Volume 19, Issue 2

This paper contributes to the study of transitivity as a general property of the clause. Unlike most previous work on the subject, however, transitivity in the present article is used to study a lexical alternation, namely the two causative predicates dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ in Spanish. To do this, I use the transitivity index (TI), a weighted continuous measure of transitivity based on Hopper and Thompson’s (1980, transitivity in grammar and discourse, Language 56, 251–299) transitivity parameters. The advantage of the TI is that it assigns different weights to each of the transitivity parameters and it is therefore sensitive to the particular construction it is applied to. I show that the TI can correctly predict the two Spanish causatives dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ with 80% accuracy and demonstrate that hacer is associated with higher transitivity contexts. In addition, linguistic features of the causer such as grammatical person and number are found to help distinguish between the two predicates. The finding that a lexical alternation can be reduced to a difference in transitivity raises important questions regarding the structure of the lexicon and the type of information it may contain.

The present paper provides a methodological case study on how underlying incipient grammar change might be discerned even when frequencies of the incoming variant are apparently marginal and stable. Analysing the spread of tonic possessive pronouns in complements of locative adverbial constructions in European Spanish from a probabilistic perspective, more than 11,000 locative constructions from 1900 to 2004 were compiled, and probabilistic grammar change was operationalised as an interactive function between language-internal predictors and real time. The results reveal that numerous intralinguistic factors have been and are active in constraining the variation, with the innovation spreading significantly in spite of apparent stability in frequency. Crucially, the findings demonstrate that, even in a relatively standardised written language where the innovation has a considerably low frequency, the innovation grammaticalises along the same pathway as in colloquial vernaculars where the incoming variant is employed much more frequently.

Previous research has tracked the history of the theme-recipient alternation (or: “dative” alternation) in Chinese, but few studies have embedded their analysis in a probabilistic variationist framework. Against this backdrop, we explore the language-internal and language-external factors that probabilistically influence the alternation between theme-first and recipient-first ordering in a large diachronic corpus of Chinese writing (1300s–1900s). Our analysis reveals that the recipient-first variant is consistently more frequent than its competitor and even more common in more recent texts than in older texts. Regression analysis also suggests that there are stable linguistic constraints (i.e., animacy and definiteness of theme) and fluid constraints (i.e., end-weight, recipient animacy). Notably, the diachronic instability of end-weight and animacy points to cross-linguistic parallels for ditransitive constructions, including the English dative alternation. We thus contribute to theory building in variationist linguistics by advancing the field’s knowledge about the comparative fluidity versus stability of probabilistic constraints.

The object case inflection in Koalib (Niger-Congo) represents complex patterns that involve phoneme position, syllable structure, and tonal pattern. Few attempts have been made with qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify the rules of the object case paradigms in Koalib. In the current study, information on phonemes, tones, and syllables are automatically extracted from a Koalib sample of 2,677 lexemes. The data is then fed to decision-tree-based classifiers to predict the object case paradigms and extract the interactive patterns between the variables. The results improve the predicting accuracy of existing studies and identify the case paradigms predicted by linguistic hypotheses. New case paradigms are also found by the computational classifiers and explained from a linguistic perspective. Our work demonstrates that the combination of linguistic theoretical knowledge with machine learning techniques can become one of the methodological approaches for linguistic analyses.

The Scottish English phoneme inventory is generally claimed to have a /ʍ/-/w/ contrast, although several studies have suggested that this historical contrast is weakening for Scottish English speakers in the urban areas of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Little is known about whether the /ʍ/-/w/ contrast is maintained in supraregional Scottish Standard English (SSE). This study sets out to explore, based on the phonemically transcribed ICE-Scotland corpus, the distribution of [ʍ] and [w] in SSE, their acoustic properties and potentially influencing social and language-internal factors. A total of 1,241 <wh-> tokens were extracted from the corpus, together with a matching number of <w-> tokens, and the median of harmonicity was measured. The results show that [ʍ] and [w] produced for words beginning with <wh-> are acoustically distinct from [w] produced for words beginning with <w->. [ʍ] is relatively frequent in SSE, but most speakers use both [ʍ] and [w] interchangeably for <wh-> and some never use [ʍ]. The realisation of <wh-> as [ʍ] is determined by preceding phonetic context and speaker gender.

This study adopts a corpus-based behavioral profile approach, combining multifactorial usage-feature analysis with frequency-based quantitative analysis, to investigate the diachronic semasiological variation of the Mandarin Chinese temperature term 热 re ‘hot’. The result shows a dynamic behavioral profile, i.e., both the usage patterns and the semasiological structural weight of senses have been constantly shifting. The semasiology of re has been becoming more and more diversified over time. Methodologically, this study extends the traditional behavioral profile approach—hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis by applying multiple correspondence analysis and corroborating its validity in accounting for and visualizing the multifactorial nature of semasiological change of lexical items. Theoretically, the present study not only corroborates basic assumptions of usage-based cognitive semantics (e.g., non-discreteness, non-equality of senses, and bodily experience) but also complements it by demonstrating that sociocultural factors also play an important role in semasiological boundary variation of a lexical item.