentences from the Brown and LOB corpora, using statistical modeling to examine the nature of the CD-MDD relationship, ED’s independent contribution to MDD, and their interaction. Results reveal a non-linear CD-MDD relationship peaking at CD = 3, a distinct processing cost at the transition to double embedding (ED = 2), and a significant interaction where deeper embedding reverses the CD-MDD relationship. These findings demonstrate a dynamic trade-off in syntactic complexity, challenging additive models and supporting cognitive constraint theories. The results have direct implications for refining complexity measures in second language acquisition and for informing psycholinguistically-grounded pedagogy and assessment.

This study describes and evaluates a multi-method approach for identifying and extracting collocations to develop a learner Italian collocation dictionary. The approach integrates part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing to extract six syntactic relations from a reference corpus of Italian. The initial set of candidates was gradually reduced using frequency, dispersion, and association measures. This set was then evaluated by comparing it with existing collocation dictionaries and gathering expert judgments on which collocations should be included. Combining these two evaluations, further refined the list. Moreover, the effect of statistical measures on expert judgments was investigated. Results revealed that dispersion and association measures positively influenced human evaluations, while higher frequency often correlated with negative ratings. This triangulation of corpus-based and statistical methods, human judgements and comparison with existing dictionaries captures collocations widely used across genres, suitable for inclusion in a learner dictionary, offering a useful tool for learners while contributing to corpus-based collocation research.

Rational numbers can be expressed as decimals, fractions, and percentages, each serving distinct functions. The differences among the three forms have been examined in terms of structural distinction and the cognitive effort required for their processing. Using a multivariate approach, this study integrates cognitive and linguistic factors to explore how these representations alternate in diverse linguistic contexts. A total of 2,217 rational number tokens were coded for eight features. Their relative importance in predicting notation choice was assessed using random forests, with conceptual interpretation and syntactic structure as the most influential predictors, followed by entity type, genre, grammatical function, semantics of verbs, and definiteness, while approximation contributed little predictive information. The findings suggest that the three notations function as members of a prototype-based category, each showing a typical usage core with peripheral cases. Individuals select numerical forms in an effort-saving manner, favoring fractions over decimals and percentages for precise enumeration. Furthermore, these forms are also found to evolve and develop varied grammatical functions and syntactic structures in actual use.

Several frequency-based measures are influenced by corpus size (e.g. lexical diversity or text similarity measures). It is largely unquestioned, however, that normalised frequencies correct for the influence of corpus size – but it has not yet been systematically tested whether and how they might be influenced by corpus size themselves. The central question is whether the normalised frequency of an element in a smaller corpus can be meaningfully compared to the normalised frequency of the same element in a larger corpus. We are testing the association between lists of normalised frequencies derived from corpus samples of different sizes from six languages. Our results suggest that the size of the underlying corpora does not negatively influence comparisons of normalised frequency lists, i.e. different corpus sizes do not lead to normalised frequencies no longer being comparable. For lower-frequency types, these associations decrease rather quickly. These empirical findings converge with predictions from statistical theory.

A growing body of literature has demonstrated that semantics can codetermine fine phonetic detail. However, the complex interplay between phonetic realization and semantics remains understudied, particularly in pitch realization. The current study investigates the tonal realization of Mandarin disyllabic words with all 20 possible combinations of two tones, as found in a corpus of Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech. We made use of Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) to model f0 contours as a function of a series of predictors, including gender, tonal context, tone pattern, duration, word position, bigram probability, speaker, and word. In the GAMM analysis, word and sense emerged as crucial predictors of f0 contours, with effect sizes that exceed those of tone pattern. For each word token in our dataset, we then obtained a contextualized embedding by applying the GPT-2 large language model to the context of that token in the corpus. We show that the pitch contours of word tokens can be predicted to a considerable extent from these contextualized embeddings, which approximate token-specific meanings in contexts of use. The results of our corpus study show that meaning in context and phonetic realization are far more entangled than standard linguistic theory predicts.

