A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
-
Zhen Wu
Abstract
Syntactic gradience has been studied mainly from a qualitative perspective. In this paper, I propose a new method, based on the process of multi-criteria decision-making, that can quantify the word-phrase gradience against the standardized morphosyntactic continuum. This method may be applied to both synchronic and diachronic research, with the discrepancies between compounds and idioms and the lexicalization of compound pronouns in English examined as illustrations.
Funding source: Social science fund of Shandong Province
Award Identifier / Grant number: 22DYYJ03
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by Social Science Fund of Shandong Province, China (grant no. 22DYYJ03). I am grateful for the useful feedback of the reviewer. All remaining errors are mine.
References
Aarts, Bas. 2007. Syntactic gradience: The nature of grammatical indeterminacy. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780199219261.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Aljohani, Samirah. 2023. How adjectival can a participle be? In Subsective gradience in English 2nd participles. Oxford: Peter Lang.10.3726/b18519Search in Google Scholar
Anderson, John M. 1997. A notional theory of syntactic categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511519734Search in Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 2017. Compounds and compounding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108235679Search in Google Scholar
Belton, Valerie & Theodor J. Stewart. 2002. Multiple criteria decision analysis: An integrated approach. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media.10.1007/978-1-4615-1495-4_11Search in Google Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2002. An introduction to English morphology: Words and their structure. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Department for Communities and Local Government. 2009. Multi-criteria analysis: A manual. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/multi-criteria-analysis-manual-for-making-government-policy (accessed 1 May 2024).Search in Google Scholar
Egbert, Jesse, Larsson Tove & Biber Douglas. 2020. Doing linguistics with a corpus: Methodological considerations for the everyday user. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108888790Search in Google Scholar
Fonteyn, Lauren. 2019. Categoriality in language change: The case of the English gerund. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780190917579.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Giegerich, Heinz J. 2015. Lexical structures: Compounding and the modules of grammar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.1515/9780748630554Search in Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316423530Search in Google Scholar
Ishizaka, Alessio & Philippe Nemery. 2013. Multi-criteria decision analysis: Methods and software. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.10.1002/9781118644898Search in Google Scholar
Kishimoto, Hideki. 2000. Indefinite pronouns and overt N-raising. Linguistic Inquiry 31. 557–566. https://doi.org/10.1162/002438900554451.Search in Google Scholar
Larson, Richard K. & Franc Marušič. 2004. On indefinite pronoun constructions with APs: Reply to Kishimoto. Linguistic Inquiry 35(2). 268–287. https://doi.org/10.1162/002438904323019075.Search in Google Scholar
Leu, Thomas. 2005. Something invisible in English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 11(1). 143–154.Search in Google Scholar
Maekelberghe, Charlotte. 2020. The present-day English gerund system: A cognitive-constructionist account. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110686661Search in Google Scholar
McCawley, James D. 1998. The syntactic phenomena of English, 2nd edn. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Minkova, Donka & Robert Stockwell. 2009. English words: History and structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511805929Search in Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2018. Word-formation in English, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316771402Search in Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph. 1965. Descriptive statement and serial relationship. Language 41(2). 205–217. https://doi.org/10.2307/411874.Search in Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Ross, John R. 2004 [1973]. Nouniness. In Bas Aarts, David Danison, Evelien Keizer & Gergana Popova (eds.), Fuzzy grammar: A reader, 351–422. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Rúa, Paula López. 2004. The categorical continuum of English blends. English Studies 85(1). 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1076/enst.85.1.63.29107.Search in Google Scholar
Sanchez-Stockhammer, Christina. 2018. English compounds and their spelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108181877Search in Google Scholar
Taherdoost, Hamed & Mitra Madanchian. 2023. Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods and concepts. Encyclopedia 2023(3). 77–87. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia3010006.Search in Google Scholar
Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic categorization, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Thakkar, Jitesh J. 2021. Multi-criteria decision making. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.10.1007/978-981-33-4745-8Search in Google Scholar
Wu, Zhen. 2021. Compound pronouns in English. English Language and Linguistics 25(4). 825–849. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674320000386.Search in Google Scholar
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
- Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
- Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
- My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
- Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
- Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
- Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
- Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
- Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
- Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
- My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
- Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
- Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
- Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
- Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
