Volume 21, Issue 2

We explore the cognitive and sociolectal constraints that probabilistically regulate the theme-recipient (or “dative”) alternation in modern varieties of Mandarin and how these constraints interact with each other. Based on an extensively annotated corpus dataset and regression modeling, we found that the probabilistic grammar that shapes the theme-recipient alternation is fundamentally stable across regional and genre varieties of Mandarin. This general stability notwithstanding, significant variation regarding the importance of cognitive constraints across different sociolectal constraints is detected. Crucially, the analysis revealed that recipient syntactic complexity has a much greater effect in Taiwan Mandarin than in Mainland Mandarin. The effect of theme concreteness is also found to be significantly reduced in telephone conversations compared to broadcast news. Corpus-based findings were cross-validated using a psycholinguistic rating task experiment. While the results of the two approaches demonstrate substantial overlap, they also exhibit diverging patterns at the level of interaction between regional variety and recipient complexity, potentially indicating nuanced differences between the two approaches. The findings provide evidence that interactional patterns between cognitive and sociolectal constraints on probabilistic grammatical alternations may be shared across languages, despite their distinct socio-cultural factors that shape variation in human interaction.

Bei sentences in Mandarin Chinese with SOV word order have attracted extensive interest. However, their semantic features lacked quantitative evidence and their cognitive features received insufficient attention. Therefore, the current study aims to quantitatively investigate the semantic and cognitive features through the analysis of nine annotated factors in a corpus. The results regarding bei sentences show that (i) subjects exhibit a tendency to be definite and animate; non-adversative verbs have gained popularity over time, and intransitive verbs are capable of taking objects; (ii) subject relations tend to be long, implying heavy cognitive load, whereas the dependencies governed by subjects are often short, suggesting light cognitive load; and (iii) certain semantic factors significantly impact cognitive factors; for instance, animate subjects tend to govern shorter dependencies. Overall, our study provides empirical support for the semantic features of bei sentences and reveals their cognitive features using dependency distance.

The genitive case in German is predominantly used to form noun modifiers ( die Sehenswürdigkeiten [ Hamburgs ] ‘the sights of Hamburg’). Such genitive modifiers occur in a variety of different registers in German, and they have been claimed to be especially characteristic of non-proximal, written language. In many instances, they are interchangeable with diachronically younger prepositional phrases headed by von , with no noticeable impact on interpretation, thus giving rise to a genuine syntactic alternation phenomenon. There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to the distribution and function of these constructions. Based on corpus data from newspapers and internet discussion forums (approximately 15,000 noun phrases), we discuss semantic and syntactic conditions that limit the scope of this alternation. We then use a mixed-effects logistic regression model to examine a number of intra- and extralinguistic factors that bear on the choice of one construction over the other. We find that von -modifiers are used much less frequently than genitive modifiers overall, but there are grammatical niches in which they seem to thrive and, perhaps, even spread.

Usage-based constructionist approaches see language as an inventory of constructions at different levels of schematicity learned from the input. If so, personal constructicons should vary as a function of usage. Repeated use and chunking/entrenchment of concrete instances should lead to reanalysis of their internal structure and change in the level of schematicity. This paper exploits the reduction probability of is in it is as a diagnostic of reanalysis in a 1.75-million-word diachronic corpus of a single blogger over 8 years. All instances of it is/it’s (n = 10,929) were annotated at the constructional and lexical levels. A multilevel logistic regression model showed significant fixed effects of constructional entropy and construction-to-word association on reduction probability. Importantly, there remained substantial variation across lexical types of constructions in the extent to which they associated or became associated with reduction over time, suggesting idiosyncratic entrenchment and potential reanalysis as a function of usage.

Our study investigates the effect of French verb lemmata on the preverbal (QV) or postverbal (VQ) positioning of interrogative forms equivalent to English ‘what’ ( que , quoi , and related forms) within a French–Spanish parallel corpus of subtitles. We highlight and illustrate the corpus’s utility for studying less frequent verbs in combination with specific wh -forms. Our findings suggest that less frequent French verbs exhibit weaker associations with QV compared to their more frequent counterparts. A post-hoc study using Spanish translations reveals that French verbs correlated with QV often denote observable actions involving directly accessible Q-referents. We hypothesise that queries concerning ‘situationally accessible’ referents are predominantly utilised for non-standard, evaluative, or challenging questions, which are typically QV in French.

Which adjectives tend to occur as attributive ( the cute/red dress ) versus predicative ( the dress is cute/red ) and why? Building on findings from Wiegand et al. (2013. Predicative adjectives: An unsupervised criterion to extract subjective adjectives. In Lucy Vanderwende, Hal DauméIII & Katrin Kirchhoff (eds.), Proceedings of the 2013 conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics : Human language technologies (NAACL-HLT) , 534–539. Atlanta, GA: Association for Computational Linguistics) and Vartiainen (2013. Subjectivity, indefiniteness and semantic change. English Language and Linguistics 17(1). 157–179), this paper argues that subjective adjectives such as cute tend to be placed in predicative position not just because they often describe discourse-new information, but because this position serves to foreground information that the hearer may disagree with. This claim is supported using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008. The corpus of contemporary American English: One billion words, 1990-present . Available at: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/) combined with human annotations for subjectivity from Scontras et al. (2017. Subjectivity predicts adjective ordering preferences. Open Mind 1(1). 53–66) et seq. ; and data from image captions versus descriptions (for seeing versus low-vision people) from the National Gallery of Art. A production experiment manipulates the discourse context to further show that adjectives tend to be placed in predicative position when they express controversial information. Overall, this paper explores how the lexical semantics of adjectives shapes the pragmatic contexts in which they tend to be used, which in turn shapes the syntax of the sentences using them.

Different types of relativizers are used to introduce relative clauses, and the change in the use of relativizers has attracted attention in recent decades. Despite progress in this area, the challenge of extracting relative clauses, especially those with zero relativizers, has limited our understanding of relativizer change. To this end, we investigated the evolving patterns of relativizers in the State of the Union addresses spanning two centuries, employing novel methodologies developed for this purpose. Different from findings of previous studies, our results showed an increase of that and a decrease of which in subject relative clauses, and an increase of zero relativizers in object relative clauses. The change could be attributed to changes in factors concerning text complexity and styles. The faster change rate around 1940s can be explained by factors such as prescriptivism and the transition in speech styles. Methodologically, our study has confirmed dependency parsing as a reliable method for automatic extraction of relative clauses.