When corpus researchers have to down-size their data, different techniques may be used to optimize the sub-sample. In alternation studies, one strategy is the selection of instances based on the observed realization of the outcome variable. This is referred to as a case-control design in the health sciences, which have developed a rich methodology surrounding this approach. The present paper argues that corpus linguists should be sounding out the potential for methodological transfer. It pursues three goals. The first is to overcome terminological barriers by making transparent the peculiar jargon associated with this research design. Further, I will provide an overview and illustration of some principles of study design and data analysis that form the core of this method. Finally, distinctive features of case-control down-sampling will be identified, which allows for a focused exploration of the extensive literature related to this approach and also provides guideposts for future methodological work.

Cross-linguistic work on the causal–noncausal alternation has shown that there exists a strong correlation between the frequency of use of a given verb in causal versus noncausal contexts and its preferred coding pattern for the alternation, with verbs typically occurring in causal contexts preferably selecting the anticausative pattern. These studies assume that the correlation between frequency and coding is diachronic, but this assumption has so far not been tested on historical data. This paper aims to fill this gap, by contrastively exploring the interplay between frequency effects and the coding of the causal–noncausal alternation in diachronic corpora of Italian and Spanish. By resorting to inferential statistic techniques, our findings largely confirm the hypothesis advanced by frequentist approaches, while at the same time also offering a more nuanced understanding of the role of frequency, which is only one among several factors that shape speakers’ choice of anticausativization patterns in Romance languages.

This paper presents a geographically large-scale, yet structurally fine-grained study on grammaticalisation in World Englishes. Attending to the relatively neglected domain of habitual aspect, we explore structural and areal patterns of innovation or conservatism regarding grammaticalisation and its synchronic reflexes in 13 varieties. Drawing on the International Corpus of English , we quantify usage profiles of the habitual auxiliary [ use ( d ) to V], taking into account semantic, morphosyntactic and text-linguistic features. Properties of use ( d ) to are compared across varieties by means of a behavioural profile analysis employing hierarchical cluster analysis. The corpus results are mixed in that variation and cross-linguistic similarities do not seem to follow one single phylogenetic or areal trend but reveal more individual patterns, which can be partly explained by specific contact situations. The case study illustrates that one and the same synchronic grammatical variant may qualify both as a conservative relic and as an innovation as long as earlier colonial stages remain unknown. This leads us to problematise how, owing to the shortage of corresponding diachronic corpora, even instances of strongly directional types of change like grammaticalisation are open to different interpretations within competing narratives such as colonial lag, contact-induced change and the epicentre hypothesis.

We present our work on the register-dependence of metaphor, where register is defined as variation of linguistic behaviour appropriate for a given communication situation, including the purpose of the interaction. We investigated this dependence on the basis of a new German corpus of six text types with a wide range of register properties, which we annotated for metaphor. Specifically, we analysed the relation between register and metaphor in terms of investigating correlations between metaphor and specific register features, as they are exhibited by the text types. Focussing on metaphors that can serve as explicit register markers and annotating a subgroup of them in our corpus, we found significant differences between the text types in metaphor usage, which we interpreted in terms of specific register properties of the text types.

The collocational patterns of a word and its phonetic properties are often considered independent of each other. This corpus-based study tracks change in the word just over real and apparent time in New Zealand and Australian English and shows that these two phenomena take place in tandem. Four major changes are reported. First, the frequency of just has increased in both varieties, mirroring reports in Canadian and UK varieties of English. Second, the collocations of just demonstrate that it has undergone pragmatic change, evidenced by, for example, its increased co-occurrence with sort of, like, and an existential subject ( it’s just… ). Third, acoustic phonetic analyses of changes in the vowel in just indicate that it does not pattern with other content or grammatical words belonging to its canonical vowel class and has instead moved towards a closer and fronter realization. Finally, we show that this phonetic change is led by variants of just which occur in newer (more recent) collocational contexts. Together these findings provide an example of word-specific change and evidence that a word’s phonetic realization depends in part on its grammatical status, and that phonetic change over time can be linked with shifts in collocational patterns and pragmatic function.

