Volume 3, Issue 2

In this study we explore the concurrent, combined use of three research methods, statistical corpus analysis and two psycholinguistic experiments (a forced-choice and an acceptability rating task), using verbal synonymy in Finnish as a case in point. In addition to supporting conclusions from earlier studies concerning the relationships between corpus-based and experimental data (e. g., Featherston 2005), we show that each method adds to our understanding of the studied phenomenon, in a way which could not be achieved through any single method by itself. Most importantly, whereas relative rareness in a corpus is associated with dispreference in selection, such infrequency does not categorically always entail substantially lower acceptability. Furthermore, we show that forced-choice and acceptability rating tasks pertain to distinct linguistic processes, with category-wise incommensurable scales of measurement, and should therefore be merged with caution, if at all.

This paper reports on a corpus-based analysis of constituent ordering in presentative er -constructions in Belgian Dutch. Whereas in the majority of these sentences, the locative typically follows the indefinite subject (cf. Er ligt een bompakket op de zesde verdieping ‘There is a bomb on the sixth floor’), in a small number the locative precedes the subject, as in Er zijn in Brussel geen getto's ‘There are in Brussels no ghettoes’. In order to account for this hitherto unnoticed variation, we extracted 360 er -initial sentences with one locative adjunct (either in final or penultimate position) from a corpus of written and spoken Dutch, and coded them for eight semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic variables. A stepwise logistic regression confirmed our hypothesis that er's inaccessibility marking function (Grondelaers, Brysbaert, Speelman and Geeraerts 2002) is a factor which determines word order variation. At the same time, however, the regression analysis demonstrated that there is a more significant ordering motivation, viz. informational prominence. The finding that it is the more prominent constituent which tends to be sentence-final throws new light on the givenbefore-new principle (Gundel 1988), and rules out any analysis which restricts the constructional meaning of presentative sentences to “introducing an indefinite subject”.

The Special Issue of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory on Geoffrey Sampson's Target Paper, “Grammar without grammaticality” made fascinating reading. Sampson argues that “the concept of ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘ill-formed’ is a delusion, based on a false conception of the kind of thing a human language is” (p. 1). For the most part Sampson's case was strong and the counter-arguments from commentators less so. But with one striking exception. As Sampson acknowledges, the rules like (for English) “a third-person singular word form should not take a first- or second-person subject” or, “a definite article precedes rather than follows the noun with which it is in a construction” seem categorical: all he can do, in order to preserve his thesis, is to argue that linguists' sentences talking about grammaticality might infringe them, but he acknowledges that that argument carries little conviction, even for himself (p. 20–21).

This paper tests three factors that have been held to be responsible for the variable stress behavior of noun-noun constructs in English: argument structure, semantics, and analogy. In a large-scale investigation of some 4500 compounds extracted from the CELEX lexical database (Baayen et al. 1995), we show that traditional claims about noun-noun stress cannot be upheld. Argument structure plays a role only with synthetic compounds ending in the agentive suffix - er . The semantic categories and relations assumed in the literature to trigger rightward stress do not show the expected effects. As an alternative to the rule-based approaches, the data were modeled computationally and probabilistically using a memory-based analogical algorithm (TiMBL 5.1) and logistic regression, respectively. It turns out that probabilistic models and the analogical algorithm are more successful in predicting stress assignment correctly than any of the rules proposed in the literature. Furthermore, the results of the analogical modeling suggest that the left and right constituent are the most important factor in compound stress assignment. This is in line with recent findings on the semi-regular behavior of compounds in other languages.

A variety of linguistic, processing, and social factors have been shown to be associated with concord in existential there constructions (e. g., Meechan and Foley 1994; Tagliamonte 1998). Using data from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), I assess the predictivity of various factors for the appearance of nonprestige there's , including the novel factor of discourse type. Two binary logistic regression models are developed to model the production of existentials. In both models, highly predictive factors included the type of determiner that appeared in the postcopular NP, the age of the speaker, and crucially, the type of discourse – monologic, interactive, or mixed – in which speakers were engaged. A “mixed-effect” (Baayen, Davidson et al., submitted) logistic regression model provided a better fit to the data than the standard logistic regression model used in previous studies, highlighting the importance of idiolectal variation in the production of existentials. Implications for syntactic theories of the existential construction are discussed.

Michael Hoey, Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge, 2005, xiii + 202 pp. ISBN 0-415-32863-2.