Parameters and Language Contact: Morphosyntactic Variation in Dutch Dialects

Measuring Syntactic Variation in Dutch Dialects

This research applies dialectometric methods to purely syntactic dialect data. It will be shown that there is geographic cohesion in syntactic variation when viewed in the aggregate. The amount of syntactic variation which can be accounted for by geography will be determined. Dialectometric techniques will be used to develop an additive measure of syntactic differences. Multidimensional scaling...

Language Contact and Morphosyntactic Complexity: Evidence from German

The article focuses on the hypothesis that the structural complexity of languages is variable and historically changeable. By means of a quantitative statistical analysis of naturalistic corpus data, the question is raised as to what role language contact and adult second language acquisition play in the simplification and complexification of language varieties. The results confirm that there i...

Morphosyntactic Variation

In a series of recent investigations of language change, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere has described the grammatical character and time course of a number of gradual syntactic changes in various European languages.[1] In all of these cases, the languages undergoing change exhibit variation in areas of grammar where we do not find optionality in stable sy...

Dutch in Indonesia: Language Attrition or Language Contact?

Corpus-based Dialectometry: Aggregate Morphosyntactic Variability in British English Dialects

The research reported in this paper departs from most previous work in dialectometry in several ways. Empirically, it draws on frequency vectors derived from naturalistic corpus data and not on discrete atlas classifications. Linguistically, it is concerned with morphosyntactic (as opposed to lexical or pronunciational) variability. Methodologically, it marries the careful analysis of dialect p...