It has been observed in many languages that the complementizer at the beginning of a complement clause (CC) can be optionally omitted. Several accounts of language processing have been proposed to explain the phenomenon. Specifically for the ambiguity avoidance account, however, mixed results have been reported in previous research. In our study, we investigate whether the cross-linguistic difference in omission rates can be explained by the ambiguity avoidance account at a general strategic level. Our hypothesis is that, in order to avoid ambiguities, users of languages with a more flexible word order should be more reluctant to omit the complementizer. To test it, we conducted an in-depth analysis in three languages that are different in the degree of word order flexibility – English, German, and Russian, and a broad analysis with 23 languages from 13 genera. The results provide complementary evidence that word order flexibility indeed emerges as an important predictor of complementizer omission.

Mandarin differs essentially in colexification from many other languages due to its preference for controlled visual activity verb kan “look” over uncontrolled visual experience verb jian “see.” This triggers inquiries as to whether Mandarin is historically inclined to controlled visual activity. Based on a dynamic behavioral profile analysis, this study traces the semantic change in kan and jian from Archaic Chinese to Contemporary Chinese, with a particular focus on the evidential discourse markers derived from them. Through descriptive statistics and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), the data reveal that: (1) kan and jian have distinct behavioral profiles, and they primarily convey controlled visual activity and uncontrolled visual experience respectively in history; (2) kan has undergone semantic expansions with more varied usages, while jian has been decreasingly used; and (3) except in the Archaic period, the evidential discourse markers derived from kan exhibit greater semantic and structural diversities compared with those derived from jian . The comparison and contrast between the two basic vision verbs help to reveal Mandarin’s commonalities in semantic change while highlighting its peculiarity in emphasizing controlled visual activity over time.

The Complexity Trade-off Hypothesis suggests that when one language domain becomes more complex, another tends to simplify to maintain an overall balance of complexity in languages. Previous studies sought to test such trade-offs across languages, implying the equal complexity across languages. However, this assumption has been increasingly questioned. Furthermore, little attention has been given to diachronic changes and interactions in lexical and syntactic complexities, especially within ancient and non-European languages. Against this backdrop, this study explored the evolution of lexical and syntactic complexities and their possible trade-off in Classical Chinese over two millennia. Based on entropy and dependency distance metrics, we found a marked increase in lexical complexity alongside a decrease in syntactic complexity. Our findings provided support to the existence of trade-offs in an individual language and broadened the scope of the complexity trade-off analysis in historical language contexts.

Two recent studies (Biber, Douglas, Larsson Tove & Gregory R. Hancock. 2024a. The linguistic organization of grammatical text complexity: Comparing the empirical adequacy of theory-based models. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20(2). 347–373; Biber, Douglas, Larsson Tove & Gregory R. Hancock. 2024b. Dimensions of text complexity in the spoken and written modes: A comparison of theory-based models. Journal of English Linguistics 52(1). 65–94) evaluate how well theory-based models account for the distributions of complexity features across spoken and written texts. Those studies provide strong evidence for two groupings of complexity features: phrases functioning syntactically as noun modifiers, and finite dependent clauses functioning as clause-level constituents. At the same time, those studies fail to identify systematic patterns of covariation for the other complexity features (e.g., phrases functioning as clause-level constituents). The present study picks up where those previous studies left off, exploring the possibility that complexity features pattern together in systematic ways at the register level, even though they have less strong patterns of covariation across individual texts. The results show that: 1) all 25 features can be grouped into one of two groupings, referred to as the “oral” and “literate” complexity dimensions, and 2) those two dimensions have a strong complementary relation to one another. These general patterns are described and interpreted relative to the particular features grouped into each dimension, the register distributions associated with each dimension, and the extent to which these register-level patterns are found at the text level.

