Chapter 5. Between context and community

This paper investigates the relationship between stylistic context of utterance production and language user’s regional background as influencing factors in one syntactic alternation, i.e., variation double object prepositional dative construction. To that end, this chapter zooms on (1) competition community regarding choice, (2) cross-regional inter-register variation, (3) register-specific coherence (aka intra-register variation). Comparing data from nine varieties English using corpora presumably share same structure (and registers) reveals is more important than context, effect register regionally variable registers are largely but not fully coherent. These findings do only stress nature probabilistic grammars also point to importance effects when studying (all scripts at https://osf.io/3djkr/).