This study employs a BERT-assisted behavioural profiles approach to examine the diachronic interaction of two Chinese extreme degree resultative constructions: [V-HUAI ‘go bad’] and [V-SI ‘die’]. Drawing data from the CCL Ancient Chinese Corpus, we trace their semantic developments and interactions across three historical periods – spanning approximately 2,000 years. The findings reveal a converging tendency with both constructions undergoing multi-stage evolution. Clustering analyses show semantic convergence stems from their shared ability to express outcomes of the same causal events while differentiation arises from HUAI’s encoding of gradable scales. Notably, the study reveals a collaborative interplay between attraction and differentiation at distinct levels: attraction contributes to the schematic generalization and formation of constructions, while differentiation operates at the instance level, serving to stabilize the constructional network. This research enriches evolutionary construction grammar by clarifying the interplay between semantic-driven attraction and differentiation, which governs the diachronic evolution of extreme-degree resultative constructions.

This study analyses co-speech gestures accompanying prosodic and information Parenthetical (PAR) Units in Brazilian Portuguese. It introduces the BGEST corpus, a multimodal dataset of spontaneous speech, and explores how PARs function as distinct discourse levels within utterances. Initially, we provide a brief ov\erview of the corpus. Subsequently, we delve into the concept of PAR and how it can be understood as a different discourse level in relation to the utterance. Our findings reveal that PARs are consistently marked by gestural patterns, particularly at the illocutionary level, where gestures exhibit disruption at PAR boundaries. These disruptions manifest in varied forms but consistently involve alterations in gestural patterns.

The sequential ordering of causal clauses in Mandarin Chinese displays variation, with reason connectives (e.g., yīnwèi , yóuyú ) appearing either before or after the main clause (sentence-initial vs. sentence-medial positions). However, the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors shaping causal clause ordering remains underexplored. This study addresses the gap through a corpus-based multifactorial analysis of spoken Mandarin, employing mixed-effects regression modeling. Our findings reveal that syntactic parsing factors, including clause length and complexity, influence clause positioning. Longer subordinate clauses favor sentence-medial ordering of reason connectives, while the interaction between main clause length and its complexity shows that simpler but longer main clauses favor sentence-medial placement. Semantically, emotional valence plays a role: positive subordinate clauses prefer sentence-medial positioning, while the emotional valence of main clauses interacts with genre. Specifically, neutral valence in dialogues and positive valence in monologues favor sentence-medial positioning, whereas negative valence in dialogues least favors it. Discourse-pragmatic factors further condition causal clause ordering. The presence of yīnwèi and the absence of suǒyǐ jointly favor sentence-medial positioning of reason connectives. This study provides novel insights into the multifaceted factors influencing causal clause ordering in Mandarin Chinese, thereby enhancing our understanding of sentence structure and discourse cohesion in the language.

This study examines the usage, semantics, and affective valence of olfactory metaphors in English, addressing a gap in sensory language and metaphor research. We analyze eight basic smell lexemes ( smell , aroma , scent , odor , stench , stink , reek , fragrance ) in the iWeb corpus, tracing their abstract noun collocates through frequency counts, WordNet hypernym paths, intersection analysis, and affective valence ratings. Our results reveal that English olfactory metaphors are highly productive, mapping smell perception onto a broad array of abstract experiences, especially socioemotional and moral domains. The eight patterns exhibit pronounced affective polarization: while some (e.g., fragrance , aroma ) skew positive, most (e.g., stink , stench , reek, odor ) skew negative, reflecting both olfactory hedonics and a cognitive negativity bias. These findings deepen our understanding of how sensory language structures abstract thought and affirm the rich figurative potential of smell in English, with implications for theories of sensory language, conceptual metaphor, and embodied cognition.

Entities in discourse vary in salience: main participants, objects and locations stay prominent, while others are quickly forgotten, raising questions about how humans signal and infer discourse-level salience. Using a graded operationalization of discourse-level salience based on summary-worthiness in multiple summaries, this paper investigates whether predictors of utterance-level prominence extend to the discourse level, and how they interact across 24 spoken and written genres of English. We examine features including grammatical function, definiteness, entity type, linear order, discourse relations and hierarchy, and referential structure, as well as the impact of genre. Our results show that utterance-level predictors significantly correlate with discourse-level salience, but interact with and are modulated by entity-level factors such as frequency and dispersion across the document. Multifactorial models reveal that no single factor determines salience; rather, discourse-structural and semantic features prove more robust than morphosyntactic ones, with substantial variation by genre and communicative intent.

Pijpops and Van de Velde (2016. Constructional contamination: How does it work and how do we measure it? Folia Linguistica 50(2). 543–581) demonstrated that an alternation within a construction may be influenced by a different construction that is coincidentally formally similar through the process of constructional contamination. This mechanism has been explained as a consequence of the storage of unanalyzed chunks produced by a contaminating construction, which are later recycled in a target construction. Consequently, constructional contamination has hitherto been measured by calculating the frequency of individual lexemes (which are assumed to be part of exemplar chunks eligible for recycling) in the contaminating construction. In this paper, we propose a different measurement for constructional contamination. Using the large language model RobBERT, we define “prototype embeddings” for both the target construction and the contaminating construction involved in constructional contamination. For each instance of the target construction, we calculate its similarity to these prototypes. We then show that these similarity variables are significantly correlated with the alternation within the target construction: the more an instance of the target construction is semantically similar to the contaminating construction, the more likely it is to appear with the alternant that is exclusively used in that contaminating construction. Our results are in line with a scenario in which horizontal links, which hold between formally similar constructions, can directly trigger constructional contamination. In addition, we find that the more semantically similar an instance is to the prototype of the target construction itself, the more likely it is to appear with the alternant that is not found in the contaminating construction, supporting a view of the constructional network in which constructions are themselves conceptualized as links rather than nodes.

Previous research on the phonetic outcomes of code-switching has most commonly found a degree of cross-linguistic interference, although such studies have relied heavily on read-aloud paradigms. Moreover, while prior studies have mostly examined the effect at the point-of-switch, less work has examined potential impacts beyond the point-of-switch. The current study investigates whether the distance from the point-of-switch impacts phonetic outcomes in bilingual vowel production in a Mandarin–English corpus of bilingual speech. English and Mandarin vowels, /æ/ and /e/ respectively, produced by 30 Singaporean speakers were analyzed, along with the distance from the point-of-switch. Results showed evidence of cross-linguistic interference, with English tokens becoming more Mandarin-like, although these effects were modulated by the distance from the point-of-switch. This effect followed a nonlinear trajectory, with the strongest effect at the point-of-switch, indicating a short-term time course of phonetic interference. These results support a transient, decay-oriented cross-linguistic interference model driven by co-activation of both languages and adding to current understandings of language selection and separation mechanisms in bilinguals.

Variationist linguists study alternations between different ways of saying the same thing (Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns . Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press: 188). Some linguists tend to believe that this sort of optionality is not predicted by theory and dysfunctional. We empirically explore if the two positions can be reconciled by assuming interchangeability between grammatical variants but admitting semantic information about the material in argument slots of competing constructions into variationist modeling. As a test case, we marshal corpus-based methods to study the well-known dative alternation after the verb to give in English. We specifically reanalyze the dataset investigated in Bresnan et al.’s seminal (2007) study. To assess the lexical semantics of the dative constituents, we rely on Semantic Vector Space modeling (Lenci, Alessandro. 2018. Distributional models of word meaning. Annual Review of Linguistics 4(1). 151–171). The meaning distinctions that we thus establish are subsequently submitted to variationist modeling. The distributional-semantic dative alternation model is then benchmarked against a traditional dative alternation model considering mostly higher-level, i.e., fairly abstract formal predictors (e.g., end-weight, definiteness) à la Bresnan (2007). The analysis shows that traditional variationist modeling à la Bresnan (2007) outperforms distributional-semantic modeling.